A lot of sources to mention here! My most important recent read feeding into "The Alchemist" was John Fleming's kaleidoscopic Dark Side of the Enlightenment. And of course magician Ricky Jay's marvelous new book from earlier this year, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living.
As the existence of the second book implies, Buchinger is a real person, and my use of him fits within the limits of what we know about his career. On the other hand, my protagonist Hartwig is very much made-up... though his former patrons are not. Maximillian II Emanuel and his wife Theresa Kunegunda Sobieska are real people - Electors of Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, who resided in Nuremberg, and were caught up in the now-well-forgotten War of Spanish Succession. I have, I admit it freely, libeled these people 300 years after the fact by inventing an affair between Therea and her astrologer. I officially apologize. There is no evidence for this. There's no evidence she even had an astrologer!, but that part's not too far-fetched.
...A little more distantly influencing the story, a favorite book of mine is Rupert Hall's From Galileo to Newton, which I read ages ago and like to leaf through again from time to time. Also, in the last year, a great book has come out touching on the interplay between truth, falsity, empiricism, and mysticism that were all warring for intellectual preeminence in Europe in the 16- and 1700s: this is John Glassie's Man of Misconceptions, about the seemingly-half-mad Jesuit polymath Athanaeus Kircher. (I only found space to name-check Kircher in passing in this story. But if you're ever in Los Angeles, make a point of seeing the exhibit about him at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Fascinating stuff, and also... sort of... funny?)
In its best form, "The Alchemist" would make up a little meditation on how close mystical and superstitious thinking can be to any more refined concept of scientific method. Newton was an alchemist himself, Leibniz rubbed elbows with the practice (and with everything else under the sun). Kepler was as mystic as they come.* I am not suggesting anything woo-woo, just that to get science right is hard. And it seems to require sliding through error and weird thinking on the way.
In 15 quick minutes here, I only wander into the neighborhood of that theme, the thing which at bottom was really on my mind. So maybe someday I can extend and expand on what I have. But it does me good to have pinned this much down! A draft of a chapter to serve as down-payment toward a novel. That's what we have.
* Obscure Note: In the story I refer to calculus as the original invention of an Otto von Hohensteigen, independently rediscovered by Leibniz, plagiarized by Newton - and that the whole thing's a kind of kabbalistic mathematics. This is a deliberate muddle on at least three levels. One: Hohensteigen is a person I invented in an unreleased story, which no one has read, so that is really obscure. But, fun for me to slip in. Two: Newton has priority over Leibniz for nailing down calculus, but I am picturing my characters as partisans for their fellow-German. And needless to say, Three: calculus has nothing to do with the kabbala. But my guys are speaking of its strange symbols and surprising results in the terms that make the most sense to them.
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