Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Why It Matters for the Hypnerotomachia

The HP's gatherings are regular quaternions throughout most of the book, with the final gathering G being shorter. This regularity is essential for the deterministic signature map that enables folio-level concordance between Russell's references and manuscript photographs.

Why It Matters in Scholarship

The gathering structure of the 1499 HP follows the standard collation formula a-z8 A-F8 G6 (omitting j, u, w). Bibliographers use this formula to detect missing or inserted leaves and to identify variant copies.

Key Passages / Evidence

• <!-- Page 7 --> to think.”48 As Augustine says in his Confessions, he did not store his ideas and concepts in his mind as single entities because these resulted “from the action of cogitation, from... [Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Fabiani_Giannetto_Raffaella_Not_before_eithe]
• ... Lascaris’s Erotemata, a Greek–Latin grammar, for roughly twice as much as he paid for the Hypnerotomachia two years later. Goodhart was able to buy the book at a reduced price because it is... [Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Pumroy_Eric_L_Bryn_Mawr_College_s_1499_editi]
• ... foundational premise, viz. that the HP was an alchemical allegory. --- <!-- Page 134 --> 6 London, British Library – C.60.o.12 The preceding studies of the ‘Encyclopedic’... [Russell 2014 (PhD thesis)]

Source Documents

Gollnick (Apuleius dreamworld); HP (Da Capo edition); HP primary text; O'Neill (Durham thesis); Russell 2014 (PhD thesis); Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Fabiani_Giannetto_Raffaella_Not_before_eithe; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Farrington_Lynne_Though_I_could_lead_a_quiet; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Nygren_Christopher_J_The_Hypnerotomachia_Pol; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Pumroy_Eric_L_Bryn_Mawr_College_s_1499_editi