Abstract
This chapter explores King James’s noteworthy expertise in alchemical and Paracelsian matters. Significant evidence exists that testifies to the monarch’s opposition to necromancy, witchcraft, and conjuration, and attests, instead, that he liked to be identified with Hermes Trismegistus and Solomon, the founding fathers of alchemy. This chapter considers James’s relationships with several figures connected with Hermetic, alchemical, and Paracelsian culture, namely John Dee and his son Arthur, Tycho Brahe, Walter Ralegh, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, Francis Anthony, and the celebrated Paracelsian Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. Moreover, by focusing on the first treatise the king addressed to his English subjects, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), this chapter demonstrates James’s precise knowledge of coeval Paracelsian and medical issues.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
John Dee, To the Kings most excellent Maiestie. A petition from Dee to James I (1604). A digital version of Dee’s letter is available through the British Library website: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-dees-petition-to-james-i-asking-to-be-cleared-of-accusations-of-conjuring-1604. The petition claims that Dee presented it to James on 5 June 1604. See Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror, 266–267. As Parry explains, John Dee also published a verse petition to the Commons with which he tried to clear his name and demanded a general act against slander: “For fifty years he [Dee] had been slandered as a ‘conjuror’, but now he demanded a general Act against slander, with special provision ‘for John Dee his case’”.
- 2.
James I, Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogve, Diuided into three books (London: for William Cotton, and Will. Aspley, 1603). All references are to this edition. The treatise was also printed in the 1616 collected edition of the king’s works. See James I, Daemonologie, in The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames by the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (London: Robert Barker and John Bill, 1616), 91–136.
- 3.
See Stuart Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship”, in The Damned Art. Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 156.
- 4.
James I, ‘The Preface to the Reader’, Daemonologie, sig. A2r.
- 5.
See Lynn Thorndike, “The Literature of Witchcraft and Magic after Wier”, in A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–1958), 6: 515–559. On the subject of witchcraft in early modern England and Europe, see Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2020); Harmes and Bladen, Supernatural and Secular Power, 185–231. In Part III of their volume, Harmes and Bladen bring together a series of essays that address the topic of witchcraft in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England in relation to the female body and female sexuality.
- 6.
James I, Daemonologie, 13–14.
- 7.
Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror, 266. The English Witchcraft Statutes were passed in 1542, 1563, and 1604. As regards the 1604 bill, Macfarlane points out that “[g]reater stress was laid on the punishment of intention to use witchcraft as well as its actual use”. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 15. On English Witchcraft Acts, see also Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England, 13–15.
- 8.
According to Rattansi, James condemned Ralegh’s book also because of the latter’s interest in the Hermetic disciplines. As Rattansi explains, “James set narrow bounds to the ‘natural’; whatever transgressed those bounds was ‘demonic’. Against that view, Ralegh sought to claim a wide area of operation for natural magic”. Rattansi, “Alchemy and Natural Magic”, Ambix, 137.
- 9.
Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 18. Emphasising King James’s aversion to the Renaissance occult philosophy, Mebane comments thus: “The influence of millenary occultism had waned somewhat in the first decade of the seventeenth century, especially because of King James’s opposition to the occult tradition, but it was by no means extinct”. Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 138.
- 10.
See Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror, 265.
- 11.
See R. Julian Roberts, ‘Dee, John’, ODNB 15: 673 and 674.
- 12.
Letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 5 January 1615, cited in Rattansi, “Alchemy and Natural Magic”, Ambix, 123. Ralegh started writing his History of the World during his imprisonment in the Tower of London. Initially, the work was intended as a homage to the young prince Henry of Wales. The History, however, was published in 1614, after Henry’s premature death and this time it was meant to please King James I. It is a well-known fact that Ralegh was implicated in a plot against James. The so-called Main Plot was aimed at overthrowing the king and at placing Arabella Stuart, James’s first cousin, on the throne. See Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, ‘Ralegh, Walter’, ODNB 45: 852.
- 13.
See Patricia Tatspaugh, “The Winter’s Tale: Shifts in Staging and Status”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays, ed. Catherine M.S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 114: “The Winter’s Tale was performed not only at the Globe but also at Blackfriars, the King’s Men’s indoor theatre, and at Whitehall Palace. Court records confirm five performances and suggest the possibility of two other performances at the First and Second Banqueting Houses between November 1611 and January 1633/4, when it was ‘lik’d’. The most accidentally topical of these performances took place during winter 1612/13 in the season of fourteen plays in honour of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, the Elector Palatine, a union effectively separating the sixteen-year-old from England and her family and resulting in her becoming Queen of Bohemia in 1619”.
- 14.
Hart, Art and Magic, 9.
- 15.
As Hart observes, Daemonologie “has suggested to commentators that Renaissance magic itself was looked on with suspicion by the Stuart Court” and has been regarded as evidence of “the Court’s apparent hostility to magic”. Ibid.
- 16.
See Stuart M. Kurland, “Shakespeare and James I: personal rule and public responsibility”, in Power and Loughnane, Late Shakespeare, 210.
- 17.
As Kronbergs writes, “[t]he repertory of fourteen plays included works by other contemporary dramatists, but ten were plays by Shakespeare, so that his work dominated the program for this occasion beyond that of any other living playwright”. Ann Kronbergs, “The Significance of the Court Performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations”, in The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival, ed. Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 344. See also Graham Parry, The Golden Age, 100–101.
- 18.
Kronbergs, “The Significance”, 343.
- 19.
See Hart, Art and Magic, 10 and 26.
- 20.
Graham Parry observes that “James, after all, considered himself to be a learned monarch” and thus “he could exhibit his learning and taste in spectacles of emblematic wit of a high order”. Graham Parry, The Golden Age, 66.
- 21.
See Hart, Art and Magic, 10. Mebane observes that “James had grown somewhat more tolerant as he was influenced by the growing skepticism of the period with regard to witchcraft, but it seems likely that the most significant factor was political: one could write a play about a magician so long as the proper authorities were reaffirmed, rather than challenged”. Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 108.
- 22.
See James I, Daemonologie, 13. Just like Agrippa, Roger Bacon was associated with necromancy. In Robert Greene’s The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, for instance, Bacon is depicted as a conjurer and a necromancer. See Robert Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay As it was plaid by her Maiesties seruants (London: Adam Islip for Edward White, 1594).
- 23.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Collected Works, vol. 3, part I, 263.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
James I, Daemonologie, 13.
- 26.
Ibid., 13–14.
- 27.
Sir John Harrington’s Interview with the King, 1604–1605, in Nichols, Progresses of James I, vol. 1, 492–493. See also Hart, Art and Magic, 10; Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 107–108.
- 28.
James I, Daemonologie, 10.
- 29.
In a conversation with his daughter Miranda, Prospero admits having being captivated by the study of magical matters: “The government I cast upon my brother / And to my state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (The Tempest, 1.2.75–77).
- 30.
Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 108. Mebane also remarks that “James’s Daemonologie is of special interest because of the manner in which the king apparently projects onto learned magicians his own feelings of guilt with regard to intellectual pride”. Ibid., 107.
- 31.
Thomas A. Birrell, English Monarchs and their Books: from Henry VII to Charles II (London: The British Library, 1986), 27.
- 32.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Collected Works, vol. 3, part I, 263. See also Hart, Art and Magic, 26.
- 33.
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim: Johann Theodor De Bry, 1617–1621), vol. 1, 2. See also Hart, Art and Magic, 26, and Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd. Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 9.
- 34.
Ben Jonson, Epigrammes, IV (‘To King James’), ll. 1–2, cited in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 17.
- 35.
Basilikon Doron was first written in the form of a letter addressed to Prince Henry and officially published in London in 1603. It was first printed in Edinburgh in 1599 for private circulation only. After Henry’s death, in November 1612, James dedicated the treatise to his other son and future king of England, Charles I. See James I, Basilikon Doron or His Maiesties Instrvctions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (London: Felix Kingston for Iohn Norton, 1603). The True Lawe of Free Monarchies was first published in Edinburgh in 1598 and a new edition was published in London in 1603, when James was crowned King of England. See James I, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies: or, the reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes (London: Printed by Robert Walde-graue [i.e. Thomas Creede], 1603). All references are to these editions.
- 36.
Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie”, 165. A few words below, Clark observes that “Daemonologie was not tangential to, let alone aberrant from, his other early political writings. Its arguments complemented the Biblical, historico-legal and patriarchal defences of monarchy attempted in the Trew law of free monarchies and it dealt with one aspect of a kingship idealised in the Basilikon Doron”. Ibid., 166.
- 37.
James I, Basilikon Doron, 3.
- 38.
Ibid., 31.
- 39.
See Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie”, 166.
- 40.
Ibid., 177. Clark also remarks that “[a]t a vital stage in his early career they [witches] helped him to establish a view of monarchy and his own fitness for implementing it”.
- 41.
James I, A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall (March 1609), in Workes, 529.
- 42.
James I, Daemonologie, 50–51.
- 43.
See Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie”, 166.
- 44.
See Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England, 7–8.
- 45.
James I, Daemonologie, 77–78 (emphasis in original).
- 46.
Thorndike, A History of Magic, 6: 550. See also George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 277.
- 47.
See Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 278; Thorndike, A History of Magic, 6: 550. See also the study of Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 3–4. As the two scholars point out, there has been “a historiography of prejudice against him [James VI]”. In fact, the Scottish witch trials of the 1590s were the result of multiple factors in a country where witchcraft was a particularly entrenched belief.
- 48.
Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 288.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 14. As Macfarlane remarks, the statistics published by C. L’Estrange Ewen in Witch Hunting and Witch Trials. The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records of the 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit A.D. 1559–1736 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929) show that prosecutions in the Home Circuit declined under James I. Ewen’s studies, as well as Kittredge’s defence of James, have undermined the Stuart king’s reputation as a witch-finder. See Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 20, n. 10. As Sharpe remarks, Ewen’s researches, based on archival documentation, are now regarded as pathbreaking. See Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England, 10.
- 51.
Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 315.
- 52.
King James firmly believed in his role as the British Solomon. Thus Francis Bacon: “you who resemble Solomon in so many things—in the gravity of your judgments, in the peacefulness of your reign, in the largeness of your heart, in the noble variety of the books which you have composed”. Francis Bacon, ‘To our most gracious and mighty prince and lord James’, The Great Instauration, in Collected Works, vol. 4 (reprint of the 1875 ed.), 12.
- 53.
Ashmole, Prolegomena, TCB sig. B2r. See also ‘Solomon’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 186.
- 54.
See Jan Schouten, The Rod and Serpent of Asklepios (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing, 1967), 120. Schouten comments thus: “In my opinion, the fact that the caduceus of Hermes, apart from its original meaning, in later times also became a medico-pharmaceutical emblem springs from the history of the development of alchemy”. See also Walter J. Friedlander, The Golden Wand of Medicine. A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), 73, and ‘caduceus’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 30–31.
- 55.
See Figure no. 59, in Alchemy and the Occult. A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts from the Collection of Paul and Mary Mellon Given to Yale University Library, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1968–1977), vol. 1, 196.
- 56.
See ‘Mercurius’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 124.
- 57.
See Jonson, Mercury Vindicated, ed. Butler, 438, note to line 81. In his edition of the masque, Butler also explains that “Jonson’s theme was the perfection and freedom of the king’s sunlike power to make his own creature”. Ibid., 432 (‘Introduction’). On the alchemical significance of the sun, see ‘Sol’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 185–186.
- 58.
See Figure 13, in Hart, Art and Magic, 70.
- 59.
Ibid., 26.
- 60.
“And that ye may the readier with wisedome and iustice gouerne your subiects, by knowing what vices they are naturally most inclined to, as a good Physitian, who must first knowe what peccant humours his patient naturally is most subiect vnto, before hee can beginne his cure”. James I, Basilikon Doron, 37.
- 61.
On James’s interest in alchemical research and on his acquaintance with Severinus and Craig, see Jonathan G. Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic. Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56, and Trevor-Roper, “The Court Physician”, 91. Trevor-Roper attests that James brought Thomas Craig with him as his “chief mediciner” at the Scottish court and that Craig followed James to London when the latter became King of England in 1603. On James’s visit to Tycho Brahe’s laboratory at Hveen, see also Hart, Art and Magic, 5.
- 62.
‘An Elogie made and written by IAMES the VI King of Scots, in Commendation of TYCHO BRAHE his Workes, and worth’, in Tycho Brahe, Learned: Tico Brahae his Astronomicall Coniectur of the New and Much Admired [Star] Which Appered in the Year 1572 (London: B. Alsop, etc., 1632). See also Hart, Art and Magic, 207, n. 20.
- 63.
See Robert J.W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World. A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 81n. As documented by Evans, in 1609 Rudolf II sent “two characteristic gifts” to James, namely a celestial globe and a clock.
- 64.
Drebbel, one of the most popular engineers in Europe, spent a considerable part of his life in the service of the Stuart monarchs James and Charles I. See Gerrit Tierie, Cornelis Drebbel (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1932), [Introduction]. Drebbel was first employed at the Jacobean court in 1604 at the service of Prince Henry of Wales. See H.A.M Snelders, ‘Drebbel, Cornelis’, ODNB 16: 900. Besides working for the preparation of theatrical and court entertainments, the Dutch engineer delighted his audiences with numerous inventions. In 1620, Drebbel astonished the citizens of London with an oar-driven submarine that sailed down the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich.
- 65.
On Brahe’s alchemical and Paracelsian connections, see O.P. Grell, “Intellectual Currents”, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, ed. Knut Helle, E.I. Kouri, and J.E. Olesen, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–), 2: 94; Debus, The English Paracelsians, 72; Thorndike, A History of Magic, 5: 642.
- 66.
Grell, “Intellectual Currents”, 94.
- 67.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 4. On Mayerne’s visit to England in 1606, see ibid., 101–116.
- 68.
The only reference to this is to be found in W.A. Murray, “Why was Duncan’s blood golden?”, Shakespeare’s Survey 19 (1966): 36. Murray observes that “King James VI and I himself shows detailed knowledge of them [Paracelsian theories] in his Counterblaste to Tobacco, and appointed a Paracelsian doctor as one of his own physicians”.
- 69.
For a discussion of James’s treatise, see Sandra S. Bell, ‘“Precious Stinke’: James I’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco”, in Royal Subjects. Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. D. Fischlin and M. Fortier, with a foreword by Kevin Sharpe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 324. As King James explains, tobacco “is a common herbe, which though vnder diuers names growes almost euery where” and has been traditionally applied as “a stinking and vnsauorie Antidot” against the “Pockes”, primarily by the “barbarous Indians”. James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London: By R. B[arker], 1604), sig. B1v. All references are to this edition. In early modern England the term ‘pox’ indicated either various infectious diseases causing pock-marks or scarring, such as smallpox, or sexually transmitted infections. See ‘pox’, in Sujata Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language. A Dictionary (London and New York: Continuum, 2011, repr. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 275. In this case, the reference is to syphilis, which James defines as a “corrupted and execrable a Maladie” that was imported from the New World. James I, Counterblaste, sig. B1v. Sir Walter Ralegh was first credited with the introduction of tobacco in England. See James VI and I, Selected Writings, ed. N. Rhodes, J. Richards and J. Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 284.
- 70.
Paracelsus, Operum Medico-Chimicorum sive Paradoxorum, ed. Zacharias Palthenius, 11 vols. (Frankfurt: Zacharias Palthenius, 1603–1605). Authoritative editions of Paracelsus’s writings, in both Latin and German, appeared in print between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Webster, “Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine”, 317. Webster also highlights how in the later sixteenth century Paracelsus was widely read and appreciated in England and offers a list of works by English authors relating to Paracelsian medicine and published before 1600. See ibid., 333–334. For a chronological list of published writings by Paracelsus contained in the library of John Dee, see ibid., 331–332. See also Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 39–40, and Kocher, “Paracelsan Medicine”, Journal of the History of Medicine, 451–480.
- 71.
Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 86.
- 72.
As Clark observes, “the royal touch was readily intelligible within the same intellectual ambit as was witchcraft. Indeed, what is striking about these two subjects is not just their proximity but their overlap. In a very important way demonology enters into both of them and not just into one”. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 659. A few lines later, Clark comments thus: “kings were not the only healers who claimed to cure by touch and the invocation of a form of words; nor was healing the only kind of efficacy which could result from such actions. Above all, there were those who were thought to harm by the same means, including, of course, witches. Accordingly, we find the theorists of royal authority and the theorists of witchcraft entering, from their different directions, the same debate—a debate about how to distinguish the cases regarded as authentically monarchical, miraculous, and beneficial from those regarded as false, spurious, and maleficent”. Ibid., 662–663.
- 73.
See Clark, Thinking with Demons, 661. See also Frank Barlow, “The King’s Evil”, The English Historical Review 95 (1980): 3–27; Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch. Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
- 74.
The royal prerogative to heal through touch is clearly documented in one of the first Shakespearean tragedies written during the Jacobean reign, Macbeth, where the power to heal is ascribed to King Edward the Confessor. In Act 4, a doctor says to Malcolm that “there are a crew of wretched souls” (Macbeth, 4.3.141) who wait for being cured by the king. As the physician observes, “Their malady convinces / The great assay of art, but at his touch, / Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand, / They presently amend” (4.3.142–145).
- 75.
See Clark, Thinking with Demons, 661.
- 76.
James I, ‘To the Reader’, Counterblaste, sig. A3v.
- 77.
Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 73.
- 78.
Ibid.
- 79.
Bostocke, The Difference, sig. A6v–A7r (‘The Authors obtestation to almightie God’).
- 80.
Ibid., sig. A7r.
- 81.
James I, Counterblaste, sig. C2v.
- 82.
Ibid.
- 83.
Ibid., sig. Cr.
- 84.
Ibid., sig. Cv. A few words below, the king comments thus: “such is the miraculous omnipotencie of our strong tasted Tobacco, as it cures all sorts of diseases (which neuer any drugge could do before) in all persons, and at all times”.
- 85.
Ibid., sig. C2r.
- 86.
Ibid., sig. C2v.
- 87.
On Galenic, allopathic therapeutics, see Mary Lindeman, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 88; Hannah Newton, “‘Nature Concocts & Expels’: The Agents and Processes of Recovery from Disease in Early Modern England”, Social History of Medicine 28, no. 3 (2015): 476.
- 88.
Galen, Certaine Workes of Galens, trans. Thomas Gale (London 1586), 47 (The Third Chapter). The above-mentioned text is an abridged version of Galen’s De Naturalibus Facultatibus, trans. T. Linacre (London 1523), which university-trained doctors would have read thoroughly.
- 89.
Paracelsus, Three Books of Philosophy Written to the Athenians, in Philosophy Reformed & Improved in Four Profound Tractates, trans. H. Pinnell (London: M.S. for L. Lloyd, 1657), 37. This is an English translation of the pseudo-Paracelsian work Philosophia ad Athenienses, first published in German in 1564 (Cologne) and later included in the Frankfurt edition of the Swiss doctor’s collected writings as well as in the Geneva folio edition of 1658 in three volumes. Ad Athenienses, now considered a spurious work, was very popular among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paracelsians in that it presented a view of creation founded on alchemical tenets. See Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), vol. 1, 55–56, and Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 49–50. The very John Dee owned a copy of the treatise, along with other Paracelsian and alchemical works. On the treatise’s authorship, see Didier Kahn, “The Philosophia ad Athenienses in the Light of Genuine Paracelsian Cosmology”, Early Science and Medicine 24, Issue 5–6 (2020), 439–472.
- 90.
King James, Counterblaste, sig. B2v–B3r.
- 91.
Ibid., sig. B3v.
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid., sig. B3r.
- 94.
Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 74.
- 95.
King James, Counterblaste, sig. B3r.
- 96.
Harris, Foreign Bodies, 56.
- 97.
See Trevor-Roper, “The Court Physician”, 90, and Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician, 212. As Trevor-Roper explains, James showed this preference already as King of Scotland and he was influenced by other courts, such as the Danish and the French ones.
- 98.
The humoral theory of the composition of the body was first expressed by Hippocrates, whom Galen regarded as a respected authority. See Ian Johnston, “Galen and His System of Medicine”, in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, ed. P.T. Keyser and J. Scarborough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 769.
- 99.
Bernard George Penotus, ‘An Apologeticall Preface’, in Hester, A hundred and fourtene experiments, sig. B4r.
- 100.
James I, Counterblaste, sig. C2r/v.
- 101.
Wilhelm Michael von Richter, “Four Letters between King James I and Charles I and Tsar Mikhail Romanov mentioning Arthur Dee”, History of Medicine in Russia II, 1820: Supplement to part 2, 4; cited in Abraham, ‘Introduction’ to Arthur Dee, Fasciculus Chemicus, xxv. Dee’s Fasciculus Chemicus was translated into English by Ashmole and published in London in 1650.
- 102.
Abraham, ‘Introduction’ to Arthur Dee, Fasciculus Chemicus, xli.
- 103.
Ibid., xxiii.
- 104.
Ibid. In her seminal study Marvell and Alchemy, Abraham points out that Mayerne is explicitly mentioned by Marvell in his poem Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings (1649): “For, how immortal must their race have stood, / Had Mayerne once been mixt with Hastings blood!” (ll. 51–52). Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy, 18.
- 105.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Mayerne, Sir Theodore Turquet de’, ODNB 37: 578.
- 106.
Ibid., 580.
- 107.
Ibid., 579. Significantly, Moffett’s project to publish a London pharmacopoeia that included chemical remedies did not come to fruition in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was only with the advent of James that Moffett’s project was realised, thanks to the exceptional interest of the new king and to Mayerne’s efforts. See Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician, 211–212 and 217.
- 108.
See Elizabeth L. Furdell, Fatal Thirst. Diabetes in Britain until Insuline (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 48; Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England. Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 6–7; Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 216; Jonathan G. Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 16; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 4–7; Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician, 208. See also Elizabeth L. Furdell, The Royal Doctors, 1485–1714. Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 104. As Furdell explains, “[t]he College of Physicians welcomed Mayerne as a Fellow in 1616, recognising that his Paracelsianism was eclectic, compatible with much traditional practice. The College felt his influence immediately, as Mayerne, writing the preface, honored King James with the long-awaited London Pharmacopoeia in 1618. The pharmacopoeia, containing chemical and mineral medicaments as well as Galenic standbys, evinced the quiet syncretistic compromise effected by the Fellows in Elizabeth’s reign and preserved until the Civil War”.
- 109.
King James, Counterblaste, sig. B3v.
- 110.
See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Mayerne, Sir Theodore Turquet de’, ODNB 37: 579, and Trevor-Roper, “The Court Physician”, 91–92. Significantly, Mayerne was the first physician to be knighted.
- 111.
See Karin Figala and Ulrich Neumann, “Michael Maier (1569–1622): New Bio-Bibliographical Material”, in Alchemy Revisited: Proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Alchemy at the University of Groningen, ed. Z.R.W.M von Martels, 17–19 April 1989 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 41.
- 112.
Karin Figala and Ulrich Neumann, “‘Author cui nomen Hermes Malavici’. New Light on the Bio-Bibliography of Michael Maier (1569–1622)”, in Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. Antonio Clericuzio and Piyo Rattansi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 129.
- 113.
See Bruce T. Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court. Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), 107, and Michael Srigley, Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its Cultural Background (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1985), 99. On Maier’s dedication of Arcana arcanissima to William Paddy, see Lauren Kassell, ‘Paddy, Sir William’, ODNB 42: 318.
- 114.
F.V. White, ‘Anthony, Francis’, ODNB 2: 288.
- 115.
See ibid., 288–289.
- 116.
The Latin text of James’s dedication to F. Anthony reads as follows: “Numquid ego ANTONIUM puniam, quia Deus illi benedixit”. See title page of Francis Anthony, Panacea aurea, sive Tractatus duo de ipsius Auro Potabili (Hamburg, 1618). The English translation is from F.V. White, ‘Anthony, Francis’, ODNB 2: 288. As White explains, Panacea aurea comprehends the two treatises Medicinae chymicae et veri potabilis auri assertio (1610), dedicated to James I, and Apologia veritatis illucescentis, pro auro potabili (1616).
- 117.
See Simon Smith, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 58.
- 118.
Klossowski De Rola, The Golden Game, 60.
- 119.
See Ron Heisler, “Michael Maier and England”, The Hermetic Journal (1989): 119.
- 120.
See Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 80n.
- 121.
James’s Christmas card is now preserved in the Scottish National Archives. See Adam McLean, “A Rosicrucian Manuscript of Michael Maier”, The Hermetic Journal no. 5 (1979): 5–8. See also Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 90–91, and Srigley, Images of Regeneration, 100.
- 122.
McLean, “A Rosicrucian Manuscript”, The Hermetic Journal, 5.
- 123.
The Rosicrucian seal clearly appears on the title page of Robert Fludd’s Clavis philosophiae et alchymiae Fluddanae (Frankfurt 1633).
- 124.
See “Michael Maier’s Christmas Greeting to King James I and VI (1611)”, in Joscelyn Godwin, ed. and trans., Atalanta fugiens. An Edition of the Emblems, Fugues and Epigrams (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1989), 207.
- 125.
See Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 90–91, and Srigley, Images of Regeneration, 100.
- 126.
Cited in Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 90.
- 127.
Ibid., 91.
- 128.
See British Library, Royal Mss. 14 B XVI.
- 129.
See Nichols, Progresses of James I, vol. 2, 496.
- 130.
Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s Tragic Homeopathy”, in Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context, ed. R. Dotterer (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), 77.
- 131.
According to Bostocke, Galenic medicine “consisteth in dualitie, discord and contrarietie. It maketh warre and not peace in mans bodie. It is not founded vpon the rule of Gods worde”. Bostocke, The Difference, sig. B1v (Chapter first).
- 132.
“These two [Chimia and Medicina] are founded vpon the Center of vnitie, concord and agreement, their scope and end is to bring the sicke person to vnitie in himself, they doe agree with the rule of Gods worde, they depend vpon the fountaine of trueth”. Ibid., sig. B1v (Chapter first). In another passage, Bostocke stresses that Galenic philosophy “doth not knowe how thou (O God) hast ordeyned all thinges in vnitie peace and concorde, therefore it seeketh the cure in dualitie and contrarietie”. Ibid., sig. A6v and A7r (‘The Authors obtestation to almightie God’).
- 133.
“I know not by what fortune, the dicton of PACIFICUS was added to my title, at my comming in England; that of the Lyon, expressing true fortitude, hauing beene my dicton before: but I am not ashamed of this addition; for King Salomon was a figure of CHRIST in that he was a King of peace”. King James the First, Meditation upon the Lords Prayer: Written by the Kings Maiestie, for the benefit of all his subiects, especially of such as follow the Court (London 1616), in Workes, 590.
- 134.
James I, Counterblaste, sig. A4r and B3r.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zamparo, M. (2022). Alchemy and Paracelsianism at the Jacobean Court. In: Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05167-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05167-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05166-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05167-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)