An Alchemist’s Travels, according to Himself

Abstract

This essay reconsiders a little-known collection of Latin alchemical recipes from the fifteenth century attributed to one “Leonard of Marburg.” Preserved today in only one manuscript (MS Latin 14005, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), these recipes were collected over the course of the narrator’s arduous travels ranging from Italy, to Poland, to Armenia—or so Leonard claims. Are we supposed to believe him? Reading this alchemical text alongside other medieval travel narratives, I show how this travel narrative signals its affiliations with that genre and, in so doing, invites us to regard it as a literary experiment rather than a record of a medieval traveling alchemist’s alchemical practice.