The Mirror of Alchimy

Three additional works attributed to Jean de Mehun, Claude Celestin, and Pope John XXII were also incorporated.

On the title page the publisher describes the book as The mirror of alchimy, composed by the thrice-famous and learned fryer, Roger Bachon.

In the first chapter pseudo-Bacon describes alchemy as a science teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, does fully perfect them in the very projection.

[5] It is a short treatise broken into seven chapters, some of which are only a paragraph long:[5] The following alchemical writings are appended to Pseudo-Bacon's tract in the 1597 edition:[6] The Mirror of Alchimy appeared at a time when there was an explosion of interest in Bacon, magic and alchemy in England.

Stanton Linden writes that the description of exoteric alchemy found in this widely distributed text defined the discipline as "Corporal Science" and reinforced its longstanding association with metallurgy and goldsmithing.

[9] About this work, John Maxson Stillman wrote that "there is nothing in it that is characteristic of Roger Bacon's style or ideas, nor that distinguishes it from many unimportant alchemical lucubrations of anonymous writers of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries".