A scholarly consensus has long held that in redefining alchemy, Paracelsus rejected metallic transmutation. I show here, however, that for most of his career Paracelsus believed that it was possible to change one metal into another, and even late in his short life he did not break with that view. Furthermore, in certain places in his works he also represented himself, occasionally directly and more often obliquely, as a practical transmutationist. Because Paracelsus not only acknowledged that metallic transmutations were theoretically possible but also claimed to have carried them out in practice, we must regard him as (among other things) a transmutational alchemist. As such, he had more in common than historians have generally admitted with both his medieval predecessors and his posthumous followers. The Paracelsian alchemists of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not wrong to situate Paracelsus within the alchemical tradition, nor to connect their own goldmaking interests to his.

中文翻译：

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变形炼金术士帕拉塞尔苏斯

长期以来，学术界一致认为，在重新定义炼金术时，帕拉塞尔苏斯拒绝了金属嬗变。然而，我在这里展示的是，在他职业生涯的大部分时间里，帕拉塞尔苏斯相信可以将一种金属变成另一种金属，即使在他短暂的生命后期，他也没有打破这种观点。此外，在他作品的某些地方，他也将自己描绘成一个实际的嬗变主义者，有时是直接的，更多的时候是间接的。因为帕拉塞尔苏斯不仅承认金属嬗变在理论上是可能的，而且还声称在实践中实现了它们，我们必须将他视为（除其他外）嬗变炼金术士。因此，他与中世纪的前辈和死后的追随者之间的共同点比历史学家普遍承认的要多。