Paul of Taranto

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.