Magnets, hydraulics, alcohol, perpetual motion machines: a beautiful, unrecorded 14th century scientific manuscript

Peregrinus, Petrus (Pierre de Maricourt). Tractatus de magnete. [In a compendium of scientific texts, together with works by Arnaldus de Villanova, Philo of Byzantium, Johannes de Rupescissa, and Theodoric Borgognoni].

Auf Anfrage

A truly outstanding late medieval manuscript comprising six self-contained works on chemistry, medicine, mechanics, engineering, and applied physics, including "one of the most impressive scientific treatises of the Middle Ages" (DSB X, 537): Peregrinus's "Tractatus de magnete", "the first extant treatise on the properties and applications of magnets" (532), which is "considered the earliest known European work of experimental science, and the foundation of the study of electricity and magnetism" (Norman).

Written in 1269, "De magnete" is known in no more than 31 manuscripts, not all of which are illustrated, and only one out of roughly three predates the year 1400. Of the remainder, all 16th- and 17th-century manuscript copies listed by Schlund and Thompson (see below) follow the first printed edition, published in 1558 by the Lindau physician Achilles Gasser, famous for contributing the preface to Rheticus's "Narratio Prima", the first published account of heliocentrism. The manuscript Gasser used for the editio princeps is now lost, as are four others listed by Schlund and Thompson.

The present manuscript is not listed in any census and was previously entirely unknown. The full text of the famous "Tractatus de magnete", as present here (ff. 69r-77v), describes a floating compass and contains the earliest description of the pivoted compass, both illustrated with a half-page drawing at the bottom of fol. 76r and a schematic illustration on fol. 74v. A marginal illustration in chapter X (fol. 74r in our manuscript), discussing the nature of magnetism in relation to the Earth's poles (called "polus" for the first time by Peregrinus), is of particular interest: not part of the four canonical illustrations discussed by Thompson (and pictured in Gasser's edition), the diagram can be interpreted as a representation of the Earth's magnetic fields, a concept Peregrinus denies on the very same page ("licet ferrum ad polos mundi moveatur, hoc tamen non est, nisi quia minera lapidis in illis partibus situatur", quoted in Hellmann 1898, p. 35). The manuscript ends with the full-page drawing of a perpetuum mobile which Peregrinus invented, described by the DSB as a "continually moving toothed wheel powered by an oval magnet. The latter is so positioned that each tooth of the wheel will, in turn, be attracted to the north pole of the magnet. Under the influence of the attraction, the tooth acquires sufficient momentum to move beyond the north pole and into the vicinity of the south pole, by which it is repelled toward the north pole. As each tooth is alternately attracted and repelled, the wheel maintains a perpetual motion … Although Peregrinus did not claim to have constructed such a perpetual motion machine, there is the hint that an abortive attempt was made, for he stated that failure of the sphere to perform as described could only be attributed to lack of skill in the contriver rather than deficiency in the theory, which he judged wholly sound. Peregrinus thus insulated his theory from the practical consequences that he himself deduced from it. Both Gilbert, who referred to this passage and mentioned Peregrinus by name, and Galileo rejected such claims" (536).

Even rarer in the Western manuscript tradition is Philo's "Pneumatica", which, until the discovery of the Arabic text in the early 20th century, was "known only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version of the first sixteen chapters" (DSB X, 587). As an unrecorded source for this Latin tradition of the lost Greek original, our manuscript is of particular importance. In principio lists only two manuscripts (in Oxford and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) that contain Philo's "De ingeniis aquae", as it is present here (ff. 78r-86v), while the Schoenberg database contains records only for his works on fortification and the construction of catapults. "De ductu aquarum sive de ingeniis spiritualibus", as the present work is also referred to, "begins with a series of introductory chapters that incorporate a number of experiments" and continues to describe "pneumatic toys - trick jars, inexhaustible bowls, and other apparatus for parlor magic … All the chapters are illustrated in the extant Arabic manuscripts, but the illustrations have never been published" (588). In our manuscript, Philo's text is accompanied by no fewer than 13 mostly half-page miniatures that meticulously label and explain various machines and mechanical experiments. These illustrations are another hitherto unknown witness to the author's "thoroughness and attention to detail," which are "evident in every part" of what remains today from the Greek engineer's large book on mechanics (589).

Rupescissa's seminal treatise on distillation, which forms the first work in our codex ("De consideratione quintae essentiae", ff. 1-52r), was written around 1360 and counts as one of the most important early texts in European chemistry. The author's experiments in distillation led to the discovery of what he termed "quinta essentia", which he praised as a universal cure for all diseases. The work is divided into two books, the second of which comprises twenty numbered remedies.

Following this, "De aqua vitae simplici et composita" (fol. 52r-69v) examines the distillation and medical applications of alcohol. It is traditionally attributed to Arnaldus de Villanova (1240-1311), who is recognized to this day as the "greatest scientist and physician of his time" (Daly, 29f.) and is renowned for his translations of Avicenna and Rhazes. It is this particular work for which he was credited as the discoverer of pure alcohol.

The third work to link alchemy and the science of chemistry with their practical applications is a very rare text by the surgeon Theodoric Borgognoni (ff. 90v-92v), also titled "De aqua vitae". A physician to the pope from 1240 and a practicing surgeon until the last decade of the 13th century, Borgognoni is regarded as one of the most significant medical practitioners of the Middle Ages. He introduced and promoted important medical advances, including the use of anesthetics and basic antiseptic practices in surgery. Emphasizing the importance of personal experience and observation over blind reliance on ancient sources, he advocated replacing the traditional practice of encouraging pus formation in wounds (an approach inherited from Galen and Arabic medicine) with an antiseptic method.

A short collection of medical recipes titled "Medicina Gloriosa" (ff. 93r-95v) directly follows Borgognoni's text and is recorded with the same incipit in at least one other, slightly later manuscript in the Frankfurt University Library (Lat. Oct. 231) which has been identified as the working manuscript of a Spanish alchemist (cf. K. Bredehorn & G. Powitz, Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Gruppe Manuscripta latina [1979], pp. 168-172).

Borgognoni's treatise is preceded by a short anonymous manual on surgical procedures (ff. 87r-90v), beginning with instructions on how to treat a tibial fracture. This text is known in only one other manuscript (Wellcome Ms. 531, Sect. 6, ff. 2r-39r), which appears to have been copied directly from our codex (with Rupescissa's "Quintae Essentiae" preserved only as a fragment of the last two leaves). The Wellcome Ms. was formerly part of the collection of the Revd. Walter Sneyd and was sold by Maggs in November 1905. It not only closely follows the arrangement of the first five works in our codex, but also reproduces all of the illustrations contained therein. Written on paper in a more hurried and less refined humanist hand, the Wellcome Ms. was evidently produced at least half a century later than ours (as confirmed by an entry in Sect. 1, fol. 58r, and SDBM 33291). While the number of illustrations in Philo's engineering manual and Peregrinus's "De Magnete" is identical in both manuscripts and their placement and composition are consistent with our codex, those in the Wellcome Ms. are easily recognizable as direct copies of clearly inferior quality.

An extraordinary discovery and arguably one of the most important scientific manuscripts to have come to the market in recent decades.