In particular, the recurrence of antimony in the laboratory activities investigated here reveals hidden connections and significant material overlaps between different spheres of early modern knowledge, from alchemy to metallurgy, iatrochemistry, medical practices, and Paracelsian thought. Based on this interdisciplinary methodology, we argue that alchemists’ material practices were strongly linked to early modern understandings of bodily matter and the material transformation of bodies. This article combines the scientific analysis of laboratory remains employed during sixteenth-century alchemical experiments and recovered through archaeological excavations with in-depth archival research to recover novel insights into the embodied nature of the material culture of early modern science. As an epistemic space for the transformation of matter, the laboratory was “the locus of practice,” Pamela Smith states, “where the underground workshop of nature was imitated by ars to produce knowledge about nature.” 1 This article explores the material epistemology of the sixteenth-century alchemical laboratory, and the materiality of early modern science more generally, by opening a conversation between archaeological sciences and the history of science, the body, and medicine. In early modern alchemical laboratories, materials, bodies, and ideas merged into complex knowledge moulding the very modalities of Renaissance material thinking and doing.

In methodological terms, this article shifts boundaries between historians, archaeologists, and materials scientists. Based on this methodology, we argue that the alchemist’s material practices were strongly linked to early modern Paracelsian thought and medical understandings of the body. This article combines the scientific analysis of luted glass remains from the sixteenth century Oberstockstall alchemical laboratory in Kirchberg am Wagram, Lower Austria, with the in-depth study of recipe collections, alchemical, botanical, medical, and metallurgical treatises, and visual sources. In an age that valued embodied epistemologies, we argue, medicine mattered for cultures of making and affected alchemists’ material practices. We explore the material epistemology of the alchemical laboratory by opening a conversation between archaeological sciences and the history of the body, medicine, and science. This article is the first interdisciplinary study of excavated early modern lute, a paste that alchemists wrapped around vessels, contextualising its relevance for the history of science.

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