Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi, written in German and first published in Strasbourg in 1500, was the first printed manual on the distillation of medicinal waters. Although influential among early modern audiences and well known to modern scholars, its intriguing blend of intellectual and practical traditions has thus far received little attention. This paper identifies these strands in Brunschwig's technical instructions and shows how they intertwine in the production of reliable remedies. Exploring the intellectual dimension of Brunschwig's work, I argue that his concept of distillation is shaped by an alchemical understanding of matter, especially by the writings on 'quintessence' of the fourteenth-century alchemist John of Rupescissa. To realise this concept in the workshop, Brunschwig emphasises the central importance of the body and its senses to ensure true craftsmanship. Brunschwig's printed manual was as much a product of skilled artisanal practices as the distilled waters it describes, and I argue that it was shaped by the same concerns about technical precision and reliability.

The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation.

What are historians doing in the laboratory? Looking back over six years of collaborative work, researchers of the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University discuss their experience with hands‐on reconstruction as a historical method. This work engages practical forms of knowledge—from pigment‐making to metal casting—recorded in the BnF Ms. Fr. 640, an anonymous French manuscript compiled in the later sixteenth century. Bodily encounters with materials and processes of the past offer insights into the material and mental worlds of early modern artists and artisans, and train the eye in the interpretation of historical objects. At the same time, reconstruction contributes to the interpretation of the text: it is only by attempting to implement the instructions of practical or recipe literature that these texts can be understood as vehicles of emergent knowledge that only fully manifests itself in the doing. Overall, our approach to reconstruction mirrors that of the anonymous author‐practitioner, who explored a wide range of techniques through experimenting and writing.

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La Messe alchimique attribuée à Melchior de Sibiu. Edited by Didier Kahn. (Textes de la Renaissance, .) Pp. . Paris: Classiques Garnier, . €.      JEH () ; doi:./S An alchemical mass seems like a curious piece of writing, and indeed the text edited and investigated in this book is the only known example of its kind. Nevertheless, Didier Kahn's attention to philological and historical detail turns it into a lucid case study which throws into relief the relationships between alchemy, religion and their literary forms across the late medieval and early modern period. The critical edition of the short text of the mass usefully places its known Latin versions (all after ) alongside one another where they differ, and even adduces a Czech version, given in transcription, transliteration and a re-translation into Latin for comparative purposes. Careful examination of the sources dates the origin of the text not to Melchior de Sibiu, a Transylvanian priest decapitated in  for counterfeiting gold coins, but to the mid-fifteenth century. In this late medieval context, which saw a whole range of different genres of masses, including parodic ones, an alchemical mass would not have seemed out of place, and certainly not shockingly outlandish: a playful pastiche drawing allegorical parallels between the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and the 'great work' of making the philosophers' stone. The late sixteenth-century copyists and publishers of surviving versions of the mass, Kahn argues, show a similarly carefree attitude towards this literary game. Despite their well-defined confessional leanings (Calvinist, Schwenckfeldian, and Paracelsian theosophy), they refrain from any theological commentary on its liturgical form, focusing instead on the alchemical process. Although this is in itself likely to be a reflection of the Protestant relegation of the mass to a mere commemorative rite, Kahn points out that the text does not serve as a vessel for religious polemic, but rather as a playful and evocative way of packaging practical alchemical content. This is a welcome corrective to previous studies of this mass which, following C. G. Jung, have over-emphasised the religious symbolism of its liturgical elements by reading it as an expression of psychological processes, thus obscuring the alchemical practica at its core. During the first half of the sixteenth century, the reception of the alchemical mass changed. Such spiritually diverse commentators as Michael Maier (a Rosicrucian), Andreas Libavius (a Lutheran) and Athanasius Kircher (a Jesuit) increasingly expressed discomfort or even disdain at the text's amalgamation of the sacred and the profane. What had been seen as a playful pastiche now had to be disentangledin Libavius' case by toning down the liturgical and extracting the purely alchemical; for the Jesuits, by a wholesale rejection of Rosicrucianism and indeed any alchemical interpretation of Scripture. Overall, Kahn's edition and analysis of this puzzli...