Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

vii. On reading this edition

The German is transcribed diplomatically from the page images of the Magdeburg printing, and the conventions are set out in the Editorial Note. Khunrath’s own printed marginal glosses stand in the margin of the German page, at the lines where he set them; each is translated in the apparatus under the English. Where the 1599 prints something that is not a word, this edition prints it and says so rather than mending it quietly: something under two hundred places across the treatise carry an editorial mark of some kind, from a wrong sort to a word that will not construe, and the reader can see exactly where the text is insecure. Khunrath’s own twenty errata are printed entire at the end, with the state of this copy and the disposition adopted beside each.

The apparatus is an aid, not an argument. It translates the glosses, identifies quotations, and annotates loaded names where the surface reading would otherwise lose the meaning. It does not decode. Where the German bears two constructions the English is built to bear both and the note says so; where a term is loaded — Magnesia, Chaos, Azoth, Fimus Philosophorum — it is retained and glossed, never resolved into a modern chemical sense. A reader who wants the book to tell him what to put in a flask will not be satisfied; and the demands Khunrath spends the book answering are exactly that demand, quoted back at him by name. Hat doch Doctor Khunrath noch nichts gewisses in der Kunst (p. 130); Ich hette mein Schreiben von MAGNESIA einstellen sollen (pp. 161–162); Solte D. Khunrath mich erst lehren was MAGNESIA Philosophorum sey? (p. 180).