A Machine Reasoning Algorithm for the Digital Analysis of Alchemical Language and its Decknamen .

Alchemical language has been addressed in several lexicographical studies, historically and recently. This paper discusses the current state of the field and proposes a digital distant-reading approach to the issue of decoding alchemical Decknamen . This paper presents an algorithm for the digital analysis of alchemical language using the corpus of printed works by Michael Maier (1568-1622). Alchemical language was used as a medium for negotiating authority, inclusion, and exclusion in alchemical and chymical communities and also as a tool for social and scholarly knowledge-making. This paper addresses the historical problem of understanding early modern alchemical language by computational analysis. Previous studies have applied close reading methodologies to decode Decknamen ; however, this paper offers a machine reasoning approach to analyse patterns in alchemical language.