Medical licensing and learning in fourteenth-century Valencia

helped to qualify this, because in order to win Moritz's favour it was not enough to claim special revelation; as other plausible obfuscation failed, one had to achieve some practical credibility. The quarrel between Andreas Libavius and Johannes Hartmann, the subject of a separate monograph by Moran, also assisted in the process. As Moritz's appointee to the first chair of Paracelsian chemistry, Hartmann was expected to be an expositor and apologist of the Cassel court philosophy. His inaugural address as professor publicus chymiatriae at Marburg, published in 1613, responded to an unnamed assailant identified by Moran as Libavius. In turn Libavius branded Hartmann as a dreamer who ought never to have forsaken mathematics for chemistry; hence the hidden agenda of Hartmann's laboratory practice, as Moran explains it, to discredit Libavius' pronouncements by exposing his inexperience. Hartmann's laboratory notebooks, preserved at Erlangen, enable Moran to reconstruct in some detail the two courses offered at Marburg in 1615-16. Although the students were treated as initiates, the "secrets" that were passed on to them were not mystical but entirely empirical. The chemical college is thus interpreted as a significant development in the stabilizing of Paracelsian doctrine by subjecting the astral explanations of disease to the discipline of pedagogy. Precisely because chymiatria functioned as a polemical and political strategy, it sought a middle way between institutional auctoritas and hermetic subjectivity. In glossing one dimension of the Libavius controversy, therefore, Moran's monograph on Hartmann forms a substantial footnote to Owen Hannaway's The chemists and the word.