From Alchemist to Witch: Anna Zieglerin's Dissolving Archive | Tara Nummedal

This talk uses the story of a sixteenth-century German alchemist named Anna Zieglerin to disentangle discourses around the alchemist, the sorceress, and the witch in early modern Europe. In her 1574-5 trial, Zieglerin was accused of false alchemy and sorcery, but not witchcraft, suggesting that these practices occupied overlapping but surprisingly distinct legal, intellectual, and religious spaces in early modern Germany. The subsequent archiving of Zieglerin’s life and work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, demonstrates how these earlier distinctions disappeared, forming instead an irrational and marginalized twin to the modern Western subject.

Tara Nummedal is professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany and Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Most recently, with Donna Bilak she co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, an open-access digital publication of a musical alchemical emblem book.

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