[ALCHEMY]

Description

Rare third edition of this compendium of popular medieval French poetical works on alchemy, first published 1561, though La Fontaine’s poem had certainly appeared earlier. The three poems are: the fifteenth-century Fontaine des Amoreux de Science by Jean de La Fontaine; a thirteenth-century ‘attack’ on alchemy, delivered from the perspective of Nature, and with the Alchemist’s prudent response, by Jean de Mean, along with a brief section on alchemy from his continuation of the Roman de la Rose; and the Sommaire Philosophique, attributed to the supposed alchemist Nicholas Flamel. Finally, there are two anonymous works, apparently later: one a short poem on alchemy, the other a prose defence of alchemy, apparently by the publisher of the first edition, against the efforts of one J. Girard to ‘outrage’ the alchemists. The poems are hardly of any literary merit, serving rather as vehicles for a more basic kind of alchemical knowledge and the description of alchemical processes.