Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Note on this Edition

The treatise is given entire: printed pages 5–187, German verso and English recto, one 1599 page to each edition page. The German has been transcribed afresh from the 600 dpi page images of the Magdeburg copy, and not from the optical text of the digitization, which interleaves the marginal glosses into the body and is unreliable throughout. Every page was read from the image; every reading that the image will not settle is marked and recorded.

The volume was made in twenty passes of ten pages each, and then read through as a whole. That last reading was not a formality. Errors survive a page-by-page check that only a continuous one will catch, and a number did: five places where the English of one page completed a word that the next page then began again; two places where Khunrath’s distinction between the catholic and the specified had come out backwards; one verb, geseihet, rendered strained through four pages and sown through five, where the apple pips of p. 123 settle it for sowing; a Latin word at p. 134 completed with an English syllable at p. 135; and three of Khunrath’s own Latin-and-German doublets Englished twice over, so that he appeared to repeat himself in translation where in the 1599 he is glossing his own Latin. Each is corrected here, and each was the kind of fault that is invisible from inside a ten-page block.

The three pieces of apparatus — the Introduction, the Key Words, the Outline and the Glossary — were likewise rebuilt from the finished translation rather than extended from the states in which they were begun. Claims that the pages did not bear have been struck, and the two that mattered most are recorded where they stood: that the treatise contains no process, no weights and no vessel (it contains all three, and withholds only the quantities), and that Khunrath turns the word Catholisch against the Church at p. 176 (the gloss there does the opposite, and makes extra ecclesiam nulla salus the model for his own claim).

Three unnumbered pages follow p. 187, and they are now edited too. Their position is settled from the signatures rather than from the order of the images: the book is an octavo, signed on the rectos through the fourth leaf of each gathering (A iij at p. 5, A iiij at p. 7, B ij at p. 19), so the odd printed pages are rectos and p. 187 is one. Its own verso carries the errata. One further leaf follows, bearing the owl emblem on its recto and the Magdeburg colophon on its verso. That is three pages on two leaves, not three leaves, and the errata do not stand on a leaf of their own — two statements this edition made wrongly before the signatures were read.

Editing those three pages changed four things in the volume behind them. The colophon prints the printer’s name at a size and an inking the title-page does not, and settles it as Bötcher. The errata leaf carries a misprint of its own, a long s for an i in Sal Armeniaci at the p. 69 entry, which had gone unrecorded through twenty passes because the entry had always been read through the page it corrects rather than for itself. The Liß Pagina of the column-head is set with its Latin word in Fraktur, against the compositor’s practice everywhere else on the leaf. And sixteen notes in the treatise still placed the errata on the leaf following p. 187, which the signatures had already disproved; all sixteen are corrected.

The emblem is the reason to have edited these pages at all. An owl in spectacles, lit by two torches and two candles, over the words what good are torches, light or spectacles, when the people will not see — it is the argument of the treatise in one block, and it is the last thing Khunrath puts in front of the reader. A volume that stopped at p. 187 would have ended on a sentence. This one ends where he ended it.