Search

Boyle, Robert, * 25 Jan 1627 (Lismore (Ireland)), † 31 Jan 1691 (London) Boyle is a preeminent figure of the 17th century. He is best known as a natural philosopher, particularly in the fields of chemistry and physics, but his scientific work covers many areas including hydrostatics, medicine, earth sciences, natural history, and traditional → alchemy. His avid service to the Christian faith produced devotional and ethical essays, and theological tracts on the limits of reason and the role of the natural phi…

Starkey, George (ps.: Eirenaeus Philalethes), * 8 or 9 Jun 1628 (Bermuda), † summer 1665 (London) The character of George Starkey has long been eclipsed by that of his fictional creation the alchemical adept Eirenaeus Philalethes, “author” of some of the 17th century's most influential and popular treatises on transmutational → alchemy. Starkey's books, published both under his own name and under that of Philalethes, render him the most widely read scientific writer from the New World until Benjamin Franklin. Starkey was born in Bermuda, the son of a Scottish minister who h…

Alchemy I: Introduction Alchemy is a subject of enormous intrinsic interest but one which has long proven difficult to grasp properly. The last thirty years, however, have witnessed a remarkable florescence of scholarly work on the subject, which has shed much new light on this obscure subject and brought forth significant revisions and advances in our understanding of it. Whereas it was common just half a century ago for historians of science to dismiss alchemy out-of-hand as a “pseudo-science” or to deploy it merely as a foil against which to set the …