Jabirian Corpus
composition: range-uncertainauthorship: contested
A large body of alchemical writing sets out laboratory procedure, apparatus and classification with a precision its own attribution cannot match, since the corpus accumulated under one name across generations.
- laboratory operations described as repeatable procedures with apparatus
- substances classified into a working taxonomy
- a corpus accumulated under a single name across generations
- practical technique that outlived the theory framing it
The writings describe distillation, sublimation, crystallisation and calcination as repeatable operations with named apparatus, classify substances into spirits, metals and pulverisable bodies, and develop a theory of the balance of qualities in matter. Scholarship generally holds that the corpus grew over a long period and that much of it postdates the historical Jabir, possibly by more than a century. The practical chemistry it records, whatever its authorship, entered Latin Europe and gave several words to the vocabulary of the laboratory.
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