Events Calendar

Friday, April 18, 2008 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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.

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*