Paul of Taranto

Geberis philosophi perspicacissimi, summa perfectionis magisterii, 1542, Title page

Paul of Taranto was a 13th-century Franciscan alchemist and author from southern Italy. (Taranto is a city in Apulia.) Perhaps the best known of his works is his Theorica et practica, which defends alchemical principles by describing the theoretical and practical reasoning behind it. It has also been argued that Paul is the author of the much more widely known alchemical text Summa perfectionis, generally attributed to the spurious Jabir, or Pseudo-Geber.[1]

  1. ^ Pseudo-Geber (1991). The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-09464-2.