Events Calendar

Thursday, April 17, 2008 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

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.

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.

This event appears on the following calendars:

• History Department
• OSU Events: Lectures / Seminars*