Anthony Grafton

The well-recognized complexity and opacity of alchemical literature has long constituted a barrier to its proper understanding. Indeed, since the eighteenth-century disappearance of its last serious practitioners within the community of chemists, alchemy has been the subject of several radically distinct schools of historical interpretation. The current understanding of alchemy among historians of science, not to mention the general public, remains strongly colored by one or more of these divergent schools of interpretation, which stem, respectively, from the Enlightenment rejection of obscurity and the later Romantic disenchantment with Newtonian science that led to a new embrace of the occult.