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This essay brings together research in the history of science and soft matter physics to consider how early modern Italian apothecaries organised and communicated their knowledge from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century through an "apothecary taxonomy." This was based on a what we call a "hylocentric" classification scheme (from the Greek hyle = matter, material, stuff) founded on a tactile understanding of materials. We will investigate how the behaviour of medicines under deformation and flow - their "rheology" - is a previously underestimated organisational principle, and consider the specialist vocabulary these author-practitioners used to describe different liquid and liquid-like formulations. We will also suggest that the rheology of these formulations - which today falls under the domain of "soft matter science" - affected the material culture of apothecary shops, in the arrangement and selection of drug bottles and jars, which presented this knowledge visually to visitors and clients. That soft matter scientists organise the substances they study in similar ways to early modern apothecaries suggests the agency of materials in affecting human categorisations.

This article examines the origins of the golden pigment known as mosaic gold (SnS₂), formed through the sublimation of tin with mercury, sulphur, and ammonium chloride. It explores the textual transmission of mosaic gold from the earliest known written testimonies, as well as the earliest material remnants of the pigment during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Additionally, the study introduces and analyses two new recipes from an earlier date: one comes from the Greek treatise known as the Anonymous of Zuretti; and the other from the Latin alchemical work attributed to pseudo-Avicenna, De anima. The analysis of these new recipes allows for a better understanding of the origin of the pigment and its connection with the medieval alchemical tradition inherited from the Arabic world. Based on these testimonies, the study proposes a new hypothesis about the origin, development, and etymology of mosaic gold.

Despite the increasing interest in Italian medicine, comparatively little attention has been paid to the establishment of iatrochemistry. Though this process spread throughout the Peninsula, Naples witnessed an impressive growth of chemical research and the outbreak of a conflict between the medical establishment and the chemical physicians. The purpose of this article is to explore the emergence of chemical medicine in Naples in the period that precedes the founding (1663) of the Accademia degli Investiganti. In the first part of the seventeenth century, chemistry achieved recognition in settings like academies, pharmacies, hospitals, and monasteries. Chemical studies and the making of new remedies were spurred by the scientific exchange that Neapolitan savants established with scholars from different areas. The so-called medical pluralism and the recurrent outbreaks of epidemics stimulated the introduction of new chemical therapies, which coexisted with old ones. The establishment of chemical medicine was triggered by Marco Aurelio Severino (1580-1656), who, besides promoting chemical remedies, resorted to chemical theories, including Paracelsian ones, to account for physiological processes. Severino was the mentor of the chemical physicians who gave rise to the Accademia degli Investiganti. One of Severino's disciples was Giuseppe Donzelli (1596-1670), who fostered chemical remedies in Naples.

The Swiss physician and philosopher Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493-1541) is known for his strong advocacy of medical alchemy. That his natural philosophy was tied to medical alchemy is perhaps uncontroversial, but just how it was so is less straightforward. This article provides an insight into the connection between the two by means of Paracelsus's concept of active agents, with an emphasis on fire, its master Vulcanus, and the associated term Archeus. I will show how these evolved in the thought of Paracelsus by taking an evolutionary view of his works. The complexity of his views comes to light as a result of employing the method of hybrid reading, which integrates the traditional close reading technique with the much more novel one of distant reading. The latter is part of the emerging field of digital and computational humanities, and involves the analysis of corpora by means of digital tools, including computer programming (Python). In the article, I will attempt to combine distant and close reading and showcase how such hybrid reading approaches may provide new insights into historical corpora.

This article focuses on a curious manuscript treatise in the British Library, Harley MS 6940, which the learned physician Samuel Bispham composed for the English patron and horseman William Cavendish (1593-1676), most likely in the mid-1640s. Sitting somewhere between a practical medical recipe book and theoretical chymical treatise, while being peppered with traditional causal explanations and Galenic precautions, Harley MS 6940 testifies to the erosion of the entrenched dichotomy between chymical and Galenic medicine in the mid-seventeenth century. Harley MS 6940 also lays bare how a learned physician used (and taught the use of) practice to confirm and sometimes challenge his learning, offering a counterpoint to recent scholarship that underscores the learning that apothecaries used to shore up their practice. Produced at the behest of a leading Royalist who sought both to acquire techniques for distilling and fermenting herbs and to advance his knowledge of chymical conceptions of spirits, seeds, and salts, the manuscript allows us to appreciate that the chymical art animated a broader set of individuals than the historiography often implies.