2 -- Learning with Sennert in Wittenberg: The "Collegium Chymicum" between Aristotle, Anatomy, and Chemistry
Students learned in a group or place that Sennert called his "Collegium Chymicum". What did they do there, what did they take away?
New findings of Chemical Equipment from the 16th and early 17th century point to the existance of a large laboratory facility for alchemical experiments in Wittenberg: a former Franciscan monastery church, secularized during the Reformation. Archaeologists found recently glass pieces in this church. Putting them together they were surprised: Not medieval glass windows but chemical phioles came out as results of their work of collecting and restoring the fragments.
An exhibition in 2016/2017 of the results was at the Museum of Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Wittenberg. A richly illustrated collected volume drew together expert research, that had been first presented at an International Conference in Halle in 2015, sponsored by the Landesamtes für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt and the Institute für Kunstgeschichte und Archäologie Europas der Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg: Alchemie und Wissenschaft des 16. Jahrhunderts. Fallstudien aus Wittenberg und vergleichbare Befunde, hg. Harald Meller, Alfred Reichenberger, Christian-Heinrich Wunderlich (2016). In this volume, restaurers and chemists laid down their results that the glass could be dated to the 16th to early 17th century and that it contained traces of chemicals that were commonly used in that period for alchemical experiments.
The conference participants were also able to connect the results with practices that scholars of alchemy at the then University of Wittenberg employed, and which could have taken place at such a laboratory. Joel Klein affirmed in his research that one of the first public student laboratories in this region was Daniel Sennert's Collegium Chymicum, held in the years between 1616 and his death in 1637.
Sennert's letters to and from his brother-in-law Michael Döring in the Silesian Breslau (today: Wroclaw, Poland), printed postumously in Lyon, show very clearly how such experiments looked like, and how much Sennert was still caught in a for the time a little bit dusted world view and mind set deriving from the writing of Paracelsus, in spite of all his progressivity. Nonetheless, students were intrigued by his chemical experiments and their own assistence, and some of their disputations breathed the character of observation and experimentation.
Literature:
Joel A. Klein: "Alchemical Histories, Chymical Education, and Chymical Medicine in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Wittenberg," in: Alchemie und Wissenschaft des 16. Jahrhunderts. Fallstudien aus wittenberg und vergleichbare Befunde. Internationale Tagung vom 3. bis 4. Juli 2015 in Halle (Saale), Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle, 15, hg. Harald Meller, Alfred Reichenberger, Christian-Heinrich Wunderlich (Halle, 2016), 195-205. See also the other remarkable chapters in this volume.
Credits
@Anja