Peter of Zealand

Peter of Zealand is a newcomer in the history of late medieval magic. ¹ No one seems to have ever read his magnum opus, the “Elucidation of Marvelous Things” (Lucidarius de rebus mirabilibus), or even noticed its existence, before the twenty-first century. Written in the 1490s, the work is preserved in a single manuscript copied around 1500, which entered at some point the library of the Dukes of Burgundy, now Royal Library of Belgium. ² It was catalogued as a miscellany on medicine and magic by several authors (including Peter of Zealand), though all the texts it contains were actually parts of a comprehensive work, the Lucidarius, whose title escaped the attention of the librarians because it is buried in the prologue to the first section. Ironically, while the Lucidarius lay undiscovered for five centuries, another of Peter’s works, a short untitled treatise on alchemy, circulated rather widely in manuscript form, and was even printed in the seventeenth century in one of the most famous collections of alchemical texts, the Theatrum chemicum – but the name “Petrus de Zelandia” or “de Zelante” was misspelled beyond recognition as “Petrus de Silento”. ³ A third work is mentioned in the Lucidarius itself: Peter refers to a pamphlet he wrote “On the Prolongation of Life and Retardation of Death” (libellus de prolongatione vitæ et retardatione mortis), ⁴ as yet unfound.