Johannes Nicolaus Furichius

Johannes Nicolaus Furichius (* 1602 in Strasbourg ; † October 14, 1633 there ) was a neo-Latin poet, doctor and alchemist.

Life

Furichius was the son of Huguenots , who probably fled France because of religious persecution, and learned German at the Protestant grammar school (academy) in Strasbourg. There he made friends with Johann Michael Moscherosch and, like him, pursued poetic inclinations. In 1622 he acquired his Magister artium and the Poeta Laureatus in Strasbourg and began studying medicine in Strasbourg in 1623. Around this time two volumes of his poetry appeared in print. In 1625 he traveled via Switzerland (including Geneva ) to Italy and studied medicine in Padua . It was here that his alchemical poem Aurea Catena was created based on the model of corresponding poems by Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (Chrysopeia, Venice 1515), which depicted alchemy in mythological allegories. At the beginning of 1628 he was back in Strasbourg, where he received his doctorate in medicine that same year and married the daughter of the Strasbourg master goldsmith Josias Barbette, with whom he had five children. He was a resident doctor in Strasbourg. Since his trip abroad he has dealt with iatrochemistry after the school of Paracelsus and had contacts with Rosicrucian circles such as Joachim Morsius from Hamburg . He visited him in Strasbourg at the end of 1631 and encouraged him to write another extensive alchemical poem as a continuation and revision of his Aurea Catena. It appeared in 1631 as Chryseidos Libri IIII with Furichius' own commentary. A little later he died in a plague epidemic in Strasbourg.

Chryseis

His alchemical poem Chryseis has, in addition to the influence of Augurelli and ancient natural history didactic poems ( Marcus Manilius , Lucretius , Virgil , Claudian ), ancient doctors and philosophers, more recent poets ( Pierre de Ronsard , Ariost ), Florentine Neoplatonists, commentaries by humanists, such as the two Scaliger ( Julius Caesar Scaliger , Joseph Justus Scaliger ), contemporary pharmaceutical literature ( Prospero Alpino ), the Corpus Hermeticum ( Hermes Trismegistos ), Paracelsist and alchemical literature (such as Michael Sendivogius , George Ripley , the Hermetis Trismegisti Tractatus vere aureus de lapidis secreti , Leipzig 1610). It consists of four books with 1600 Latin hexameters and is dedicated to Joachim Morsius. The first-person narrator travels to the Libyan desert to the sanctuary of Chryseis ( Proserpine , based on Claudian as a model) and meets there a speaking raven and a wise old hermit. Dreams and their interpretation are also built in.

Fonts

• Libelli Carminum Tres, Strasbourg 1622
• Poemata Miscellanea. Lyrica, Epigrammata, Satyrae, Eclogae, Alia, Strasbourg 1624 (dedicated to Moscherosch)
• Aurea Catena siue Hermes poeticus de Lapide Philosophorum, Padua 1627
• Chryseidos Libri IIII, Strasbourg 1631
• Disceptatio et Phrenitide, Strasbourg 1628

literature

• Wilhelm Kühlmann : Alchemy and late humanistic form culture, The Strasbourg poet Johann Nicolaus Furichius (1602-1633), a friend of Moscherosch, in: Daphnis, Volume 13, 1984, pp. 101-135
• Thomas Reiser: Furichius, Johannes Nicolaus, in: Walter Killy (Hrsg.), Literaturlexikon, De Gruyter
• Thomas Reiser: Mythology and Alchemy in the Teaching Repik of the Early 17th Century, The Chryseidos libri IIII of the Strasbourg poet Johannes Nicolaus Furichius (1602–1633), De Gruyter 2011 (new edition of Chryseidos Libri IIII).
• Didier Kahn : Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Preliminary Survey and Synthesis, Part 1,2, Ambix, Volume 57/3, 2010, pp. 249-274, Volume 58/1, 2011, pp. 62-77 (on the environment, Furichius is only mentioned briefly)
• Jacques Héran (Ed.): Histoire de la Médicine á Strasbourg, Strasbourg 1997

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The book also served as a suggestion for Michael Maier , Atlanta fuguens, 1617/18