"Learn to Restrain Your Mouth": Alchemical Rumours and their Historiographical Afterlives

Abstract From around 1700 onwards, a number of sensationalist claims regarding adepts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to appear in alchemical literature. They eventually made their way into standard works of historiography and continue to be repeated as factual. Yet the source for these rumours, a poem attributed to Martinus de Delle, supposedly a chamberlain of Emperor Rudolf II, has largely escaped scrutiny. The only surviving manuscript version currently known is here edited and translated in full for the first time. In the introductory essay, we call into question the existence of De Delle. Through scrutiny of the portrayals of alchemists within the poem, we propose that the author may have been an assayer in Prague. We then draw attention to the roles and effects of rumours within both the history and historiography of alchemy and argue for the importance of taking alchemical gossip seriously.