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Chosen by:
Associate Professor Wallace Kirsop,
Monash Centre for the Book
De la Transformation Metallique [18th century French manuscript volume]
The Monash Rare Books Collection is strong in its holdings of occult literature.
The manuscript De la Transformation métallique -- acquired in the 1960s to support the research of a staff member interested in the transmission and distribution of alchemical texts -- is a relatively rare example in Australia of the survival of scribal culture in Europe well beyond the Renaissance period. Written in the eighteenth century this collection of alchemical poems was first printed in Paris in 1561, then republished in French in Lyons in 1590 and 1618, as well as appearing in German translation in Halle in 1612. The authors or pseudo-authors represented, Jean Perréal, Nicolas Flamel and Jean de La Fontaine (not the fabulist), were classics, a fact that explains why, more than one hundred years later, a zealous reader should have taken the trouble to transcribe works that were undoubtedly not to be discovered in the trade. The new document was itself the basis for further developments in the form of added recipes. In this way one sees some of the complexities of the transmission and recording of information in an Age of Enlightenment that had recourse to all the media -- oral, scribal and printed -- then available to hearers, readers and writers.
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