by Agnieszka Rec

The exploits of John Dee in Prague cast long shadows over the history of Central European alchemy. Colorful tales of the English alchemist dominate both popular and scholarly legend, yielding countless stories and studies. Recent works on Polish and Hungarian noblemen alchemists have only begun to pull back the curtains to reveal activities outside the imperial capital. As I will show, a pair of sixteenth-century notebooks can illuminate this darkness.

The notebooks, now held at the Leiden University Library, collect recipes from throughout Central and Eastern Europe and are the work of the Silesian humanist Franciszek Mymer (c.1500-c.1570) and his sons, Franz, Adam, and Georg. The Mymer family found fellow practitioners as close by as the next village or as far away as Riga. They almost never sought recipes from Prague. The Mymer collections complicate the geography of alchemy in Central Europe, shifting the landscape from a single famous center to multiple, more everyday centers.

If we map the points of origin given for these recipes, the picture that emerges is one that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the sixteenth-century alchemical market. While alchemical recipes make frequent appearances on this blog, it’s almost always in a western European context (see the discussions of English, Dutch, and German alchemists). In this post I will look at alchemical activity on the other end of the continent where the Mymer family pursued their art.

Over the course of their lives, Franciszek Mymer and his sons moved and travelled all over Central and Eastern Europe. Born in Lower Silesia, Franciszek went south to Cracow around 1519. He studied at the university there for a time and found work as a printer, translator, and poet. During his two decades in Cracow, Franciszek developed an interest in alchemy during this time. In 1540 or 1542, Franciszek left the Polish royal city and moved north, passing several years in Thorn (now Toruń), the town that had produced Copernicus a generation earlier. His first son, Franz, was born around this time. Franciszek made a final move to Dohna, near Dresden, where he served as a Lutheran pastor until his death around 1570. Franz followed his father’s religious calling and attended the Lutheran university in Wittenberg. He settled in Saxony for a time before moving to Moravia, near Olomouc. Of the two younger Mymer boys, Adam remained in Saxony, while Georg eventually returned Silesia and worked as a goldsmith in Breslau (now Wrocław).

The Leiden manuscripts – Vossiani Chymici Q29 and F19 – were a family effort, put together at various stages on their journeys across Central Europe. The Mymers were unusually careful in recording the supposed authors of each recipe – perhaps as a means of establishing authority, as was done with medical recipes at the time. The family collected widely: their recipes are attributed to priests, monks, cathedral provosts, doctors, goldsmiths, a nailmaker, a chef, and an unexpected number of Teutonic Knights. Some of these attributions are more fiction than fact. Many others, though, are accurate and testify to the Mymers’ wide-reaching network of alchemical friends and acquaintances.

Franciszek’s long stay in Cracow yielded a number of recipes by Maciej of Miechów (a.k.a. Miechowita, 1457-1523), the famous doctor and professor of medicine at the University of Cracow. Alongside the more usual recipes for producing silver or extracting gold from mercury, Maciej explains how to make gold from two varieties of catnip(!). Franciszek’s sons strayed further afield. Adam and Franz both got a number of recipes from Martin Eyser, a draper in Glatz (now Kłodzko in southwestern Poland). Franz visited a Breslau surgeon and follower of Paracelsus named Johannes Scholz in Riga in 1579.

Georg is particularly wordy in describing the lengths he went to in pursuit of recipes. Most often, his stories start in the market square of Breslau. On 21 August 1570, for example, a friend from Madgeburg told him of a famous recipe in the hands of an unnamed Polish voivode (perhaps Olbracht Łaski, Palatine of Sieradz). According to Georg, acquiring this recipe took the help of no less than three goldsmiths, one imperial official, and one piper. And just in case you might doubt him, Georg had one of the participants confirm the story by writing his name in the manuscript at the head of the story.

The Mymers looked far and wide for their recipes. They collected across a wide swath of Central and Eastern Europe, from Nuremburg to Vilnius and Riga, and a number of cities and towns in between. The Mymers chose to look east for their recipes and found alchemists there ready to supply them. This rich tapestry of alchemical practice is just waiting to be uncovered.

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I am grateful to Anna-Maria Balbach, Center for Language Study, Yale University, for her assistance with the early modern German. The archival trip behind this project was made possible by a SHAC New Scholars Award and a Scaliger Fellowship from the Leiden University Library.

Agnieszka Rec is completing a doctorate in Medieval History at Yale University. Her thesis, titled “Transmutation in a Golden Age: Reading Alchemy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cracow,” uses the biography of an alchemical miscellany to reconstruct the community of practitioners in Cracow and their ties to wider European traditions of alchemy. An article based on this research appeared recently in Preternature.

by Christopher Nicholson

Few ingredients are as significant to the Czechs as carp. This fresh-water fish is so important that it has become the key ingredient in the now traditional Czech Christmas meal.

The centrality of carp to Czech cooking and culture has been understood for centuries. Janus Dubravius (or Jan Skála z Doubravsky, 1486 – 1553), a Czech humanist and the sometime bishop of Olomouc (1541 -1553), wrote a little book so that one could breed the best possible carp.

Dubravius’s book, De piscinis et piscium, qui in eis aluntur natura, was published in Wrocław in 1547 and dedicated to members of the German Fugger and Hungarian Thurzó families. The text gained popularity and was reprinted in 1596 (Nuremberg) and 1671 (Helmstadt). An English translation was published in 1599 as A New Booke of good Husbandry, very pleasant, and of great profite both for Gentlemen and Yeomen: Conteining, The Order and maner of making Fish-pondes, with the breeding, preserving, and multiplying of the Carpe, Tench, Pike, and Troute and diverse kindes of other Fresh-fish.

De piscinis offers readers more or less everything one might want or need to know to establish ponds and breed fish. Dubravius explains in great detail how to locate, construct and fill a pond. He also makes recommendations about the hiring of labour for the project. If a noble has to leave his estate during the building work then he should employ ‘a cunning, expert, and skilfull man to overlooke their work.’ Elsewhere Dubravius covers the breeding and harvesting of fish, while he also considers the crucial subject of what it is exactly that different fish eat. He even suggests that being a good builder of ponds might make a man more attractive to the opposite sex, but seems not to make any fantastic or medicinal claims about the fish.

This manly display will lead to the best-fed carp with which to woo the ladies, but first one must begin by finding the right location for your pond. The first thing to think about when considering a fishpond is where one should put it. Dubravius thinks this is critical for the nourishment of the pond’s potential occupants. The quality of the land is particularly important because carp require no supplementary feeding. The fish would be expected to find their food in their surroundings.[1] Dubravius warns against building ponds in rocky areas or in places where nothing will grow because these areas will not provide carp with the nutrients they need. As he explains: ‘barren and miserable ground’ is ‘most unfortunate for Carpe, because it wanteth the iuce and meysture of the earth, wherewith the Carpe is nourished and made fatte.’

Later, and referring to Aristotle, Dubravius describes the diets of a range of fish. He notes that conger, lamprey and wolf eels are carnivores that eat exclusively other fish, while ‘Mullets feedes on Fish and Sea weedes, Goldins feedes only of Sea weedes, Stockfish on Sea weedes and doung, Codfishes on slyme’.

In its desire for ‘slyme’, the cod shares something with the carp. The conditions that Dubravius says allow the carp to be ‘made fatte’ let it indulge in its preferred diet of ‘slyme and sande’. However, the carp is not a fussy fish. The carp will not eat other fish but it will take worms that live in the banks of the pond. It might also make attempts to catch gnats and flies that amble close to the surface of the water. Those who disbelieve Dubravius are invited to see for themselves: ‘if you walke quietly by the bankes and harken attentively, you shall heere him snatch after them.’

Dubravius, like many other contemporary authors, thinks not all foods are equal. The The carp eats ‘slyme and sande’ because it lies at the bottom of the pond, but it is more quickly fattened up if it consumes the worms, gnats and flies. Carp on noble estates might be left to fend for themselves, but Dubravius explains that common folk do things differently. They enclose the fish in weirs and feed to them grain. Another, slightly bizarre, option is thus: ‘Potters clay also dryed a little by the fyer, and annoynted over with the lees of oyle, maketh fatte Carpes, and is much better than corne.’

The point here, then, is not so much about what one should feed the carp. Rather it is where one should put them. In the right environment the carp will look after themselves. If the food is there they will find it. Nevertheless, if one does, through incompetence or bad luck, end up with a pond devoid of ‘slyme and sande’ for the carp to feast upon then one should not panic. Simply find some potters clay, oil and a fire.

Christopher Nicholson completed a PhD in History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is co-editor of Perpetual Motion? Transformation and Transition in Central and Eastern Europe & Russia (2011) and Between Worlds: The Age of the Jagiellonians (2013). He is currently involved with a project on the medieval laws of Croatia based at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and is co-editing a volume of essays on Emperor Sigismund.

[1]                Richard C. Hoffmann and Verena Winiwarter, ‘Making Land and Water Meet: The Cycling of Nutrients between Fields and Ponds in Pre-Modern Europe’, Agricultural History, 84, 3 (2010), pp. 352-80 (p.368).