In contrast to Lawrence M. Principe’s specialist publications, such as The Aspiring Adept (1998) on Robert Boyle’s alchemical quest, The Secrets of Alchemy is a book with the general reader and student firmly in mind. It is Principe’s distillation of more than two decades of extensive research, presented as an informed, witty, and deeply considered response to critics and, in my mind at least, is the clearest and most engaging introduction to the long history of alchemy available today. Principe makes it clear that his primary target audience is students and historians of science, although intellectual and cultural historians will find much of interest in these pages. In seven chapters, the book provides a longue durée history of alchemy from antiquity to the present day. Rather than sticking to a strictly chronological narrative, however, Principe uses chapter 4 — devoted to a discussion of redefinitions, revivals, and reinterpretations of alchemy in modernity (i.e., from Enlightenment to the present) — as a pivot, between three introductory chapters covering alchemy’s origins in ancient Alexandria, its development under the Arabs, and its arrival in the medieval Christian West, and three concluding chapters on alchemy’s golden age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, presenting essential information for those new to the subject. The reader is introduced to the two central goals of early modern alchemy: metallic transmutation and pharmaceutical medicine. Principe provides a useful selection of important terms, ingredients used in the laboratory, plus examples of the highly metaphorical verbal language and visual imagery used to communicate the wide variety of theories and practices involved in the various kinds of alchemy — enlivening the story, too, with instructions, for instance, on how to create a basilisk, talk of the homunculus, and notes on the chemical palingenesis of small birds and plants.

One of Principe’s most earnest calls has been for a return to primary textual scholarship in order to gain a closer familiarity with early modern material and for its necessary comparison with later imaginative and inventive, but not always historically accurate, modern interpretations of premodern books and manuscripts. Indeed, Principe’s call has a novel twist: not only do we find him consulting the documentary evidence, but his experience as an organic chemist also sees him turning to the primary materials (if not primal matter) of the laboratory. This investment in text and substance contributes to his analysis of that other component of early modern alchemy, the pictorial image, first appearing in medieval manuscripts and then seeing its heyday in early modern emblematic works by figures like Basil Valentine and Michael Maier. While critical of later misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the historical record, Principe is nevertheless fairly evenhanded in his discussion of the nineteenth-century occult and twentieth-century psychological reception of alchemy. While he expresses concern that many modern readers only see early modern alchemy through the lenses of either Jungianism or occultism, he generally avoids either dismissive language or the belittling of such beliefs, simply encouraging readers to use historical context as the touchstone for their own reading. If I have any criticism, it is that the occasional bias does seem to creep in: why is it, for example, that collections of sayings from multiple sources are perfectly acceptable in alchemical florilegia like the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550), when dealing with material processes in the laboratory, but become a “jumble of decontextualised quotations” in Atwood’s A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850), when promoting spiritual alchemy? As someone engaged in not only the history of alchemy, but also that of magic, I still feel Principe, who is a sophisticated scholar, is less nuanced when he touches on this subject, showing less awareness of subcategories, such as the close proximity of alchemy and natural magic. This being said, I am impressed with the depth of thought evident in his final chapter on the “Wider Worlds of Chymistry.” I am not utterly won over by his arguments on the relations of alchemy to early modern religion, but appreciate his engagement with significant figures like Heinrich Khunrath, who did include that dimension in his work. Principe’s considered reflections on how the latter’s notion of an analogical harmony between Christ and the philosophers’ stone carries “demonstrative, evidentiary and probatory power” both for alchemy and religion, displays a sympathetic awareness of the universalizing, multivalent complexity of the early modern mind. Any teacher who cultivates such openness in his students deserves plaudits from his peers. I have been waiting many years for a book like this, one that not only informs my own research, but also represents for newcomers the best introduction — dare I say initiation? — into The Secrets of Alchemy.