Alchemy and Pietism

Project

The project focuses on determining the relationship between Pietist religiosity and alchemical practices as well as theoretical adoptions from speculative alchemy at the Halle Orphanage in the 18th century. A core thesis is that the pharmacy and medicine practiced there were more closely linked to medical alchemy in the early modern period than previously assumed.

The research project started in April 2023. Starting from the observation that alchemical practices of medicine production in the 18th century were a crucial basis for the work in the laboratories of the pharmacy and medicine expedition located at the Halle Orphanage, the project researcher Claudia Weiß pursues the question of which concrete alchemical knowledge practices became effective here. In doing so, she examines which basic natural philosophical assumptions from the alchemical tradition influenced the medical views of the Pietists at the Halle Orphanage.

The aim of the project is to subject the extensive pharmacy-historical source corpus in the archive and library of the Francke Foundations – in particular the numerous surviving laboratory reports and alchemical manuscripts – for the first time to an in-depth knowledge-historical analysis with regard to alchemical practice and argumentative embedding in Pietism.

On the first evening (November 13, 2024), the focus was on herbal medicine knowledge that has been gained and exchanged in different contexts in the past and present. The cooperation project “Tri-Sustain”, which researches the pharmaceutical use of African plants, was presented - it is an association of researchers from several sub-Saharan African countries and MLU Halle. This was set in relation to practices of pharmacological knowledge production in missions of the 17th/18th century.

On the second evening (April 24, 2025), current results from pharmaceutical history research on alchemical practice at Halle's orphanage, today's Francke Foundations, were presented. These were introduced by an overview of laboratory distillation techniques since antiquity. In addition, a project was presented that makes an outstanding manuscript source of alchemical knowledge digitally available to researchers and the general public for the first time.

The project-accompanying interdisciplinary and public workshop focused on medical alchemy and the early modern alchemical (knowledge) practices associated with it. The workshop aimed to facilitate a professional exchange from the perspective of the history of knowledge as well as the history of pharmacy and chemistry. The results were published in a conference report.

Claudia Weiß gave a lecture on »Theosophical-alchemical exchange of knowledge around 1700. Connections between the Halle Orphanage, Friedrich Breckling in the Netherlands and the Sulzbach Court«. This emphasised the intense interest in the connection between alchemical and cabalistic knowledge, which linked participants in the Halle Orphanage with those at the Sulzbach Court and Friedrich Breckling (1629–1711) as a pioneer of Pietism and vehement critic within the Lutheran Church. They did not limit themselves to the field of speculative alchemy, but also dealt in detail with practical laboratory work. There was an intensive exchange of letters on these topics between Breckling and several protagonists at the Halle Orphanage, in particular the Orphanage founder and director August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). This led to the reception of alchemical and cabalistic knowledge, which was based on the work of the Sulzbach circle, in particular the civil servant and polymath Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. The results of the event have been published in a conference proceedings.

Claudia Weiß's lecture at the colloquium »Neuere Forschungen zur Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und Landesgeschichte« at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg dealt with the first head of the medicine expedition and developer of the first in-house orphanage medicines, which were based on alchemical recipes. The Medication Expedition was the acquiring institution at the Halle Orphanage which was responsible for the development and production as well as the dispatch of the in-house »Waysenhaus-Arzeneyen«.