The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber - Newman
CHAPTER FIVE
The Influence of the Summa perfectionis
There is no satisfactory way to trace the influence of the Summa perfectionis within the scope of a single study. The text was too influential, and the current historiography of alchemy too undeveloped, to allow for comprehensive analysis. Nonetheless, it is possible to arrive at an idea of the Summa's importance by considering representatives of the major alchemical corpora. It has been remarked that there are six major alchemical corpora of the late Middle Ages. These are the texts going under the names of Michael Scot, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Lull 1. Of these, we shall consider only the final three.
The corpora ascribed to Michael Scot and Thomas Aquinas are very small in relation to the others (3 for Scot, 6 for Aquinas), and the most important members of the Scot corpus seem to be earlier than the Summa. Hence we will not suffer from their loss. As for the Roger Bacon corpus, I have found no influence from the Summa in two of its early representatives, the Breve breviarium (Tl(180) and the Tres epistolae (Tl( 290, 296, 332). Other less central members of the Roger Bacon group may betray Geberian influence, but the matter cannot be settled here. We may therefore restrict ourselves to the texts bearing attributions to Albertus Magnus, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Lull.
The alchemical corpus ascribed to Albert the Great consists of about thirty titles2 Among these, the Semita recta, or Libellus de alchemia; seems to occupy a central position.3 This little work, already in existence around the end of the thirteenth century, is also very possibly the oldest alchemical text ascribed to Albert. Now we have shown elsewhere that the Summa lies at the very foundation of the Semita recta. 4 Indeed, the author of the Semita recta has borrowed entire columns verbatim from the Summa, without the slightest acknowledgement Given the fundamental nature of the Semita recta to the rest of the corpus, the established fact of its dependency on the Summa will make it unnecessary for us to explore the Albertine corpus further. Instead, we shall restrict ourselves to influential texts belonging to the corpora attributed to Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Lull, After having established that their authors owe a debt to the Summa, we shall say something about the precise nature of that debt.
No satisfactory study bas been made of the alchemical corpus going under the name of Arnald of Villanova, which consists of
some fifty-seven titles.5
The leading scholars of his medical works agree that the alchemical texts are spurious.6 The alchemical works were widely read, however, and at least one of them may date back to the first third of the fourteenth century, as we shall show. The most sustained look at the Arnaldian alchemical corpus is still Lynn Thorndike's work of 1934, and this can hardly be considered definitive. Nonetheless, we shall have to use it as a guide. Thorndike's brief study contains an analysis of alchemical Rosaria attributed to Arnald For reasons that are not entirely clear, he states that "The Rosarius which there seems the most reason for accepting as Arnald's is also the longest of his alchemical treatises."?
This Rosarius or Rosarium begins with the incipit "lste namque liber nominatur (vocatur) Rosarius," (TK 793), and was printed in Amald's Opera of 1504. Considerable confusion seems to surround the relationship of this text with John Dastin's Speculum philosophie, 8 but we cannot attempt to solve that problem here. The Rosarium bearing the above incipit is also found in Manget's Bibliotheca chemica cunosa; in what Dorothea Singer calls "a variant version."9 The following analysis will be based largely on this "variant version." We have also consulted the Lyons editions of 1504 and 1532, however, and found only minor variants in the passages quoted below.10
The Manget printing of the Rosarium makes no overt reference to Geber, but it is clear that its author has used the Summa perfectionis: Indeed, the unacknowledged quotations from the Summa are so long, frequent, and exact, that one could call this Rosarium a virtual commentary on the former text. Since the present work is not a study of the Rosarium; but of the Summa, we shall have to keep our comments short: the reader may easily find many other borrowings from the Summa that we have been forced to omit Let us begin by comparing the Rosarium s comments about mercury with those of the Summa -
Rosarium
Hoc autem in argento vivo minime contingit: quoniam figitur absque eo quod in terram vertatur: & similiter figitur conversione
ejus in terram. Nam per festinantiam ad ejus fixionem, quae fit per praecipitationem, figitur, & in terram vertitur, & per successivam iterata vice illius sublimationem figitur similiter, & non vertitur in terram, iino dat fusionem metallicam.
Summa
Hoc autem mioirne in argento vivo contingit, quoniam 6gi potest absque hoc - quod in terram vertatur - et figi similiter cum conversione illius ad terram. Nam per festinationem ad eius fixionem que per precipitationem perficitur, figitur et in terram mutator.
Per successivam vero illius iterata vice sublimatiooem figitur similiter et DOD in terram vertitur, immo fusionem dat metallicam.
The Rosarium has manifestly borrowed here either from the Summa or from the Summa's source. But as we have repeatedly stated, the Summa is not a text that recapitulates its sources verbatim. Hence it is extremely unlikely that the Rosarium has here chanced upon a source used by the Summa. This close copying continues throughout Chapter IV of the Rosarium, but we shall here pass to Chapter VI of that text, where the author describes the steadiness of mind necessary to the successful alchemist......
The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber Author: Newman
Alchemy was a subject of no small controversy in the Middle Ages. To some scholastics, alchemy seemed to arrogate the power of divinity itself in its claim that man could replicate the products of nature by means of art; others viewed alchemy as a pure technology, unworthy of inclusion in a curriculum devoted to the study of scientiae. The Summa perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber, written around the end of the 13th century as a defense of the art, became 'the Bible of the medieval alchemists,'and was still being used as late as the 17th century. The present work contains a critical edition, annotated translation, and commentary of the Summa.
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