An Introduction to Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Abstract

The essays in this volume collectively cover the development of chemistry in the “early modern world,” that is to say, from the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century. Until comparatively recently, this period was of less interest to historians of chemistry than the succeeding era of the emergence of “modern” chemistry, with its familiar chemical elements, compounds, and equations. But recent research, exemplified by the essays of this volume, has shown how exciting and complex this era in the history of chemistry was in its own right. And its backdrop of early modern European and world history was critically significant for the development of the modern world. The beginning of this period witnessed the high water mark of the Renaissance, the inception of global “outreach” of sea voyages and explorations by Europeans, the Protestant Reformation, and the beginning of bureaucratic national monarchies and smaller political entities. Its conclusion was marked by those revolutionary sequels to the Age of Enlightenment that also ushered in the modern world: the French and Industrial Revolutions. Our “early modern” centuries, in turn, divide up into two fairly distinct research epochs for the history of early modern chemistry. The first is late fifteenth-through seventeenth-century “chymistry.”1 The second is the chemistry of the eighteenth century. About half of the essays present research dealing primarily with the first epoch. The rest of the essays treat aspects of eighteenth-century chemistry, except for the final essay (Bensaude-Vincent), which offers a general commentary on the entire early modern period.