Fuit Ille non Empiricus Mercenarius: Apprehensions to Alchemy in Colonial New England
Fuit Ille non Empiricus Mercenarius: Apprehensions to Alchemy in Colonial New England
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Fuit Ille non Empiricus Mercenarius：对新英格兰殖民地炼金术的担忧
作者：
Teddy Delwiche
虽然最近的历史研究揭示了新英格兰炼金术士的洲际声誉，但早期殖民地对炼金术的实际态度仍有待了解。集中在一个语料库的大约十几个未翻译的，但完全未经审查的拉丁语演讲（约。200页）组成的哈佛学院的校长和学生在17世纪末和18世纪初，我认为，这些新的来源揭示了矛盾的，偶尔敌对的态度，受过教育的新英格兰男子对炼金术的艺术举行。这些哈佛的精英演讲者在某些情况下欣赏他们所认为的无私的、基督徒为治愈疾病所做的努力，但他们仍然担心，除了虔诚的研究者之外，还出现了一些自私自利的江湖骗子，这些人不关心艺术的公共承诺，而只关心基本的经济回报。
While recent historical studies have uncovered the intercontinental reputations of New England alchemists, much still remains to be known about actual attitudes concerning alchemy in the early colonies. Focusing on a corpus of roughly a dozen untranslated, and all but entirely unexamined Latin orations (ca. 200 pages) composed by Harvard College’s presidents and students in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, I argue that these new sources reveal the ambivalent, occasionally antagonistic attitude that educated New England men held towards the art of alchemy. Appreciating what they regarded as, in some cases, selfless, Christian efforts to cure diseases, these Harvard elite speakers still worried that alongside pious investigators had cropped up some self-serving charlatans, those who cared not for the communal promises of the art, but only the base financial reward.