Over the last thirty years, alchemy’s reputation has been transformed. This has been driven by many scholars, but in particular by the research of William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe. In an important series of works, Newman and Principe have shown that although alchemy was once derided as a pseudoscience – bound up with occult mysticism and lacking any genuine conceptual or practical basis for its claims – it can now be regarded as a respectable, if not essential, part of the history of science. Newman and Principe have termed their revisionist project the “New Historiography” of alchemy. It has helped to stimulate a range of new research into the theory and practice of this art in the medieval and early modern periods, in particular a 2013 Ambix special issue specifically concerned with alchemy and religion. Explaining the rationale for the issue, Tara Nummedal, the guest editor, noted: “In the process of detaching alchemy from the ‘occult’ [...] many of us have minimised or neglected alchemy’s religious dimension.” Building upon the ideas developed within the New Historiography, the essays contained in that volume explored in detail the multiple ways in which religion and alchemy permeated one another.

中文翻译：

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中世纪晚期和现代早期欧洲的炼金术和乞丐

在过去的三十年里，炼金术的名声已经改变。这是由许多学者推动的，尤其是威廉·R·纽曼和劳伦斯·M·普林西比的研究。在一系列重要的著作中，纽曼和普林西比表明，虽然炼金术曾经被嘲笑为伪科学——与神秘主义联系在一起，其主张缺乏任何真正的概念或实践基础——但它现在可以被视为一种受人尊敬的，如果不是必不可少的，科学史的一部分。纽曼和普林西比将他们的修正主义项目称为炼金术的“新史学”。它有助于激发对中世纪和近代早期这种艺术的理论和实践的一系列新研究，特别是 2013 年特别关注炼金术和宗教的 Ambix 特刊。客座编辑 Tara Nummedal 在解释这个问题的基本原理时指出：“在将炼金术与‘神秘’分离的过程中，[...] 我们中的许多人都最小化或忽视了炼金术的宗教层面。” 在新史学中发展的思想的基础上，该卷中包含的文章详细探讨了宗教和炼金术相互渗透的多种方式。