Chemistry in the 17 th Century : Art or Science ? [ DRAFT ]

Introduction In his study of the didactic origins of chemistry Owen Hannaway maintained that in the seventeenth century chemistry achieved ‘sufficient coherency and identity to sustain a vigorous and ongoing didactic tradition.’ The origins of the debate on the status of alchemy can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Albert the Great (1206-1280) and Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294) maintained that alchemy was both science and art. Albert wanted to incorporate alchemy within the Aristotelian system of knowledge, while Bacon maintained that it occupied a central position in the experimental science, that, in his view, combined theory and practice. In the sixteenth century, the status of alchemy was rather low. In most Renaissance encyclopaedias alchemy was regarded as practical art, as attested by the Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) of Conrad Gessner (1516-1565), by De subtilitate (1550) of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), and by Theodore Zwinger’s (1533-1588) Theatrum humanae vitae (1586). When in his Alchemia (1597) Libavius endeavoured to make chemistry a distinctive subject of instruction, chemistry was not yet recognised as an independent discipline. In the sixteenth century chemistry went through a change that brought about significant rupture with the medieval alchemical tradition. Two factors contributed to establish this break, one was the development of practical chemistry, in particular metallurgy; the other was the rise and development of the Paracelsian movement. At the beginning of the sixteenth century two booklets,