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PEREIRA, M., L'oro dei Filosofi. Saggio sulle idee di un alchimista del Trecento. Centro Italiano di Studi sull'alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 1992. VI,265p. Paperback. Cover a bit bumped. Stamp on half title. ‘The fourteenth-century alchemist of Pereira’s subtitle is the unidentified author of the ‘Testamentum’ that has been falsely ascribed to Raymond Lull but that, according to its own colophon, was composed in London at the Church of Saint Catherine in 1332 and dedicated to Edward III. The Testamentum has long been recognised as the basic document of the huge corpus of Lullian alchemy which Pereira catalogued and began to analyse in ‘The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raimond Lull of 1989. (…) Pereira’s goal in this book is to situate the ‘Testamentum’ in the history of alchemy and in the history of philosophy. (….) She concentrates (…) on the theory of alchemy. (…) It turns out that the Hermetic goal of the ‘Testamentum’ is far more ambitious than most of those modern theorists have imagined. In the second chapter Pereira takes us the theme of the acceptance of at least some forms of alchemy as a part of ‘sciential experimentalist’, and thence of philosophy. (…) The second part of the book (…) describes the theory expounded in the ‘Testamentum’. (…) Pereira’s work (…) is a most useful contribution to our understanding of the complex phenomenon of Western alchemy.’ (DVID PINGREE in speculum, 1995, pp.413-414). € 40.00 (Antiquarian)