Seventeenth-Century Chymical Collections: A Study of Unique Copies of 'Fasciculus Chemicus'.

Description
New Scholars Presentation 2019 by Megan Piorko (Georgia State University) The subject of this paper is seventeenth-century alchemist and physician Arthur Dee’s book, Fasciculus Chemicus. This Latin text, printed in Paris by Nicholas de la Vigne in 1631, is a small duodemico book featuring excerpts from canonical alchemical tracts which Dee curated in a particular order to create new alchemical knowledge. This paper looks at four specific copies of this text as a case-study to show the importance of material investigation of hand-press books for textual scholarship. Ghost editions of this text are redescribed as variant states of a single first edition through comparative bibliographical description and historical contextualization. Then, the paper asks what types of strategies could and did printers employ to modify the prefatory material within a single hand-press book for differing intended audiences? What were the driving social and economic factors behind these decisions? Who were the intended audiences? How were such modifications executed within the constraints of printing, collation, and binding practices? This type of analysis returns agency to early modern printers, publishers, booksellers, and authors to alter texts during publication for separate audiences and markets. This paper emphasizes the critical nature of bibliographical description and necessity of examining the materiality of texts to understand the nuances and variations in copies from a single edition during the hand-press period.

AudiencesGraduates, Professionals, Scholars, Undergraduates

Access TermsAlchemy, Bibliography

TagsFasciculus Chemicus, Arthur Dee, Descriptive Bibliography, BSA Annual Meeting, BSA New Scholars Program