@article{AVitalMatter:Alchemy:1409,
      recid = {1409},
      author = {Niermeier-Dohoney, Justin Robert},
      title = {A Vital Matter: Alchemy, Cornucopianism, and Agricultural  Improvement in Seventeenth-Century England},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-12},
      pages = {362},
      abstract = {This dissertation investigates the influence of vitalist  matter theories and the practical, operational techniques  of alchemy on agricultural improvement projects in  seventeenth-century England. It argues that the historical  territory of alchemy is much broader than many historians  of this subject have conceded over the past generation. In  fact, among a subset of utopian social reformers in  mid-seventeenth-century England, alchemy was both an  expansive worldview that explained physical change in the  cosmos as well as a set of practices that could be applied  in multiple locations where generation, growth, and change  were the ultimate goals. This included the question of  botanical growth and, most imperatively, the necessity of  improving agricultural production. 

This project engages  with multiple, overlapping historiographical traditions,  including not only the histories of chemistry, alchemy, and  agriculture, but also environmental history, and  particularly the unresolved tensions over whether early  moderns envisioned nature as a practically infinite,  exploitable resource under humanity’s dominion or as a  fragile, finite territory in need of stewardship and  conservancy. Many figures I examine were not only social  utopians but also believed that human ingenuity—buttressed  by empirical science and experimentalism, but constrained  within prescribed divine parameters—could create  agricultural and economic bounty irrespective of any  natural limits. This cornucopian political economy and  ecology emboldened mid-seventeenth-century agricultural  reformers to devise alternative agricultural regimes that  used alchemy as a tool in an attempt to improve crop  yields, the potency of seeds, germination speeds, soil  fertility, and artificial fertilizers. In terms of science,  many of these figures sought an overarching theory of  growth that could apply to everything from metals and  minerals underground to plants and animals on earth to more  abstract notions like the economy. This natural philosophy  was often referred to as a “vegetable philosophy.”     

With the Hartlib Intelligencer Circle as its primary  focus, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate how the  post-Baconian scientific worldview of empirical,  technocratic, and most importantly, manipulative applied  sciences induced many to seek solutions to social ills  through the application of the basic premises of alchemy to  create economic and ecological conditions that would  eradicate the need for war, the existence of hunger, the  fear of crop failure, and presage a future era of  abundance. The Hartlib Circle—named after the Prussian  émigré to England and pan-continental intelligencer Samuel  Hartlib—was a correspondence network of natural  philosophers who shared the results of experiments and  carried on theoretical discussions on themes ranging from  alchemy, mineralogy, and mathematics to pansophism,  educational reform, and the English settlement of Ireland.  This loose intellectual community was highly influenced by  Paracelsian matter theory and the sal nitrum school of  alchemy, which viewed salts as the key to unraveling the  nature of matter and salts as the starting point for  manipulating nature. For the Harltib Circle’s Paracelsians  and sal nitrum theorists, alchemy was not simply  transmuting lead into gold but rather transforming any  natural substance such as plant matter, soil, water, animal  manures, salts, and ash to solve a number of practical  problems related to husbandry. These included, among other  things, the manufacturing of saltpeter for use as a field  fertilizer, the creation of seed steeps and “fructifying  waters” to confer fertility on seeds using alchemical  recipes, the application of alchemical theories of growth  to understand soil fertility, and using alchemical  techniques like calcination, fermentation, distillation,  and putrefaction to uncover the underlying nature of plant  life. The Hartlib Circle—and especially members interested  in matter theory, such as Frederick Clodius, Gabriel  Plattes, Benjamin Worsley, Johan Moriaen, and John  Beale—sought to apply vitalistic theory and its alchemical  outcomes with a keen interest in participating in the  “improvement” of the natural world for human benefit. This  project adds another dimension of this history that views  vitalistic alchemy as a study of the intersection of inert  and living matter, the practice of which was often done by  “amateurs” in the field—on English farms, gardens,  orchards, kitchens, and other everyday spaces—as opposed to  just in the laboratory.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1409},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1409},
}