Subtle Fire: Distillation as Low-Heat Technology and the Agency of Human Art

Starting from the insights gathered during the reconstruction of a small distillation furnace at the Fire Arts workshop, this paper begins to recover the significance of "low-heat technologies" in the early modern period. It asks how these were achieved technically and codified in the emerging practical literature, but also what was at stake theoretically - how did such low-heat technologies function within larger cosmologies and theories of matter? The works of Girolamo Cardano make for a pertinent case study since Cardano denied that fire was an element. Consequently, he placed fairly restrictive boundaries on its agency in manipulating matter, and especially in achieving his key material quality of "subtlety." At a second glance, however, I argue that Cardano makes remarkable exceptions for low-heat distillation as a technology that replicates Nature's most subtle material processes.