Ms. document. Title from Les Enluminures, Primer [no.] 6, Alchemy p. 18. Script: written in a cursive gothic bookhand and cursive humanistic script. Pagination: 105 leaves. Decoration: Red rubrics. Layout: Two to thirty long lines and twenty to twenty-four long lines. Origin: This is a copy of one of the central early texts of the Pseudo-Lullian alchemical corpus, assembled before the sixteenth century from two independent manuscripts. Noteworthy for its illustrations and full complement of tables and figures, it includes extensive annotations that call for further study. The text appears to be extremely uncommon on the market, and there is only one... The text itself is presented as a compendium of the secrets of nature already revealed in other works. The opening chapters are theoretical, and discuss the relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm, the bond of love uniting the world, the need for a reformatio materiae (a reformation of matter), that can be achieved by the true alchemist who receives illumination from God (themes also... The manuscript now consists of two parts of independent origins. The first quire, which includes the end of the text by Pseudo-Lull and diagrams, is dated 1472 on f. 10v; the evidence of the script and initials suggest an origin in northern Italy (note the abbreviation of "qui" especially), or perhaps in a neighboring region of Germany or Austria. The inscription below the picture of the... The second part of the manuscript includes the bulk of the Pseudo-Lull text from the beginning, breaking off incompletely where the first part picks up. It is copied in a good Italian cursive humanistic script, approaching Italic, certainly from the second half of the fifteenth century. Dating this section depends in part on the explanation of the origin of this codex. If the first section of... Clearly the two sections of the manuscript were brought together early in its history. Both sections are copiously annotated by a later reader (sixteenth-century?) who added occasional notes, rather abstract pointing hands, and underlined large sections of the text in black ink (cf. for example ff. 8v-9 and 63v-64). The wear on the two sections, however, is clearly independent - in particular... Front flyleaf, f. ii verso, "Bonaparte Carolos. A. Dom 1763, Advocacii civit." Former shelfmark: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (Amsterdam, Netherlands), MS 17. Shelfmark: Philadelphia, PA, Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of Chemical History, MS 6. Belonged to Joost R. Ritman (b. 1941), the Dutch businessman and distinguished collector of art and books; acquired by Laurence Witten, Southport, Connecticut in 1983; Bibliotheca Philosophia Hermetica MS 17 (bookplate, inside front cover). Purchased from Les Enluminures Ltd., 9 September 2013, Primer 2 Alchemy, [item] no. 6, (TM693) to Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of Chemical...
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