An Early Modern DIY Guide to Making Paper

By Gabriella Szalay

After about half an hour of working it over everything was already so small and delicate that I could scoop, or rather make fine sheets out of it. These sheets allowed themselves to be neatly pressed on to felt, removed from the same and hung up. After they had dried, I was able to size and burnish them[1]

Penned by the Regensburg pastor and naturalist Jacob Christian Schäffer (1718-1790), these words provide a succinct description of the paper making process in the early modern period. They teach us that select raw materials were first turned into a pulp by fermenting them, and then stamping them with wooden hammers operated by a mill or beating them with the metal blades of a Hollander beater. They also tell us that this pulp was then formed into sheets using a mould. These sheets were in turn transferred onto felt blankets in order to soak up the water that helped facilitate stamping and beating. After this they were hung up to dry in a well-ventilated area. Paper intended for printing or writing was then covered with a thin layer of sizing, which typically consisted of animal glue, so that it could better retain ink. Finally, it was rubbed with a flat, hard tool until it achieved a clean finish.

Caption Sorting, Fermenting and Washing of Linen Rags, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Sorting, Fermenting and Washing of Linen Rags, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries

What Schäffer’s text does not tell us that the paper that concerned him was in many ways atypical. It was not made from the macerated linen (i.e. flax) or hemp rags that had served as the material of choice among European paper makers since the thirteenth century.

Caption Paper made from Wasps’ Nests, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Caption Paper made from Wasps’ Nests, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Rather, as he revealed in a subsequent passage, “it was for me an extremely pleasurable sight, to once again have produced such fine paper from wasps’ nests!”[2]

 

Title Page, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Title Page, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries

A complete description of Schäffer’s attempts to make paper from wasps’ nests and other ‘exotic’ materials appears in Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen (1765). The first of six volumes published by Schäffer on what I call paper trials, it begins with an account of how for generations men of learning had been experimenting with material substitutes for making paper.[3] Their goal, Schäffer argued, was to put an end to the cyclical relationship between waning supplies of linen rags and waxing costs of fine, white writing paper. As an avid participant in the Republic of Letters and as an author and publisher of natural history texts it is not surprising that he was sympathetic to their concerns. Nor that his interest in paper trials was piqued by his fellow entomologist, René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, (1683-1757), who following his close study of American and European paper wasps suggested that it should be possible to make paper from a wide range of botanical specimens, including trees.[4]

Szalay_Fig_4
Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Stamper. Image Credit: Museen der Stadt Regensburg, Historisches Museum. Photo: Michael Preischl

 

Schäffer’s first paper trial, conducted in 1764, examined the possibilities of making paper from the wool-like seeds of black poplar trees. He was disappointed by the initial results, noting how the corresponding sample lacked the rigidity (Steife) and density (Festigkeit) of paper made from linen rags. Nevertheless, he decided to go forward with more trials and had a miniature Stamper built to his specifications and set up in his own house so that he could supervise the paper making process directly. He also hired a couple of journeymen (Gesellen) to help him carry out the more than eighty paper trials on over fifty different kinds of materials that would occupy his attention over the next seven years.

Paper made from Pine Cones, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Paper made from Pine Cones, Jacob Christian Schäffer’s Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch noch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen. Image Credit: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Among the many things that make Schäffer’s paper trials worth further study are how well they are documented and how eagerly they were reproduced by other men of learning. Each volume of Schäffer’s text is filled with entries describing the physical properties and/ or origins of the material under investigation, followed by recipes for turning that material into paper. The entry dedicated to pine cones (Tannenzapfen), for example, begins by identifying them as the fruit (Frucht) or seed-cases (Saamenbehältnisse) of coniferous trees. It then notes that because of their ligneous quality they need to be soaked in water for one week before they can be turned into pulp. Schäffer even tweaked his own recipe, recalling how when the pine cones proved to still be too hard: “I placed them into a lime pit for twenty-four hours, allowed them to be stamped again, and then washed them and stamped them until they were small, delicate and rag-like.”[5]

Szalay Fig 6
Title Page, Gerhard Anton Senger’s Die älteste Urkunde der Papierfabrikation. Image Credit: Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen

The precision with which he addressed variables like time, combined with his decision to include samples from each experiment alongside the text turned Schäffer’s books into veritable “how-to-manuals.” Within a year of their publication, men of learning across Europe were installing miniature Stampers in their homes and making paper from Schäffer’s recipes with the help of artisan assistants. Some, like Gerhard Anton Senger (1754-1822), even tried to convince commercial paper mills and government bodies that they should do away with paper made from linen rags, which often had to be imported from foreign suppliers. Instead one should learn to make use of locally available resources, such as the green algae (Conferva) that filled the lakes and streams of Senger’s native Prussia and provided the topic and the material support for his Die älteste Urkunde der Papierfabrikation. Although paper made from Conferva had an unsightly greenish hue, Schäffer noted in his recipe that if left out in the sun, it would eventually assume the pristine, white color that made paper from linen rags so economically and socially desirable.

 

Gabriella Szalayis a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York and in the Philosophische Fakultät at the Georg August University in Göttingen. Since the fall of 2014 she has been Research Fellow at the DFG-Funded Graduiertenkolleg “Cultures of Expertise from the 12th to the 18th Century.” She will be finishing her dissertation “Materializing the Past: The History of Art and Natural History in Germany, 1750-1800” in the spring of 2017. This fall she will be part of the Working Group Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

_____________________________________________________

[1] Jacob Christian Schäffer, Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch mit einem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen (Regensburg, 1765), 33.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Among the names singled out by Schäffer for their interest in finding material substitutes for paper were Albertus Seba (1665-1736), Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715-1786) and Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch (1714-1786).

[4] Réaumur first presented this idea to the Académie des sciences in Paris in 1719, more than one hundred years before paper produced from wood pulp began to be produced on a commercial scale in 1845.

[5] Jacob Christian Schäffer, Neue Versuche und Muster das Pflanzenreich zum Papiermachen und andern Sachen (Regensburg, 1767).

How to establish trust

By Agnieszka Rec

How do you make a recipe look effective? How do you convince a reader that your recipe will work before they’ve even tried it? One solution, as discussed by Sietske Fransen for medical recipes, was to include the names of noblemen and women, validating the recipe by showing who it was effective for. Early modern alchemists were even more concerned with these questions since they continually faced accusations of fraud. This led to meticulous, even overscrupulous, records of how recipes were acquired.

Georg Mymer – whom you met in my previous post on his family’s part in a vast network of Central European practitioners – included such details in his recipe collection. Written between 1568 and 1571, the manuscript contains alchemical texts and recipes, laboratory expenses, and narrative accounts of his exploits. In today’s post, we’ll consider one such account in which George explains at length how he got a recipe for the coagulation of mercury. (The story is abridged and in my own translation.)

Image 1: Breslau (now Wrocław) main square to the south.]
Image 1: Breslau (now Wrocław) main square to the south.]

 

Georg writes:

In the year 1570 on 21 August, Lorenz Sehehaufer of Magdeburg came to me in the marketplace in Breslau and told me that in the land of the Poles there was a tincture about which his master, Paul Gese, the town piper of Breslau, had learned so much that in eight weeks he was able to make it himself. Then I asked him where it was. He answered, “In Poland.” But I knew nothing about it. And he wanted to know whether I wanted to know anything about it. Shortly, in just a few hours, I knew about it too.

Image 2: Georg’s account of his recipe hunt in Breslau. Leiden University Library, Vossiani Chymici F19, ff.81v-82r.
Image 2: Georg’s account of his recipe hunt in Breslau. Leiden University Library, Vossiani Chymici F19, ff.81v-82r.

 

Following this meeting, Georg leaves the marketplace and returns to the home of Wolf Freyberger, the Imperial Münzmeister (mint master), with whom he has been staying. Freyberger greets him and says,

Mr. Georg, two apprentices came to see me on the market square. They said they were goldsmiths and both brothers. And they were your countrymen, they said, from your homeland. If you please, they wanted to see you as soon as they could. They also wanted to tell you something of your father. They will wait for you for two more hours at the most and no longer. So you must go immediately.

Georg continues:

As I had already had my midday meal, I soon went to them and asked who they were and what they wanted. They were Joachim Wimmer and Christoff, his brother; both journeymen goldsmiths who were known to me.

They spoke to me thusly: “Listen, my dear Georg Mymer. As you well know we are well-versed in the art, and we have a recipe for the coagulation of mercury. We wanted to give it to you rather than Paul Gese and Lorenz, who cheated me once. I will not believe him anymore,” said Joachim Wimmer. “So I will tell you how I came to the art and discovered it in Posen.

“So here’s the thing: There is a voivode in Poland, who has had a learned man for seven years now and has spent 8,000 florins on him.[1] The voivode recently found this tincture in the Greek tongue. Then he had the learned man translate it into the Latin and German languages, and also the Polish.

“He immediately set to work to discover the truth of the recipe in Posen with the Count of Gurk[?].

Georg picks up the story once more:

The learned man, however, sought Joachim Wimmer out, saying that because he was a goldsmith, he might know how to work the recipe correctly.

The learned man let Joachim Wimmer copy the recipe, and Wimmer proceeded to copy one for him as well. Then, when Joachim Wimmer left, he came directly to me and left quickly again.

So I acquired the tincture from him in the manner I have described above. He also left his signature next to it as proof. There is much more to say about this, but it is not so important, and I will leave the story here.

Image 3: Copy of Joachim Wimmer’s confirmation and signature. Leiden University Library, Vossiani Chymici F19, ff.77v-78r.
Image 3: Copy of Joachim Wimmer’s confirmation and signature. Leiden University Library, Vossiani Chymici F19, ff.77v-78r.

 

Georg is obsessed with the specifics. He tells his reader who gave him the recipe, how he found them, how they found the recipe, and so on, going back to a Greek original. He cites the involvement of a voivode and a count. He collects witnesses – Paul Gese signs this account, while Joachim Wimmer writes his own confirmation, copied elsewhere in the manuscript. He praises Joachim Wimmer’s technical skills as a goldsmith and thus his ability to judge a recipe. This reflects well on Georg and by extension his own story, as Georg was himself a goldsmith. Georg finishes his tale promising that there is more that could be told if need be. Anyone reading the account in Georg’s presence could presumably ask him to supply information not available in the written copy. One wonders, however, what Georg left out of his account, given that he already notes that he had lunch on the day in question.

Georg brought together this overwhelming collection of details to establish the truth of recipe among his fellow alchemists. The stakes of reliability were high. He risked losing access to future recipes, as did Lorenz Sehehaufer, if his good reputation were called into question.

Whether Georg and his recipe were, in fact, trustworthy is another question. A modern reader might be excused in wondering whether Georg Mymer protests too much.

 

 

Agnieszka Rec is the 2016-2017 Herdegen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Beckman Center of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. She will receive her PhD in Medieval History from Yale University in December 2016. Her thesis, titled “Transmutation in a Golden Age: Reading Alchemy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cracow,” uses the biography of an alchemical manuscript to reconstruct the community of practitioners in the Polish royal city and their ties to wider European traditions of alchemy.

________________________________________________________________

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.

[1] This is an extraordinary amount of money for the period. Jan Zamojski (1542-1605), royal chancellor and the richest man in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was worth about 30,000 florins. Olbracht Łaski (1536-1605), the famed patron of alchemy and eighth richest man in the Commonwealth, was worth 4 or 5,000 florins. Rafał T. Prinke, “Beyond Patronage: Michael Sendivogius and the Meanings of Success in Alchemy,” in Chymia: Science and Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Miguel López Pérez, Didier Kahn, and Mar Rey Bueno (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 205.

Exploring CPP 10A214: Enter Lady Honywood, Continued; Getting it on Paper

By Hillary Nunn with Rebecca Laroche

Elaine Leong’s posting about paper’s use as a medical tool inspired me to look more carefully at instances of paper in the Layfield manuscript, which Rebecca Laroche and I have been examining in this series. What I found was much more than I expected. It turns out that concentrating on paper highlights some of the embedded puzzles about recipe transmission that have been lurking in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia manuscript, and even in the Recipe Projects blog itself. My exploration also brings us back to Lady Honywood, proving once more Rebecca’s observation that “one just has to take advantage of a name like ‘Lady Honywood’ if it’s given to you.”

Rebecca and Elaine both have written substantially about Lady Honywood (or Honeywood) in Recipe Project posts before. This past March, Elaine pointed out that Joanna St. John’s 1680 recipe book contains a remedy attributed to Lady Honeywood “for a cancer,” where the medicine is spread on paper and then laid on the sore. Not surprisingly, Lady Honeywood’s name rang a bell for me, since almost two years earlier, Rebecca had devoted two posts to Lady Honywood’s presence in the Layfield manuscript. Lady Honywood’s recipe for the gout, Rebecca showed, hinted that the compiler of the CPP manuscript’s second section had a particular need to treat that ailment since seven cures for gout appear there.

But it turns out that Elaine and Rebecca were talking about the same recipe, or so I found out when I searched for mention of paper in the CPP manuscript. While St. John labels the recipe as a cancer treatment, the Layfield manuscript identifies it as “The Lady Honywood: receite for the Goute, running & swellinge.”

Layfielde_MS Honywood
[1]

The Layfield manuscript mentions the concoction’s effectiveness against cancer as an afterthought, but it is nonetheless there – as is paper as mode of administration. The ingredients are identical as well, with two notable variations. First, the Layfield manuscript walks the user through the process of rendering juice from its herbal ingredients, while St. John begins with the juices:

Wellcome4338Honywood

Otherwise, the only difference is that St. John’s version calls for “bean flower” while the Layfield manuscript calls for “wheaten flour.”

The variation in recipe titles is not uncommon, of course, and it certainly highlights Rebecca’s point about the importance of local needs in the organization of these manuscripts. At the same time, it underscores how easily categorization schemes can obscure connections among texts and contributors. Lady Honywood and her recipe, variant title or no, forge a connection between two manuscripts, the St. John and the Layfield, that otherwise show no obvious overlap. And, ironically enough, a search for paper helped bring to light what had been an unidentified link within this very blog. The overlap between manuscripts, and the one between blog entries, hints further at what connections lie just beyond the reach of our current digital tools. Just more evidence that we need a searchable database of these manuscripts!

Notes:

[1] Below is a transcription for the Layfield hand:

Rx. one handfull of Fetherfew, salladine, smalledge, &
Rhew, of each a handfull, pick them cleane, wash them &
drie the water out cleane, & beate them in a mortar very
small, & then straine the Juce of it into a dish, &
thicken it with wheaten-flower; & put into it the
yelke of anew-laid egg, & as much honey as [that] con-
taines too, all beaten together, & spread it vpon capp
paper, or Grossers browne-paper, & apply it to the
place pained; & as the paine remoues, or moues so
follow it with this medicine –
2. this same also will helpe the Ague in a womans breast
or any bruise, the bloode beinge setled, or kill a felon
or the Kings euell, if it be swellinge or runninge.
If it be runninge lay adrie peece of paper vpon the
soare, & the plaister vpon it, by Gods blessinge it will
do all these cures

To break or not to break (Part 2): From Cairo to Dordrecht

By Saskia Klerk, with Sietske Fransen

In the eleventh chapter of his Steen-Stuck (Treatise on the Stone, 1637), Johan van Beverwijck related a story of an encounter in Dordrecht, the Dutch city where he was town physician. A man had shown him the pieces of stone that he said had been broken by the following recipe. Van Beverwijck tried it himself, but had not found the same results. Still, he noted, the pieces of stone that the “trustworthy man” showed him, would together make up a large stone.

Broken bladder stones from Des monstres et prodiges (1573) by Ambroise Paré (c. 1510– 1590). From the Lyon edition of 1664.
Broken bladder stones from Des monstres et prodiges (1573) by Ambroise Paré (c. 1510– 1590). From the Lyon edition of 1664.

Around 1677, the compiler of Ms BPL 3606 copied this passage, leaving out Van Bever-wijck´s skeptical remark. Apparently, he found the display of broken stones, a tactic we have encountered before, to be persuasive proof of the recipe´s effectiveness.

When Sietske and I started our blog series on this Dutch recipe collection, I did not expect most of my posts to be about “stone breaking” remedies such as this one. However, they turned out to have been of particular interest to its compiler. By pursuing this interest, Sietske and I have learned quite a bit about him and his world. For example, we now suspect that he lived in or near the province of Zeeland in the south-west of the Dutch Republic. We also confirmed Sietske´s earlier observation, that the compiler especially noted down remedies that where accompanied by favorable experiences. In my last post, I showed that the compiler of BPL 3606 used Steen-Stuck´s tables of contents to find the information he was looking for.

As I continued studying the manuscript, the question of why there are so many stone-breaking remedies in it became more pressing. In an earlier post, Seth LeJacq laid out the persuasive answer that patients’ fears of surgery led them to explore alternative therapies. Master Reijmers´ story has shown us that the compiler of BPL 3606 shared these fears and desires. Perhaps, this is also key to understanding why he included not only so many recipes for stone breaking remedies in his manuscript, but also three other sections from Steen-Stuck that are not recipes.

Before the recipe, as a “Nota”, the compiler copied a short section on how the stone should be returned to the bladder if it got stuck in the bladder´s neck. In his Treatise on the Stone, Van Beverwijck suggested surgical options to actually remove the stone from the body as well. The compiler copied the most curious of these, after the recipe, as another “Nota”.

Alpinus told of this procedure in Cap. XIV of the third book of De medicina Aegyptiorum (1591) under the title "To remove stones without an incision"
Alpinus described this procedure in Cap. XIV of the third book of De medicina Aegyptiorum (1591) under the title “To remove stones without an incision”

This particular option advised sufferers to blow into the   urethra with a little pipe. Thereby extending it far enough to be able to remove a stone no larger than an olive pit. Despite his interest in the cure, the compiler omits the original source of this procedure, Van Beverwijck´s teacher in Padua, Prosper Alpinus (1553-1617) and the Egyptians amongst whom Alpinus had resided.

The inclusion of treatments such as these  further confirms the compiler´s anxiety towards actually cutting the body. Moreover, I would argue this anxiety was a factor in the transmission of this custom from faraway Egypt to this Dutch recipe collection. Alpinus explicitly mentioned the non-cutting aspect of the procedure in the title of the chapter in which he described it. Van Beverwijck repeated this aspect in Steen-Stuck, before going on to describe cutting the body to remove the stone as a last resort.

Finally, in his exploration of alternative therapies the compiler also recorded knowledge that by 1677 was outmoded to many of his contemporaries.

Section from Van Beverwijck´s, Steen-Stuck (1649) Ch. 11, pt. 4
Section from Van Beverwijck´s, Steen-Stuck (1649) Ch. 11, pt. 4
The same section copied in BPL 3606
The same section copied in BPL 3606

Van Beverwijck named several materials that possessed a stone breaking power. Some of these (such as lime zest and laurel) worked by a manifest quality and others (such as ashes of scorpio and woodlice) by a hidden property. In his note-taking, the compiler was careful to separate these into two lists.

The distinction between manifest and hidden or occult qualities was characteristic of academic Galenic medicine familiar to Van Beverwijck. It was fundamental to explaining the properties of medical materials. Was the way a material worked in the body “manifest”, that is, was it caused by the primary qualities (hot, dry, cold and moist)? Or could this “operation” not be explained from these qualities and was it therefore “hidden”? While this important distinction had come to be questioned by the 1620s, as I described elsewhere[1], Van Beverwijck included it without comment. Accordingly, when the compiler copied out this section, all that mattered to him was that the physician asserted the healing properties of these materials.

Here, the compiler´s fear of cutting the body thus resulted in a quite eclectic collection of materials, surgical techniques and a stone-breaking recipe, originating from as diverse places as Egypt and Dordrecht. Investigating his interest in alternative cures for bladder stones further, has also indicated the practical reasons behind the staying power of (parts of) Galenic medicine, despite its philosophical problems.

[1] Saskia Klerk, “The Trouble with Opium. Taste, Reason and Experience in Late Galenic Pharmacology with Special Regard to the University of Leiden (1575–1625),” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 19, issue 4 (2014): 287-316.