A New Light of Alchemy

Source and Editorial Credits

The historical texts are credited to Michael Sendivogius, with Johann Heinrich Alsted identified as the author of the 1611 commendatory epigram. The 1607 friend’s address remains anonymous. John French is credited separately for the 1650 English address. Printer’s devices, ornaments, library marks, flyleaves and blank versos are not reproduced as textual chapters. The wording of mottos associated with the selected titles is translated where included in those source records.

Digitised witnesses were supplied by the Herzog August Bibliothek, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the British Library and Austrian National Library copies available through Google Books, the Rome digitisation, and the Getty Research Institute copy available through Internet Archive. Project Gutenberg and the EMLAP corpus are acknowledged as transcription and research aids in the bibliography. The historical source pages were checked independently of those aids wherever they govern the reading text.

The Latin and English passages have been accounted for through source inventories and aligned reading records. Notes disclose consequential textual difficulties rather than hiding them in a modern paraphrase. The new translation and supporting material were prepared with AI assistance for Diotimos Editions. Editorial interpretations belong to this edition, and do not carry the authority of an additional historical witness.

The edition brings the early Sendivogian corpus together for reading and study. Its witness selection and normalisation are stated in the note on the text. It makes no claim to be a facsimile, an exhaustive critical apparatus to every printing, or an unmediated transcript of the 1604 first publication.