ABSTRACT
Jean de La Fontaine was born in 1381 at Valenciennes in Hainaut (now northern France). The only other known dates in his life are 1413, when he says he wrote (at Montpellier) his only known work, La fontaine des amoureux de science, and 1431, when he shared the office of mayeur (chief magistrate or mayor) of Valenciennes with another man. His only biographer says he was equally devoted to poetry, mathematics, and natural philosophy, and that his civil office suggests he may also have studied the law. No record of his education is known, however. 14 La Fontaine’s long alchemical poem (“écrit en vers facile, mais souvent assez peu intelligibles”) has nothing in it to warrant confusing its author with his great seventeenth-century namesake. But to the student of alchemy it is an important work, given its popularity and influence. The black-letter first edition may have been as early as 1495, and the poem received at least five printings in the sixteenth century and three in the early seventeenth, when it was also translated into German. In England the poem was translated not only by William Backhouse in 1644, but also (in prose) by the same anonymous translator represented elsewhere in this collection, in the first years of the eighteenth century. 15
