:: ATALANTA · PRAEFATIO ::
Atalanta Fugiens
Michael Maier · Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica · Oppenheim, 1617
Imagine a book you do not only read but perform. A physician at the court of Rudolf II decided that an alchemical secret should reach you through three doors at once: an engraving for the eye, a Latin epigram for the mind, and a little fugue for three voices that you and two friends are meant to sing aloud. Atalanta, the swift huntress, runs ahead; a suitor casts down golden apples to slow her; and the music chases her the same way the adept chases his quarry. One voice flees, one pursues, one holds steady between them. It is a small machine, really, three voices and a footrace and a metal that wants to be gold. But ask yourself what it would take to say one idea three ways and have all three land: that is the trick the whole book is built to pull. Fifty times over, Michael Maier asks you to look, to read, and to sing the same idea, trusting that what slips past one sense will be caught by another. This is that book, opened.
Before the book is opened, let the terms be plain.
This room keeps no till. I will never sell this edition, never gate it, never wrap it in advertisement. I set it down for one reason: the dissemination of knowledge, and the plain love of the game.
Michael Maier died in 1622; his fleeing Atalanta has belonged to all of us for four centuries. The fifty plates you are about to read were engraved after Maier’s designs by Matthäus Merian the Elder for the Oppenheim editions of 1617–1618, a work so far out of copyright that the word scarcely applies. The Latin epigrams here are corrected against the page; the epigrams have a modern English translation, while the discourses reproduce the historical English translation published in Furnace and Fugue, with its wording unchanged and its own credits and licence. My original translations and reading interface remain under CC0 1.0; the separately credited discourses retain CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Provenance & Thanks
- The work
- Michael Maier (1568–1622), Atalanta Fugiens, hoc est, Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica: fifty emblems, each uniting an allegorical engraving, a Latin epigram, a three-voice fugue, and an extended prose Discourse. Public domain by some four hundred years.
- The printing
- Oppenheim: printed by Hieronymus Galler at the expense of Johann Theodor de Bry, 1617. The plates were engraved by Matthäus Merian the Elder after Maier’s designs.
- The digitisation
- The plates and Latin epigrams were read from a supplied e-text reproducing the 1618 title page. Its earlier English layer credited Clay Holden, Hereward Tilton and Peter Branwin for Sloane MS 3645, hosted by Adam McLean, with three motto translations from H. M. de Jong. Those discourses have been replaced here by the explicitly licensed witness below; the historical English epigram stanzas are omitted and the three affected motto captions are freshly translated from Latin.
- This edition
- Corrected Latin epigrams, my English epigram translations, commentary and reading interface remain offered under CC0 1.0. The fifty complete English discourses are separate, unchanged extracts from Furnace and Fugue, edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak (University of Virginia Press, 2020), © Brown University. Transcription and encoding: Elli Mylonas, Scott DiGiulio and George Elliott, from the anonymous seventeenth-century translation in Yale’s Beinecke Library, Mellon MS 48. They retain CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; the publisher’s normalized reading is displayed. Each discourse links to its source. No endorsement is implied. The musical fugues remain available in the source publication.
To the librarians, scanner-operators, and archivists whose patient, unglamorous work makes a 1617 emblem book openable on a screen in the present — this edition bows. You are the reason any of this is possible. Thank you.