Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Editorial Note

The 1599 German stands on the left-hand (verso) page and the English translation on the facing right-hand (recto) page, each pair carrying the page number of the 1599 printing in the running head. The 1599 Magdeburg printing is the principal witness; Khunrath’s own errata, printed on the unnumbered verso of the leaf whose recto is p. 187, are incorporated into the established text and each such correction is recorded in the apparatus.

Two kinds of superscript appear on the German pages and must not be confused. A superscript letter is Khunrath’s own key, printed in the 1599 and tying one of his marginal glosses to a point in the text; it is reproduced where he set it, and carries the same letter on the facing page. A superscript dagger (†, ‡, and, where a page needs more, § and ¶) is the editor’s, and marks a place where the 1599 prints something that is not a word, or where one of Khunrath’s errata has been incorporated; the note under the English says which.

The German text is given diplomatically. The virgule (/) is kept where the 1599 sets it, as are u/v and lowercase i/j (jhr, jrret). In Fraktur the majuscule I and J are a single sort, so capitals cannot be distinguished by eye and are transcribed by sense: EIN, DING, VORARBEIT. Also kept are the capitalization, the macron for a suppressed nasal (allē for allem), and the original word-division across pages, including the broken words at the foot of each page. The long s is normalized to round s, and the r-rotunda the 1599 uses for et cetera is printed as rc.; nothing else is silently altered. The 1599 sets German in Fraktur and Latin — together with certain emphasized terms — in Antiqua. That distinction carries information, and it is preserved here by setting in italic everything the 1599 sets in Antiqua, and upright everything it sets in Fraktur. Where a word appears in capitals, the capitals are Khunrath’s.

The marginal glosses printed in the 1599 are reproduced in the margin of the German page, at the line where the original places them, and each is translated in the apparatus beneath the English. Khunrath’s own keyed notes (marked ^a in the text) are kept where he set the key.

The translation renders Khunrath directly. First and second person, rhetorical questions, repetitions, and his habit of restating a Latin clause in German are preserved rather than smoothed, and no editorial narrator is introduced. Technical and deliberately ambiguous vocabulary — Magnesia, Materia Catholica, Subiectum, Spiritus, Mercurius, Universal-Stein, Erst-Materialisch, Acker, Chaos — is translated conservatively or retained and discussed in the notes, never resolved into a single modern chemical sense. Where the German will bear more than one construction, the English is built to bear both and the readings are recorded; where it will not, the note says so. Latin that Khunrath inflects to his German syntax is re-cased to the English syntax where it is quoted in the translation (subiecto debito becomes subiectum debitum, Codice Codex), while the German page keeps his case exactly. Alchymia and its family are rendered as alchemy and alchemical; Naturgemeß as Nature-conforming; historical Theosophia as divine wisdom, with a note distinguishing it from the later Theosophical movement.

The three closing pages — the errata, the owl emblem and the Magdeburg colophon — are set in the same facing arrangement as the treatise. The 1599 gives them no page numbers and this edition invents none, so their running heads carry a word (Errata, Emblem, Colophon) where the other spreads carry a number. Where those pages hold a woodcut, which cannot be reproduced in type, a description of the block stands in its place, set in small italic between rules; that block of description is the editor’s and is the one thing on any page of the original column that Khunrath did not write. On the errata leaf the readings themselves are left in his German and Latin, being the words to be set right and not a text to be turned into English; only the directing words — für, in marg., lin., linea vltima, Ibidem — are rendered.

Square brackets mark nothing supplied by the translator in the text itself; supplied matter and departures from the 1599 are confined to the footnotes, so that the English page can be read continuously.

The Treatise

The 1599 German and the English translation stood on facing pages in the printed volume, verso and recto. A flowing file has no facing pages, so each page of the 1599 is given here as a unit of its own, headed by its printed page number: the German first, indented, with Khunrath’s marginal glosses as notes upon it where he set them; then the English translation, with the apparatus note for that page. Nothing is omitted, and the page numbers are those of the Magdeburg printing, so that any reference to the edition holds across all four formats.