Lawrence M. Principe is the Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of the History of Science and Technology and the Department of Chemistry. His research interests focus on early modern alchemy/chemistry, particularly chrysopoeia. His publications include The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, 1998) and (with William R. Newman) Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2004), the winner of the 2005 Pfizer Prize. He is currently completing a book provisionally entitled Wilhelm Homberg and the Transmutations of Chymistry at the Académie Royale des Sciences. In 2004, he was the inaugural winner of the Francis Bacon Award for the history and philosophy of science.
Tuesday, April 15, 4:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, Room 208
While “alchemy” is a word familiar to most people, what is it really? Is it a kind of protochemistry, a spiritual endeavor, a fraudulent dream, or something else? Scholarly work of the last twenty years has radically changed our understanding of the subject, transforming alchemy from a disreputable subject into a hot topic within the history of science. This lecture will examine the new understanding of alchemy in the Latin West (1150-1750) by focusing on the content of alchemical thought, the goals of alchemical activities, and the context of early modern thought in which such thoughts and activities were conceived and carried out.
Thursday, April 17, 4:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, Room 213
Alchemical ideas, images, and promises thoroughly permeated European thought and society. Poets, artists, dramatists, theologians, lawyers, and many others drew upon it for a host of purposes. These manifold, even contradictory, expressions and deployments of alchemy complicate the historian’s task of describing it both accurately and comprehensively. This lecture will examine several of these uses of alchemy, covering topics as diverse as warnings against greed and fraud, expositions of eschatology, and grand claims about human power over nature. The implications of the ongoing rediscovery of alchemy for the history of science will also be treated.
Friday, April 18, noon
Valley Library, East and West Willamette Industries Seminar Rooms
After flourishing for over half a millennium in Europe, transmutational alchemy virtually disappeared within less than a generation. What happened? Where did the subject and its practitioners go? This lecture approaches these questions, looking particularly at the French scene and the role of professionalized scientific societies in the process. A grander question however involves how we should rewrite the long-term history of chemistry to account for our new understanding.
