Liber de imaginibus

also:
De imaginibus

I. Basic information

Printing History, Manuscripts. First printed in 1572 by Pietro Perna; not reprinted before Huser. Three manuscripts.

Editions. Edited by Huser, 9 (1591): 369–393. Edited by Sudhoff in Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, I/13: 359–386.

Relationship between different versions. Only one known version.

Structure, genre/form, perspective, style. Divided into 13 chapters.

Relationship to other texts. The Liber de imaginibus mentions a book “written by myself” on the ‘Nuremberg figures’, a pictorial prophecy about the papal succession. Another text on images written by Paracelsus is the Liber de imaginibus idolatriae (ca. 1525/28). – Both in the 1572 printed edition and in all three manuscripts the Liber de imaginibus is found in close vicinity to chapters of Archidoxis magica (§ ‎5.1). In Huser’s edition the Liber de imaginibus is preceded by De occulta philosophia (§ ‎5.7), both printed from a manuscript provided by Johannes Montanus. – It has been shown that chap. 12 of the Liber de imaginibus shares the same topics and specific terminology as the authentic Vom langen Leben (which expressly refers to a treatise called De imaginibus) – not to mention another topic shared with De vita longa, IV, 3.

Authenticity, authorship. The authenticity of the Liber de imaginibus has been cast in doubt by Sudhoff (I, 13, XI). Sudhoff was followed by Telle who attributed the Liber de imaginibus to “(Ps.-) Paracelsus”. Other authors like Strebel, Peuckert or Pagel disagreed with Sudhoff and explicitly regarded the text as genuine. Gause regarded the Liber de imaginibus as authentic without giving arguments, while Möseneder speaks rather tentatively of “the presumed author Paracelsus” or a text “connected with his [i.e. Paracelsus’s] name”. The most recent study on the Liber de imaginibus by Amadeo Murase regards the Liber as authentic.

Time of writing. According to Gause, the Liber de imaginibus was written after Paracelsus’s visit to Nuremberg in 1529, while Rudolph considers the text to be not reliably datable and Holenstein dates it rather generously to the years 1520 to 1535. – If, on the other hand, the text is spurious it may have been written in the 1560s like the Archidoxis magica or De occulta philosophia.

II. Sources

Manuscripts:

• Halle, Marienbibliothek: Hs. Nr. 70 (olim Nr. 34), no foliation
• Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek: Cod. alchim. 192, f. 23r–37v
• Praha, Národní knihovna: Osek 43, f. 49v–65v

First printed:

• 1572 (in Archidoxorum […] Theophrasti Paracelsi X. Bücher (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1572); VD16 P 396; Sudhoff, Bibliographia Paracelsica, 239–241 n° 142)

Historical Manuscript Catalogues: Catalogus Osek (Prague) 2, n° 2; Catalogus (Stuttgart), I, f. 4r n° [146]; Catalogus Adelwert (Leiden), n° [112]

III. Bibliography

Essential bibliography: Sudhoff, Bibliographia Paracelsica, 239–241 n° 142; Sudhoff, Paracelsus-Handschriften, 28, 31, 142, 776; Sudhoff, “Vorwort,” in Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, I/13, I–XI; CP 1 (2001): 274; CP 3 (2013): 712, 1139

Further bibliographical references:

Josef Strebel, “Über Wesen und Zweck der sogenannten niederen Magie im Sinne von Paracelsus”, Nova Acta Paracelsica, 3 (1946), 43–48.

Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “‘Paracelsisches’ in der Kunst der Paracelsuszeit”, Nova Acta Paracelsica, 7 (1954), 132–163, on 144–145, 153.

Peuckert, Pansophie (1956), 212–213, 236, 291, 355, 468, 485.

Will-Erich Peuckert, “Paracelsische Zauberei,” Nova Acta Paracelsica, 8 (1957), 71–94, on 76, 85.

Walter Pagel, “Paracelsus and Techellus the Jew”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 34 (1960), 274–277.

Peuckert, Gabalia (1967), 81, 161–162, 330.

Walter Pagel and Marianne Winder, “Gnostisches bei Paracelsus und Konrad von Megenberg”, in Gundolf Keil et al., eds., Fachliteratur des Mittelalters. Festschrift für Gerhard Eis (Stuttgart, 1968), 359–371.

Hartmut Rudolph, “Kosmosspekulation und Trinitätslehre. Ein Beitrag zur Beziehung zwischen Weltbild und Theologie bei Paracelsus”, in Paracelsus in der Tradition. Vorträge Paracelsustag 1978 (Vienna, 1980) (Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung, 21), 32–47, on 34.

Arlene Miller Guinsburg, “Die Ideenwelt des Paracelsus und seiner Anhänger in Hinsicht auf das Thema des christlichen Magus und dessen Wirken”, in Von Paracelsus zu Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt (Vienna, 1981) (Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung, 22), 27–54, on 40–41.

Hartmut Rudolph, “Einige Gesichtspunkte zum Thema ‘Paracelsus und Luther’”, in Von Paracelsus zu Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt (Vienna, 1981) (Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung, 22), 9–26, on 12.

Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd rev. ed. (Basel, 1982), 149, 361, 367, 369.

Walter Pagel, The Smiling Spleen. Paracelsianism in Storm and Stress (Basel, 1984), 186.

Ute Gause, Paracelsus (1493–1541). Genese und Entfaltung seiner frühen Theologie (Tübingen, 1993), 145, 146, 156–158.

Gilly, Paracelsus in der BPH (1993), 39.

Gilly, “Theophrastia Sancta” (1994), 428–429.

Pia Holenstein Weidemann, “Sterne, Zeichen, Zukunft. Paracelsus’ astrologische Theorien im ‘Liber Philosophiae de arte praesaga’ und im ‘Liber de imaginibus’”, Nova Acta Paracelsica, N.F. 8 (1994), 37–55.

Thomas Hofmeier, “Paracelsus und Ägypten,” Nova Acta Paracelsica, N.F. 15 (2001), 41–54, on 49–50.

Pia Holenstein Weidemann, “Endzeitliche Vorstellungen bei Paracelsus und seinen Zeitgenossen”, Nova Acta Paracelsica, N.F. 18 (2004), 33–60, on 50–55, 59.

Karl Möseneder, Paracelsus und die Bilder. Über Glauben, Magie und Astrologie im Reformationszeitalter (Tübingen, 2009), 4–6, 71–162, 196–207.

Karl Möseneder, “Paracelsus: Über die ‘kraft und tugent’ von Bildern, schattenhafte Kunstwerke und den vollkommenen Künstler als ‘signator perfectus’”, in Paracelsus gestern und heute. Forschung – Interpretation – Vermarktung. 59. Paracelsustag 2010 (Salzburg, 2012) (Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung, 44), 33–58, on 40, 44, 46.

Pia Holenstein Weidemann, “Sprechende Steine und streitende Fische: Göttliche Botschaften als Endzeitwarnungen im 16. Jahrhundert”, Nova Acta Paracelsica, N.F. 26 (2012–2013), 69–101, on 71–72, 77, 84–85.

Telle, Alchemie und Poesie (2013), 702 n. 70.

Amadeo Murase, “The Homunculus and the Paracelsian Liber de imaginibus,” Ambix, 67 (2020), 47–61.

Didier Kahn, “La Création ex nihilo et la notion d’increatum chez Paracelse”, in Edouard Mehl and Isabelle Pantin, eds., “De mundi recentioribus phænomenis.” Cosmologie et science dans l’Europe des Temps modernes, XV^e–XVII^e siècles. Essais en l’honneur de Miguel Ángel Granada (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).