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Tara Nummedal. Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xvii + 260 pp. Ill. $37.50, £22.00 (ISBN-10: 0-226-60856-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60856-3).
Philipp Sömmering, an alchemist at the court of Duke Julius of Braunschweig- Wolfenbüttel, and his fellow alchemist Anna Zieglerin, were executed in February 1575 for a potful of crimes that included deception. As Tara Nummedal argues in this wonderfully written, brilliantly conceived, and thoroughly documented study of alchemy in the Holy Roman Empire, by publicly exposing the element of fraud in contractual obligations, such events helped to define the identity of early modern alchemists. Alchemical fraud, or Betrug, became a matter of intense concern precisely because alchemy had expanded to such an extent in the sixteenth century that it supplied essential practices to the entrepreneurial programs of territorial princes. Such debates concerning fraud, as well as the depictions of alchemists as fools, corrupt merchants, and criminals in the works of humanist...