Alchemical and Theological Manuscripts

Newton's private papers on alchemy, biblical chronology, and theology — mostly unpublished until the twentieth century

Tradition: Newtonian natural philosophy / alchemy / heterodox Anglicanism / biblical chronology

Newton's vast unpublished alchemical and theological manuscripts — millions of words, edited and studied from the 1930s onward

Newton left at his 1727 death an enormous body of private manuscripts on alchemy and theology — totalling perhaps three million words, far more than the entire published corpus that established his public reputation. The manuscripts were largely suppressed by his eighteenth-century executors and by his nineteenth-century biographer David Brewster (who knew the contents but considered them an embarrassment); they were not seriously edited until the 1936 Sotheby's auction of the Portsmouth Papers, which dispersed the collection across many private and institutional owners (the principal collections now: the Yahuda papers in Jerusalem, the Keynes manuscripts at King's College Cambridge, the Babson collection at MIT/Burndy Library / now at the Huntington Library). The contemporary Newton Project (Cambridge / University of Sussex, 2000-) has digitised and edited the full corpus and made it available online. The manuscripts fall into two broad categories. (1) Alchemical manuscripts: Newton's lifelong engagement with the Hermetic-alchemical tradition (especially through the writings of the American alchemist George Starkey under the pseudonym Eirenaeus Philalethes); thousands of pages of laboratory notes, transcribed alchemical texts, and Newton's own commentary on the 'philosophical mercury' and the Great Work. (2) Theological manuscripts: Newton's private heterodox-Christian biblical-prophetic work — the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms (1728, posthumous), extensive Trinitarian polemic (Newton was an Arian who rejected the Nicene Trinity but kept this private throughout his life), the foundational manuscript work for the 1733 'Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse'. Together the manuscripts reveal a Newton far removed from the Enlightenment-rationalist figure of subsequent reception — a thinker who spent more time on alchemy and biblical chronology than on the Principia and the Opticks combined.