First edition. A late-Paracelsian medical compendium with one of the most consequential hermetic treatises of the seventeenth century bound up at the back, surviving in a Swiss copy whose first owner read it, dismissed it in five blunt words, and then kept the book as a household chronicle for the next hundred years.
The principal draw, taken straight, sits in the volume's final 32 pages: the first appearance in German of the Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium ("An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King"), the celebrated treatise attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, the pseudonym now firmly identified with the English-American chymist George Starkey (1628–1665), first printed in Latin at Amsterdam in 1667. The Introitus is among the seventeenth century's most influential alchemical texts: Newton studied and copied from it heavily, Boyle mined it, and it stayed in print across Europe for a hundred years. Cardilucius brings it into German only nine years after its Latin debut, and pairs it with the Magnalia deliberately: the practical alchemy of the pharmacy and the philosophical alchemy of the adept as two faces of a single art. Its appearance here, embedded in late-Paracelsian medical literature, is itself a small datum about how the Introitus reached the German-speaking reader.
The Magnalia itself is an annotated reworking of the pseudo-Paracelsian Wunder Artzney — a collection of medical-alchemical recipes first printed at Basel in 1586 under the reformer's name (Sudhoff 209) but almost certainly not by his hand. By 1676 the Paracelsian brand still moved books even where the attribution had grown threadbare. Cardilucius translates it into modern High German, glosses, comments, and adds new material aimed at making the obscure accessible to a later generation of iatrochemical practitioners. His concern is emphatically medical rather than chrysopoetic; the transmutation he promises is of substances into remedies, not of lead into gold. The Circulatum majus et minus, the acetum mercuriale universale, and the spiritus vini tartarisatus all invoke alchemical distillation rather than Harveian circulation. Cardilucius belongs to the last generation of German Medico-Chymici who tried to systematize Paracelsian medicine in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, and his idiom is hermetic at a moment when much of European medicine had already moved on. The Endter firm at Nuremberg, which ran a brisk Paracelsian and hermetic list through the second half of the century, produced the book for literate apothecaries and practitioners. A continuation, the Magnalia Medico-Chymica Continuata, followed in 1680.
This copy is unusually communicative. On the front flyleaf a Swiss buyer who acquired the volume in a Zurich bookshop on September 28, 1680, four years after publication, has recorded the transaction down to the binder's fee: 10 Batzen for the unbound book, 3 Batzen for the binding. He then read it, did not like it, and committed his verdict to the same flyleaf in five words of Swiss German: Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz. "Cardilucius is not much use." Having reached his conclusion, he put the remaining blank leaves to what he evidently considered better purpose. The endpapers carry, in at least one early hand, a weather diary recording lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685; a property transaction near Dillingen recorded on March 6, 1785, for 25 Gulden payable at Martinmas; and various further notations on both vellum covers, some faded and partly legible. The rear endpaper carries an owner-compiled index to the text, evidence that, the flyleaf review notwithstanding, the book was in fact worked through and used. That the owner's dismissal came only nine years after the Introitus apertus had taken learned Europe by storm is one small data point on the gap between hermetic ambition and bedside utility; that the volume then served as a household record-keeper for a full century, accumulating thunderstorms and land sales, is another. Books that survive as working objects rather than library ornaments have, we would argue, their own kind of eloquence.
CARDILUCIUS, Johannes Hiskias (1630–1697). Magnalia Medico-Chymica, Oder Die höchste Artzney- und Feurkünstige Geheimnisse: Wie nemlich mit dem Circulato maiori & minori oder dem Universal aceto mercuriali, und spiritu vini tartarisato die herzlichsten Artzneyen zum langen Leben und Heilung der unheilsamen Kranckheiten zu machen… Nuremberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter and Johann Andreæ Endter's Heirs, 1676.
Provenance: Contemporary purchase inscription on the front flyleaf, Zurich, September 28, 1680, recording acquisition for 13 Batzen (10 unbound, 3 for binding), apparently from the Thurneysen and/or Bodmer shop. The same or a closely related hand supplies the owner's assessment ("Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz"); a weather diary noting lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685; and the owner-compiled index on the rear endpaper. A later inscription dated March 6, 1785, records a property transaction near Dillingen for 25 Gulden payable at Martinmas, indicating that the book remained in active household use for more than a century. Further manuscript notations on the vellum covers and endpapers, partially legible.
Physical Description: Octavo. [24] ff., 409 pp., [15] ff., 32 pp. With woodcut diagrams.
Binding: Contemporary vellum over boards, soiled and darkened. Manuscript notations in an early hand on both covers, substantially faded on the rear board. Remnants of ties on back cover.
Condition: Some spotting throughout; partly slightly worm-eaten. Flyleaves and endpapers with extensive manuscript entries in at least one early hand. Title page lightly browned but legible. Binding sound.
First edition. A late-Paracelsian medical compendium with one of the most consequential hermetic treatises of the seventeenth century bound up at the back, surviving in a Swiss copy whose first owner read it, dismissed it in five blunt words, and then kept the book as a household chronicle for the next hundred years.
The principal draw, taken straight, sits in the volume's final 32 pages: the first appearance in German of the Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium ("An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King"), the celebrated treatise attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, the pseudonym now firmly identified with the English-American chymist George Starkey (1628–1665), first printed in Latin at Amsterdam in 1667. The Introitus is among the seventeenth century's most influential alchemical texts: Newton studied and copied from it heavily, Boyle mined it, and it stayed in print across Europe for a hundred years. Cardilucius brings it into German only nine years after its Latin debut, and pairs it with the Magnalia deliberately: the practical alchemy of the pharmacy and the philosophical alchemy of the adept as two faces of a single art. Its appearance here, embedded in late-Paracelsian medical literature, is itself a small datum about how the Introitus reached the German-speaking reader.
The Magnalia itself is an annotated reworking of the pseudo-Paracelsian Wunder Artzney — a collection of medical-alchemical recipes first printed at Basel in 1586 under the reformer's name (Sudhoff 209) but almost certainly not by his hand. By 1676 the Paracelsian brand still moved books even where the attribution had grown threadbare. Cardilucius translates it into modern High German, glosses, comments, and adds new material aimed at making the obscure accessible to a later generation of iatrochemical practitioners. His concern is emphatically medical rather than chrysopoetic; the transmutation he promises is of substances into remedies, not of lead into gold. The Circulatum majus et minus, the acetum mercuriale universale, and the spiritus vini tartarisatus all invoke alchemical distillation rather than Harveian circulation. Cardilucius belongs to the last generation of German Medico-Chymici who tried to systematize Paracelsian medicine in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, and his idiom is hermetic at a moment when much of European medicine had already moved on. The Endter firm at Nuremberg, which ran a brisk Paracelsian and hermetic list through the second half of the century, produced the book for literate apothecaries and practitioners. A continuation, the Magnalia Medico-Chymica Continuata, followed in 1680.
This copy is unusually communicative. On the front flyleaf a Swiss buyer who acquired the volume in a Zurich bookshop on September 28, 1680, four years after publication, has recorded the transaction down to the binder's fee: 10 Batzen for the unbound book, 3 Batzen for the binding. He then read it, did not like it, and committed his verdict to the same flyleaf in five words of Swiss German: Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz. "Cardilucius is not much use." Having reached his conclusion, he put the remaining blank leaves to what he evidently considered better purpose. The endpapers carry, in at least one early hand, a weather diary recording lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685; a property transaction near Dillingen recorded on March 6, 1785, for 25 Gulden payable at Martinmas; and various further notations on both vellum covers, some faded and partly legible. The rear endpaper carries an owner-compiled index to the text, evidence that, the flyleaf review notwithstanding, the book was in fact worked through and used. That the owner's dismissal came only nine years after the Introitus apertus had taken learned Europe by storm is one small data point on the gap between hermetic ambition and bedside utility; that the volume then served as a household record-keeper for a full century, accumulating thunderstorms and land sales, is another. Books that survive as working objects rather than library ornaments have, we would argue, their own kind of eloquence.
CARDILUCIUS, Johannes Hiskias (1630–1697). Magnalia Medico-Chymica, Oder Die höchste Artzney- und Feurkünstige Geheimnisse: Wie nemlich mit dem Circulato maiori & minori oder dem Universal aceto mercuriali, und spiritu vini tartarisato die herzlichsten Artzneyen zum langen Leben und Heilung der unheilsamen Kranckheiten zu machen… Nuremberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter and Johann Andreæ Endter's Heirs, 1676.
Provenance: Contemporary purchase inscription on the front flyleaf, Zurich, September 28, 1680, recording acquisition for 13 Batzen (10 unbound, 3 for binding), apparently from the Thurneysen and/or Bodmer shop. The same or a closely related hand supplies the owner's assessment ("Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz"); a weather diary noting lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685; and the owner-compiled index on the rear endpaper. A later inscription dated March 6, 1785, records a property transaction near Dillingen for 25 Gulden payable at Martinmas, indicating that the book remained in active household use for more than a century. Further manuscript notations on the vellum covers and endpapers, partially legible.
Physical Description: Octavo. [24] ff., 409 pp., [15] ff., 32 pp. With woodcut diagrams.
Binding: Contemporary vellum over boards, soiled and darkened. Manuscript notations in an early hand on both covers, substantially faded on the rear board. Remnants of ties on back cover.
Condition: Some spotting throughout; partly slightly worm-eaten. Flyleaves and endpapers with extensive manuscript entries in at least one early hand. Title page lightly browned but legible. Binding sound.
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