Yet, what occurred was not simply translation. The magnitude of the importation also transformed alchemy. Western academics developed new theories, wrote their own texts, and brought their own cultural assumptions and prejudices to bear on the development of the scientia of alchemy. Aristotelian notions such as soul, essence, form, and material littered the landscape of the new alchemy, but did so weighted with meaning unintended by the Stagirite. Aristotle used a host of terms such as these as concepts meant to describe the world. In the alchemical texts of both Arabic and Latin provenance, however, these conceptual terms were used to discuss actual substances that could be manipulated in the laboratory. Essence was not an idea; it was a substance that could be identified, distilled, and manipulated.7 It is also important to bear in mind that, just as Aristotle never fully developed his chemical geology, neither did he discuss the possibility of transmutation. Therefore, the medieval alchemist, Islamic or Latin, often innovated or, at the very least, extrapolated to fill lacunae in the Aristotelian corpus.
Medicinal alchemy was largely a Western phenomenon. Terminology and essential theory were borrowed from translated treatises from the Islamic world, but the desire to use alchemy to make medicine was not a traditional theme of Islamic alchemists (though Islamic physicians certainly were interested in the possibility of making compound drugs). The elixir of life was the alchemical medicine par excellence, though its composition and precise properties tended to vary from writer to writer. Though the differences among theories of and instructions for making the elixir often prove revealing, it is possible to recognize some more or less general qualities of the substance. It was a universal medicine or cure-all, as well as a means by which one could significantly extend human life. The elixir did not promise immortality, however. Immortality was a quality reserved for God and the resurrected dead after the Last Judgment, though some alchemists blurred this distinction.
Given the pervasive, though hardly dominant clerical discourse that care for the body often came at the cost of care for the soul, it might seem surprising that a handful of Franciscans might give such a vaunted place to the elixir. The elixir, however, did not instill physical benefits only. It also could endow one with gifts that might be better described as spiritual, emotional, or intellectual. It could ease spiritual suffering. It cleared the mind and instilled confidence, bravery, and even intelligence. Just as metallurgical alchemists transmuted and ennobled a base metal into gold by removing its negative properties and instilling positive ones, so too did alchemists hope to purify, transmute, and ennoble the human body. The elixir’s ability to rewrite the composition of the human body transcended the power of most medicines. Nevertheless, the elixir was closely related to the development of compound drugs. The study and production of compound medicines, some of which required some artisanal skill to create, were part of the formal medical curriculum at the universities. Yet caution pervaded such discussions. At the University of Montpellier, for example, the foremost medical school of the later Middle Ages, masters were aware of the potential harm of new medicaments. Yet they allowed for the combination of drugs to also exhibit new properties that could not be explained by the combination of their basic ingredients.8 The compound drug called the theriac, for instance, rivaled the elixir in its potency according to some of its proponents, and, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, there can be some overlap between the theriac and the elixir. The general aim of even the most powerful compound drugs was to heal and repair certain conditions or illnesses. The elixir, however, transformed.
My study focuses principally on three Franciscans interested in the elixir. For two of them, Roger Bacon and John of Rupescissa, the elixir had the potential to reshape not only bodies, but the world. For the third “alchemist,” Franciscan cardinal and plagiarist Vitalis of Furno, the elixir was a powerful medicine and potentially transformative, but ultimately mundane. Spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, the history of all these men and their alchemical works was tangled up with the turbulent history of the Franciscan Order. From the early flirtations with the apocalyptic works of Joachim of Fiore and the controversy over poverty, through the burgeoning of the Spiritual problem, to the immediate aftermath of Pope John XXII’s attacks on the Spirituals and on the core notion of Franciscan poverty itself, the Order was rent into pieces by conflicts both within and without. These troubles left their mark on each of the principal figures of this study.
I have tried, therefore, to balance the larger alchemical discourses with the individual features of the texts I have engaged in this study. Roger Bacon is among those historical figures whose legend outshines historical data.9 Many of the once salient details of Bacon’s life—persecution, arcane masteries, quintessential Englishness—emerge from rather unreliable sources at least a century after his death. We do know he was born sometime around 1214 or 1220, and died around 1292. Bacon finished his studies in Oxford probably by the mid-1230s, and may himself have been a master at Paris in the 1240s or earlier, though he was apparently back at Oxford shortly thereafter.10 Having already pursued an active academic career, he entered the Order of Friars Minor around 1256, just prior to Bonaventure’s elevation to the post of Minister General. Bacon’s admission came in the wake of the so-called scandal of the Eternal Gospel, when, in 1254, the young Franciscan Gerardo of Borgo San Doninno penned a text called the Introductorius, in which he claimed that Joachim of Fiore’s prophetic-exegetical works superseded scripture. This misstep provided the rivals and enemies of the Franciscans an opening through which to attack the Order. It is therefore difficult to countenance claims that Bacon took the Franciscan habit strictly as a means of advancement.
Bacon met Cardinal Guy Foulques, later Pope Clement IV, in 1263 or 1264. It was in the course of this conversation that Bacon first mentioned to the future pope the topics he would later include in his Opus maius (The Greater Work) and in the recapitulations and emendations of the Opus minus (The Lesser Work) and Opus tertium (The Third Work). In 1265, Guy became pope and the next year ordered Bacon to send him a treatise covering the issues they had discussed, as well as his insights on philosophy, theology, the secular-mendicant controversy at Paris, and the role of Aristotle. Bacon complied by hastily writing the Opera and neglected to submit it to his Franciscan superiors beforehand. A late fourteenth-century source claims that Bacon was condemned between 1277 and 1279. The cause of the condemnation is not known, except that it was due to various “novelties.” Bacon’s work offers a number of possible candidates for such a distinction, so it is certainly possible. In any case, around 1278 Bacon had departed Paris for Oxford, and the events of the years until the end of his life are unknown apart from the completion of a few works.
Vitalis of Furno’s reputation as an alchemist is almost nonexistent. He may not have even authored the encyclopedic treatise where his discussion of the elixir is found, though the book’s Franciscan provenance seems secure. Vitalis was better known as a careerist, whose academic interests seem to have existed only to serve his desire to climb the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He was born in Gascony sometime before 1260, but little is known of Vitalis’s life prior to his entrance into the university. We know he began his studies in theology at Paris around 1285, where he read the Sentences under Jacques de Quesnoy.11 We do not know when he entered the Order, but he returned to Montpellier as a lector at the Franciscan studium in 1291, and a few years later returned to Paris. In the closing years of the century he was lector at Toulouse, though Stephen Marrone points to 1300 as the effective end of his academic career. Still, it was far from the end of his intellectual life. In 1307 he was named Provincial in Aquitaine. In 1312 Clement V named him cardinal priest of St. Martin