18th Century
Baroque
Illuminated Manuscript
Manuscript
Rare Books
Alchemical and Rosicrucian Compendium ca. 1760 at the Beinecke Library
Alchemy entered into European popular culture in the late middle ages, with the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin and the European vernaculars. Based on the tenets of the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and meant to date to the age of Abraham, alchemy, or al-kimya in Arabic, can be summarized as the attempt to decipher a divine presence in the ma...
