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Human Placenta in Premodern Europe-a Cultural and Pharmaceutical Agent.
Ber Wiss
December 2024
Abteilung für Pharmazie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Technische Universität Braunschweig.
This paper was prompted by some striking similarities between both the ritual and the medical use of placenta in Ming China and in premodern Europe. Contrary to most accounts, which focus either on the rise of chemiatric medicine or on the growing interest in "exotic" substances, the seventeenth century in Europe also reveals a revived interest in substances from animals, including materials from human bodies. The paper will analyse the use of words signifying the placenta, and follow the trace of vernacular knowledge about the placenta and its role in birth-giving, and in medieval medical texts on women's medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew Research on the Origin of Mosaic Gold.
Ambix
November 2024
Department of Classical Philology, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain.
This article examines the origins of the golden pigment known as mosaic gold (SnS), formed through the sublimation of tin with mercury, sulphur, and ammonium chloride. It explores the textual transmission of mosaic gold from the earliest known written testimonies, as well as the earliest material remnants of the pigment during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Additionally, the study introduces and analyses two new recipes from an earlier date: one comes from the Greek treatise known as the ; and the other from the Latin alchemical work attributed to pseudo-Avicenna, .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper traces the analogy between the making of bread with ferment (leaven or yeast) and theories of metallic transmutation throughout the Middle Ages. For this purpose it surveys several medieval alchemical writings, including Hortulanus's influential . In this work, the ferment, an essential ingredient of the philosophers' stone, is portrayed less as an active agent and more as the passive, nutritive earth () which combines with the soul () in order to yield the stone ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedicine, Life, and Transformations of Matter.
Ambix
August 2024
Institute for Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
This Ambix special issue explores premodern alchemical ideas and practices in their entanglements with medicine. It employs diverse methods, from traditional close reading to the new distant-reading framework of computational humanities, to investigate alchemical thought over a timespan of several centuries. In medieval times, everyday practices could offer heuristic models of material transformation - such as the fermentation of bread as a model for metallic transmutation (Schmechel).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFragments of Alchemy from a Cairene Synagogue: Context, Codicology, and Contents of the Alchemical Corpus of the Cairo Genizah.
Ambix
May 2024
Department of Philosophy, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
This article presents the results of a survey and a first assessment of the corpus of alchemical manuscripts retrieved from the Cairo Genizah, a storage room mainly intended for sacred writings that is attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo. The alchemical manuscripts are described in their codicological and palaeographic features; their content is analysed in the context of the medieval production of alchemical texts in the surrounding Islamic world. The alchemical corpus of the Genizah represents a unique and widely unstudied source for our understanding of the relationship between Jews and alchemy in the medieval Mediterranean World.
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