Richard Eden

Richard Eden (c. 1520–1576) was an English alchemist and translator. His translations of the geographical works of other writers helped to foster enthusiasm for overseas exploration in Tudor England. Early life Richard Eden, the son of a cloth merchant, attended Christ's College, Cambridge and then Queens' College, graduating BA in 1538 and MA in 1544. As a protégé of Sir Thomas Smith, Eden associated with intellectuals such as John Cheke and Roger Ascham and served in a minor Treasury position from 1544 to 1546. From the late 1540s Eden worked for Richard Whalley, who would be Sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1595. He was salaried at £20 per annum as he sought the secret of turning base metal into gold. Eden set out to translate Vannoccio Biringuccio's De la pirotechnia into English and had completed the first 22 chapters in 1552, but he made the mistake of lending out the manuscript and was unable to retrieve it. However, he included a translation of its first three chapters in his Decades of the new worlde of 1555, although he omitted Biringuccio's attack on alchemists.