Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- 6 The Man of Science
- 7 Women of Natural Knowledge
- 8 Markets, Piazzas, and Villages
- 9 Homes and Households
- 10 Libraries and Lecture Halls
- 11 Courts and Academies
- 12 Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections
- 13 Laboratories
- 14 Sites of Military Science and Technology
- 15 Coffeehouses and Print Shops
- 16 Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
13 - Laboratories
from Part II - Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- 6 The Man of Science
- 7 Women of Natural Knowledge
- 8 Markets, Piazzas, and Villages
- 9 Homes and Households
- 10 Libraries and Lecture Halls
- 11 Courts and Academies
- 12 Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections
- 13 Laboratories
- 14 Sites of Military Science and Technology
- 15 Coffeehouses and Print Shops
- 16 Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
Summary
In 1603, after six years of construction, Count Wolfgang II von Hohenlohe put the finishing touches on a new two-story laboratory in his residence Schloss Weikersheim. Many of the basic elements of his laboratory can be seen in the frontispiece from a work of theosophical alchemy, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, 1609), by the physician and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605); see Figure 13.1. Although this frontispiece foregrounds the spiritual dimension of alchemy (for example, in the kneeling figure of the alchemist), it also illustrates the practical tools of the alchemical laboratory that Khunrath would have known from his work with Central European princes and alchemists.
As in the frontispiece, Wolfgang II’s roomy laboratory had large, bright windows with extra-deep sills where vessels could be placed, as well as smaller window vents to allow smoke and steam to escape. One corner was occupied by a raised flat stone hearth or forge (like those used by blacksmiths), and, looming over it, a smoke hood, like the one shown in the engraving, to draw away vapors. (This did not, however, protect the laboratory workers from the many poisonous fumes that often billowed up from operations to fill the room.) A large set of fixed bellows mounted at the side of the hearth fanned the coals in the forge and heated the smaller furnaces that were probably contained within it. Connected to the main chimney of the hearth in the Weikersheim laboratory were four brick furnaces, including one called a Faule Heinz, or Lazy Harry, on which many distillations could be carried out simultaneously; an assaying furnace in which refined gold and silver were assayed to determine their purity and ores were tested for metal content; and, probably, a sublimation furnace in which substances were heated until they vaporized and then condensed back to solidity by rapid cooling.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 290 - 305Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
The Art of the Trumpet-Maker: The Materials, Tools, and Techniques of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Nuremberg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Chemie und Alchymie in österreich bis zum beginnenden XIX Jahrhundert (Vienna: R. Lechner, 1883)Google Scholar
“Les cabinets de chimie,” in Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIII siècle, ed. (Paris: Hermann, 1964).Google Scholar
“Clinical Teaching in Leiden from Its Beginning until the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Clio Medica, 21 (1987–8).Google Scholar
“Het Laboratorium van Sylvius,” Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis der geneeskunde, natuurwetenschappen, wiskunde en technick, 3 (1980).Google Scholar
“The Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity,” in The Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in Western Art (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, 2) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).Google Scholar
, and , eds., Moritz der Gelehrte: Ein Renaissancefürst in Europa (Eurasburg: Edition Minerva, 1997)Google Scholar
“The New Philosophy in the Low Countries,” in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
“Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Literary Structure of a Scientific Argument: Historical Studies, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’ Accademia del Cimento sotto la protezione del serenissimo principe Leopoldo di Toscana e descritte dal segretario dr essa accademia (Florence: Giuseppe Cocchini, 1667).Google Scholar
The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy; or, “The hunting of the greene lyon” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar
Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Mediecal and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
Beschreibung aller fürnemsten mineralischen Ertzt unnd Bergwercksarten (Prague: G. Schwartz, 1574).Google Scholar
Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
and , eds. Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
The Attitude toward Labor in Christianity and Ancient Culture (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic university of America Press, 1945)Google Scholar
Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
and From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar
“Der Meister sol auch kennen schreiben und lesen: Writings about Technology ca. 1400–ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implication,” in Early Technologies, ed. (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1979).Google Scholar
“Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe,” Isis, 77 (1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Chamists and the Wird: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Blatimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).Google Scholar
“La Nature et l’art,” in Selected Studies in History of Science (Coimbra: Acta Universitatis Conimbricensis, 1983).Google Scholar
Humanisme, Science et Réforme: Pierre de la Ranmée (1515–1572) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985)Google Scholar
Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Social (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989).Google Scholar
and “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Post and Present, 129 (1990).Google Scholar
“The Chemical Workshop Tradition and the Experimental Practice: Discontinuities within Continuities,” Science in Context, 9 (1996).Google Scholar
Verbindung und Affinität: Die Grundlegung der neuzeitlichen chemie an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert (Basel: Birkhauser, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Cabinet of Experimental Philosophy,” in The Origins of Museume: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Centuey Europe, ed. and (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
“The Contribution of Architectural Writers to a ‘Scientific’ Outlook in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of Mediecal and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1985)Google Scholar
, ed., Die Alchemie in der europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986)Google Scholar
“Artibus academicis inserenda: Chemistry’s Place in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Universities,” History of Universities, 7 (1988).Google Scholar
“Philosophy and the History of Technology,” in The History and Philosophy of Technology, ed. and (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).Google Scholar
The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chamical Medicine in the circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 29) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991)Google Scholar
ed., Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, The “Aumma Perfectionis,” and and , Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
“Pure adn Sound Goverment: Laboratories, Playing Fields, and Gymnasia in the Nineteenth-Century Search for Order,” Isis, 76 (1985).Google Scholar
Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel: Karger, 1982).Google Scholar
, Das Buch Labyrinthus Medicorum genant [1538, orig. publ. 1553], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1928).Google Scholar
, Sämtliche Werke: Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und Philosophische Schriften, ed. and , 14 vols. (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg and Oldenbourg and O. W. Barth, 1922–33), vol. 12 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1929).Google Scholar
Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clatremdon Press, 1988)Google Scholar
The Three Books of the Potter’s Art [ca. 1558], trans. and , 2 vols. (London: Scholar Press, 1980).Google Scholar
Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Medical Education in the Age of Improvement: Edinburgh Students and Apprentices, 1760–1826 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).Google Scholar
“Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science, 21 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
“Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Vital Spirits: Alchemy, Redemption, and Artisanship in Early Modern Europe,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).Google Scholar
, and , “Alembics, Curcurbits, Phials, Crucibles: A 16th-Century Dicimastic Laboratory Excavated in Austria,” Ambix, 40 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
The Great Insteuration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1975).Google Scholar
and , Alchemistisches Gold: Paracelsistische Pharmaka: Laboratoriumstechnik im 16. Jahrhundert. Chemiegeschichtliche und archäometrische Untersuchungen am Inventar des Laboratoriums von Oberstockstall/Kirchberg am Wagram, ed. , , and (Perspektive der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 10) (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997).Google Scholar
Graf Wolfgang II von Hohenlohe und die Alchemie: Alchemistische Studien in Schloß Weikersheim, 1587–1610 (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbeke, 1992).Google Scholar
Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990).Google Scholar
- 21
- Cited by