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This special issue is based on a conference sponsored by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp in October 2014, co-organised by myself, ...

A striking omission in the scholarship on the reception of the chymical philosophy of Jan Baptista van Helmont in England in the seventeenth century is the work of the mid-seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In her Philosophical Letters (1664), Cavendish offers an extended critique of Van Helmont's work (whose Ortus Medicince had recently been translated into English by John Sadler). In this paper, I compare Cavendish's criticisms with those of Robert Boyle in his Sceptical Chymist (1661). Both Boyle and Cavendish attacked Van Helmont for the obscurity of his chymical vocabulary and concepts, and attacked his seminalism. Although their critiques had much in common, they diverged in their attitudes to Van Helmont's experiments. As an opponent of the experimental philosophy, Cavendish had little interest in the quality of Van Helmont's experimental claims, whereas Boyle was critical of their unreplicability. I also try to show that the two writers had very different polemical agendas, with Boyle defending his vision of chymistry based on a corpuscularian natural philosophy, and Cavendish being as much concerned with establishing her religious orthodoxy as with defending the truth claims of her own materialist vitalism. For Cavendish, Van Helmont was an example of the dangers of mingling theology and natural philosophy.

SIRCheney Culpeper (1601-1663),1 a Kentish gentleman whose vigorous correspondence in the I640S and I650S with the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib2 is preserved in the Hartlib Papers at the University of Sheffield, was a man of wide-ranging interests. His correspondence dealt with the whole gamut of contemporary political and theological issues, as well as addressing matters of scientific and technological interest such as the draining of the fens, remedies for gall-stones, and various agricultural and military inventions. While the breadth of Culpeper's interest was not always matched by a corresponding level of expertise, his letters often provide a useful commentary on contemporary matters. In the mid-I640s, the Hartlib circle grew particularly interested in chemical knowledge. While Culpeper's contributions in this area where scarcely expert, his thoughts and opinions on chemical matters provide interesting insights into chemistry in the first half of the seventeenth-century, revealing some resistance to empirical or experimental chemical methods even in the minds of open-minded supporters of the advancement of science such as Samuel Hartlib and his associates.

(2007). Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry: Papers from Ambix. Edited by Allen G. Debus. Ambix: Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 87-88.