First edition. Not every book earns a review from its first owner, and fewer still receive one this honest. On the flyleaf of this copy, a Swiss buyer who paid 13 Batzen for the volume in a Zurich bookshop in 1680 has recorded his verdict in five words of Swiss German: Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz. "Cardilucius is not very useful." He then put the remaining blank leaves to better purpose, logging thunderstorms.
The judgment is harsh but not entirely unfair. Cardilucius's Magnalia is an annotated reworking of the pseudo-Paracelsian Wunder Artzney ("Wondrous Medicine"), a collection of medical-alchemical recipes first printed in 1586 (Sudhoff 209) under the great reformer's name but almost certainly not by his hand. By 1676, the Paracelsian brand still moved books, even if the attribution had grown threadbare. Cardilucius does not merely reprint: he translates into modern High German, supplies glosses and commentary, 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 volume gains further interest from its appendix: a German translation of the Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium ("An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King"), the celebrated hermetic treatise attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, first published in Latin at Amsterdam in 1667. The pairing is deliberate. Cardilucius frames both texts as complementary expressions of a single art: the practical alchemy of the pharmacy, illuminated by the philosophical alchemy of the adept. That a Zurich reader found this synthesis unpersuasive only nine years after the Introitus had taken learned Europe by storm tells us something about the gap between hermetic ambition and bedside utility.
Cardilucius belongs to the late wave of German Medico-Chymici who sought to systematize Paracelsian medicine in the wake of the Thirty Years' War. His idiom remains resolutely hermetic at a moment when iatrochemistry had already begun its uneasy accommodation with Helmontian experimentalism and the mechanical philosophy. The Circulatum majus et minus, the acetum mercuriale universale, and the spiritus vini tartarisatus all invoke alchemical distillation rather than Harveian circulation; the furnace rather than the dissecting table remains the governing metaphor. Published by the Endter firm at Nuremberg, which maintained a brisk trade in hermetic and Paracelsian texts throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the book was produced for a readership of literate practitioners and apothecaries. A sequel appeared in 1680.
The present copy tells a story beyond the printed text. Purchased in Zurich just four years after publication, bound for a modest 3 Batzen, read, dismissed, and then repurposed as a household notebook for a full century, it records lightning strikes, property deals, and the slow rhythms of Swiss rural life. The owner's index on the rear endpaper suggests he engaged with the contents despite his unflattering review. Books that survive as working objects rather than library ornaments have their own kind of eloquence, and this one has been talking to itself in the margins for three hundred years.
Provenance: A richly annotated Swiss copy. A contemporary purchase record on the front flyleaf records acquisition in Zurich on September 28, 1680 (four years after publication), from the Thurneysen and/or Bodmer shop, for 13 Batzen (10 unbound, 3 for binding). The same or a related hand supplies a candid reader's assessment ("Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz"), a weather diary recording lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685, and what appears to be an owner-compiled index to the text on the rear endpaper. A later inscription (March 6, 1785) records a property transaction near Dillingen for 25 Gulden, payable at Martinmas, indicating the book remained in use as a household record-keeper for over a century. Further manuscript notations on the vellum covers and endpapers are partially legible.
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.
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.
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. Remnants of ties on back cover.
First edition. Not every book earns a review from its first owner, and fewer still receive one this honest. On the flyleaf of this copy, a Swiss buyer who paid 13 Batzen for the volume in a Zurich bookshop in 1680 has recorded his verdict in five words of Swiss German: Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz. "Cardilucius is not very useful." He then put the remaining blank leaves to better purpose, logging thunderstorms.
The judgment is harsh but not entirely unfair. Cardilucius's Magnalia is an annotated reworking of the pseudo-Paracelsian Wunder Artzney ("Wondrous Medicine"), a collection of medical-alchemical recipes first printed in 1586 (Sudhoff 209) under the great reformer's name but almost certainly not by his hand. By 1676, the Paracelsian brand still moved books, even if the attribution had grown threadbare. Cardilucius does not merely reprint: he translates into modern High German, supplies glosses and commentary, 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 volume gains further interest from its appendix: a German translation of the Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium ("An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King"), the celebrated hermetic treatise attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, first published in Latin at Amsterdam in 1667. The pairing is deliberate. Cardilucius frames both texts as complementary expressions of a single art: the practical alchemy of the pharmacy, illuminated by the philosophical alchemy of the adept. That a Zurich reader found this synthesis unpersuasive only nine years after the Introitus had taken learned Europe by storm tells us something about the gap between hermetic ambition and bedside utility.
Cardilucius belongs to the late wave of German Medico-Chymici who sought to systematize Paracelsian medicine in the wake of the Thirty Years' War. His idiom remains resolutely hermetic at a moment when iatrochemistry had already begun its uneasy accommodation with Helmontian experimentalism and the mechanical philosophy. The Circulatum majus et minus, the acetum mercuriale universale, and the spiritus vini tartarisatus all invoke alchemical distillation rather than Harveian circulation; the furnace rather than the dissecting table remains the governing metaphor. Published by the Endter firm at Nuremberg, which maintained a brisk trade in hermetic and Paracelsian texts throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the book was produced for a readership of literate practitioners and apothecaries. A sequel appeared in 1680.
The present copy tells a story beyond the printed text. Purchased in Zurich just four years after publication, bound for a modest 3 Batzen, read, dismissed, and then repurposed as a household notebook for a full century, it records lightning strikes, property deals, and the slow rhythms of Swiss rural life. The owner's index on the rear endpaper suggests he engaged with the contents despite his unflattering review. Books that survive as working objects rather than library ornaments have their own kind of eloquence, and this one has been talking to itself in the margins for three hundred years.
Provenance: A richly annotated Swiss copy. A contemporary purchase record on the front flyleaf records acquisition in Zurich on September 28, 1680 (four years after publication), from the Thurneysen and/or Bodmer shop, for 13 Batzen (10 unbound, 3 for binding). The same or a related hand supplies a candid reader's assessment ("Cardiluci ist nüt vil nütz"), a weather diary recording lightning strikes near Zurich in September 1685, and what appears to be an owner-compiled index to the text on the rear endpaper. A later inscription (March 6, 1785) records a property transaction near Dillingen for 25 Gulden, payable at Martinmas, indicating the book remained in use as a household record-keeper for over a century. Further manuscript notations on the vellum covers and endpapers are partially legible.
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.
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.
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. Remnants of ties on back cover.
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