A recipe of quintessence: Distilling wine and bread in late medieval alchemy

Abstract As a well-established practice, alcohol distillation represented a major technical development in the late Middle Ages. This analysis aims to interpret the alchemical instructions attributed to a certain Johannes Ungariae probably in the early fourteenth century, whose recipe circulated as far as Rome in the early modern period, attracting the interest of both a sixteenth- and an eighteenth-century collector. The manuscript with the incipit ‘Sic extrahendum quintam essentiam vini’ (Fol. 217, Sloan MS 3661.) has survived under the name of ‘John of Hungary’ as an alchemical recipe written in Latin, probably in 1322, as Ernő Simonyi has noted. In a comprehensive and coherent description of the underlying technology, Johannes Ungariae details the process of extracting the ‘quinta essentia’ of wine, a method conceived to operate at the boundary between spirit and matter. John Elyott's copy preserved in the Sloane Collection stands as a rare example of the tradition of alchymia operativa, the applied, hands-on alchemy, first brought to light by Simonyi in political exile in London in 1859. Studying the manuscript is the initial stage of a broader project that aims to contribute to our understanding of the networks of knowledge transmission.