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Alchemy Under the Hood
MAY 12, 2021
WHEN THE 16TH-CENTURY alchemist Robert Greene of Welby added books to his collection, he had some signature ways of making them his own. His name appears everywhere in them: inscribed as
R. Green and
Robertus green de welbe, or even half-translated into Greek as ροβερτωσ χλωρωσ. He sometimes scraped away a former owner’s signature and superimposed his own in its place. He checked his manuscripts against more authoritative copies: where a few lines were missing from the alchemical treatise
On the Secrets of Nature, he gave them in the margin.
On the Secrets was supposed to be the work of Ramon Llull, the Catalan polymath revered in England as an alchemical luminary, so it was important that Greene’s copy recorded his instructions in full.