2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
dividing the antagonists. These relations were governed in part by philosophical
commitments, but also by institutional and personal allegiances that were
played out in academic prize essays, in the periodical press and in books. The
controversy simmered for many years within the small international community
of mathematicians, flaring up occasionally into more or less vitriolic arguments
that were never resolved. It bubbled over into greater public visibility when
Emilie Du Châtelet and Voltaire entered the fray in the 1740s. By this time,
the arcana of 17th-century dynamics had become the stuff of Enlightenment
posturing. Why did Voltaire care about this question? Why did he think his
public would care? And why were others, arguably more mathematically astute,
focusing on other physical laws and concepts altogether? Inspired by these
questions, the paper investigates the interests and motivations at play at several
key moments in the complex history of this dispute.
Hereward␣ Edmund Tilton University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
168
Count Michael Maier and the ‘Imposture’ of Rosicrucianism:
Defending Alchemy in a Virtual Arena
The anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos that appeared in the midst of Counter-
Reformation Germany gave expression to a Paracelsian-inspired Hermeticism
and a heterodox Lutheranism with strong millennialist overtones; they
purported to stem from an order of pious scientist-monks, the ‘Brethren of the
Rosy Cross,’ who were acting as the harbinger of an age in which the prisca
sapientia would be restored. On account of his leading role as apologist for
this ‘Fraternity’, Count Michael Maier came to be known as a man who not
only squandered his talents on the impossible claims of alchemy, but who was
also duped by the Rosicrucian ‘imposture,’ as Newton would put it when
reviewing Maier’s Rosicrucian writings. Over the centuries, a plethora of
traditions have grown up amongst those who have devoted their time to
uncovering a true secret society lying behind the manifestos. As I shall
demonstrate in the course of the proposed paper, the ‘Rosicrucian fraternity’
existed in a very real and important sense, albeit a virtual one. For the manifestos
gave rise to a flood of publications that constituted, in effect, a virtual arena
for the definition and defence of Protestant Hermeticism in the years preceding
the Thirty Years War—an arena which Maier utilised to justify his own non-
Paracelsian brand of alchemy. Such was Maier’s success in exploiting the
Rosicrucian phenomenon as a vehicle for his own ideas that he came to be
known by the Jesuit detractors of Rosicrucianism as the ‘secretary’ of the
‘Fraternity.’ Whilst discussing the nature of the alchemy Maier promoted in
this fashion, it will be seen that the relation of his ideology to his laboratory
practice—no less than his role in the history of Western esotericism—presents
difficulties for the historiography and nomenclature recently proposed by
Principe and Newman.