MedCat

Darrera modificació: 2013-05-13
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat, Translat, Llull

Pereira, Michela, "Alchemy and the use of vernacular languages in the late Middle Ages", Speculum, 74 (1999), 336-356.

Resum

Estudi de l'ús del vulgar i de les interferències lingüístiques llatí -vulgar i vulgar-vulgar en textos alquímics medievals, a partir de la versió trilingüe (llatí, català, francès) del Testament alquímic pseudolul·lià de John Kirkeby.

The Renaissance of scientific thought in twelfth-century Western culture, when alchemy was introduced into the Latin schools, was largely due to the wave of translations, mainly from Arabic into Latin, but also including translations into and from Hebrew, sometimes with vernacular languages as intermediaries. Alchemy, whose tradition had been broken in the West at the end of the Hellenistic age, gained considerable attention—albeit less than astronomy/astrology and medicine—from the twelfth-century translators, who presented Latin culture with a hitherto unknown doctrine that was completely different from any other science. Alchemy, as the Latin Middle Ages received it, is the philosophical search for the agent of material perfection by means of the manipulation of base materials. It thereby united theory and practice in a way unexpected by Latin scholars. In fact, alchemy as a doctrine was inseparable from laboratory practice; and this practice so much resembled well-established craftsmen's labor (metal melting, working on minerals, glassmaking) that for a long period the place of alchemy in the divisio disciplinarum wavered between the mechanical and the liberal arts.

Matèries

Pseudo-Ramon Llull
Alquímia
Traduccions
Català

URL

http:/​/​www.jstor.org/​stable/​2887050