Hi, I'm Peter Addinson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College Lodden and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about alchemy in England with Jennifer Rampling

who is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and teaches on the program in history of science there.

Hi Jenny, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for inviting me. Maybe we can start with a question about what people actually believed about alchemy in this period.

In a previous episode, I suggested when discussing magic that most people in England in say the 15th, 16th century

would have assumed that magic was possible and actually even frequently in use even

even if they were skeptical about whether they could prove that magic had been used in like one particular case.

Is that also true for alchemy or was that something that people were more skeptical about or did people not actually generally have a view about it because it was too technical and elite?

Well the 16th to be a really

to become the subject of conversation.

And this is partly because during the 16th century,

alchemy became an art that was receiving royal patronage. And once Prince

they're interested in investing in something everybody pays attention,

especially if they're also interested in pursuing that as a source of funding on their own account.

So, Alk Alchemy really enters Europe, by which I mean

Latin Europe, in the 12th century in the form of translations from the Arabic and

would initially have circulated among more of a scholarly audience.

However, by the 14th century, it's been extremely widely practiced, which is to say it's no longer just viewed as a literate subject, it's something

that people at almost any level of society could take an interest in.

Now what really changes round about the second half of the 16th century is the

sheer level of interest that alchemy is garnering among English elites.

...