Table of Contents

Introduction, or Prima Materia
Satirizations, or Nigredo
Romanticizations, or Cauda Pavonis
Adaptations, or Albedo
Poeticizations, or Fermentatio
Spiritualizations, or Rubedo
Popularizations, or Projectio
Conclusion, or Quinta Essentia
Index

About the Author

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Theodore Ziolkowski attended school in Montevallo, Alabama, where his father was a professor of music at the college. Having attained his B.A. (1951) and M.A. (1952) at Duke University, he spent a year at the University of Innsbruck before going to Yale University for his Ph.D. in German (1957). Following assistant and associate professorships at Yale and Columbia, he moved in 1964 to Princeton, where he served as professor, chairman
of his department, and Dean of the Graduate School before his retirement in 2001. In addition to several visiting professorships, he has received numerous grants and awards in the United States and in
Germany.

Reviews

a thorough, thoughtful analysis ... [Ziolkowski's] collection of lunatics, lovers and poets drawn passionately to alchemys powerful symbolism shows that the majority pursued the topic with deadpan irony as recently as the early twenty-first century ... It is good to see an explicit effort to ask why alchemy has "a special appeal".
*Diane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement*