the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

Aristotle would have been glad to have been his disciples (“immo vero uterque (si
tempora dedissent) se etiam beatum putasset eius nominari discipulum”). 516
While Lefèvre d’Étaples was not so bold as to fully merge Christian and pre-
Christian wisdom as Ficino had done, another of Dionysius’ readers, Oswaldus Crollius
(1560-1608), had no such anxiety about his syncretistic views, stitching Christianity,
Hermeticism, neo-Platonism, Paracelcianism, Kabbalah, alchemy and chemistry into an
eclectic and expansive philosophical quilt. 517 Most importantly for this study, however, is
the fact that Crollius was also a reader of Weigel, whom he cites alongside Dionysius in
the preface to his major work, the Basilica Chymica (1609). 518
By contrast to Weigel who, as far as is known, never travelled more than a
hundred miles from his birthplace, Crollius travelled widely through Europe, first as a
student in Marburg, Heidelberg, Strasbourg and Geneva, then as a private tutor, finally
setting off on his own through Moravia and Bohemia before settling in Prague for the rest
of his life. 519 Born in Lutheran Hessen, he embraced Calvinism in the course of his
travels, but, like Weigel, was an eclectic thinker whose wide-ranging reading interests
516 Rice, 63.
517 The most accessible work on Crollius is Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic
Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). See also Oswaldus Crollius,
De signaturis internis rerum: Die lateinische Editio princeps (1609) und die deutsche Erstübersetzung
(1623), ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996); Oswaldus
Crollius, Alchemomedizinische Briefe 1585-1597, ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998).
518 Croll’s knowledge of Weigel provides an interesting glimpse into the circulation of Weigel’s
manuscripts before they were printed. The first text of Weigel’s was only printed in 1609, the same year
that Croll’s Basilica Chymica went to press, meaning that Croll could only have known about Weigel via
manuscripts. Hannaway, 10-11.
519 By the end of the 16 th century, the Emperor Rudolf II had gathered at his court a “distinguished circle of
‘occult’ physicians and philosophers” (2), of which Croll was on the fringes. He did not, in fact, work for
the (Catholic) Emperor but served as the personal physician to the (Calvinist) Prince Christian I of Anhalt-
Bernburg (the dedicatee of the Basilica) who used him for “delicate diplomatic negotiations in and around
the imperial city in furtherance of his project for an Evangelical Union of Protestant Princes” (2).
Hannaway, 2; Crollius, 7.
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