You are invited to register to attend the next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry which will be given by Professor Jennifer Rampling of Princeton University on Alchemy behind Bars.  

 This will be live on Zoom on 1 October beginning at 5pm BST (6pm CEST, 12 noon EDT, 9am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour. Anyone, member of SHAC or not, may register to attend the seminar by e-mailing meetings[AT]ambix.org they will be sent a link to the seminar the day before. (If having registered you do not receive a link the day before please check your junk folder).  Spaces are limited so please register early.

 Alchemy behind Bars: Practitioners, Patrons, and Prisons in Early Modern Europe 
Jennifer M. Rampling 
Associate Professor of History, Princeton University 

This talk explores a neglected but fascinating theme in the history of alchemy—the strategies used by alchemical practitioners to extricate themselves from prison. In early modern Europe, alchemists found themselves incarcerated for various reasons: some failed to make good on their gold-making promises, some were suspected of practicing magic, and others simply fell into debt. Once confined, some drew on their practical and rhetorical skills to write their way out of trouble, addressing petitions and alchemical treatises to princes and highly-placed figures in government. Perhaps surprisingly, they often ended up being released. 

I will focus on English practitioners, starting in the fourteenth century when John of Walden fell foul of Edward III, and moving into the sixteenth century, when at least two alchemists were arrested as suspected conjurors under Henry VIII. Finally, the notorious Edward Kelley, best known for his collaboration with the mathematician John Dee, wrote a series of elaborate treatises to Emperor Rudolf II while imprisoned in Bohemia. Although Kelley’s “prison writings” have not been previously studied, they offer new evidence for his alchemical activities—and show how the promise of transmutation might offer a “get out of jail free” card for beleaguered alchemists.  

The latest issue of Chemical Intelligence is now out! In it you will find, as usual, lots of information of relevance to our members. First, the Chair of SHAC, Frank James, addresses all members as he discusses the effects of the current pandemic on SHAC’s activities, and of the UKRI’s requirements of open access on SHAC’s future. His note to members is followed by an open letter to Sir Duncan Wingham about open access.

This issue of Chemical Intelligence further contains lots of useful information about our future (on-line) events, special issues of Ambix and Annals of Science, calls for papers, presentations of our student ambassadors, and much more!

You can now download Chemical Intelligence here.

Owing to the continuing crisis, meetings of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry have had to be suspended for the foreseeable future. We have therefore decided to run a series of hour-long on-line Zoom seminars on the history of alchemy and chemistry beginning on 21 July at 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour. Anyone, member of SHAC or not, may register to attend the seminar by e-mailing meetings@ambix.org; they will be sent a link to the seminar the day before. (If having registered you do not receive a link the day before please check your junk folder’).

The first speaker, to mark the publication of Humphry Davy’s letters by OUP, will be Tim Fulford, Professor of English at De Montfort University.

“The greatest chemist that has ever appeared?”: Humphry Davy as Revealed in His Correspondence

The publication in June this year of Davy’s Collected Correspondence gives us many new perspectives on Davy himself and on the culture of scientific enquiry in which his work was produced and consumed.  In this talk, Tim Fulford, one of the editors, will present a selection of the letters and discuss, for example, the changing role of patronage, the cultivation of reputation, the institutionalisation of chemical investigation, the role of correspondence networks, relationships between poetic and scientific experimentation, and Davy’s interactions with Ampère, Banks, Beddoes, Berzelius, Dalton, Faraday and Watt.

Oxford University Press has just published The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, advisory eds. Jan Golinski, Frank James and the late David Knight, with the assistance of Andrew Lacey. Eleven years in the making, SHAC contributed a couple of small grants to the project, this is the first scholarly edition of the correspondence of a man many literary critics know as the friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Walter Scott.  He was regarded as the greatest chemist ever, having used the Voltaic pile to decompound substances and reveal new elements—including potassium, sodium, chlorine and iodine—demonstrating the forces that hold matter together to be electrochemical.   He experimented with nitrous oxide, designed a mine safety lamp, and became the most charismatic lecturer of the era.  He knew James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, John Dalton, Henry Mackenzie, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Banks, William Godwin, Lord Byron, Germaine de Staël, John Opie, William and Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.  He was a controversial President of the Royal Society. His protégés were Michael Faraday and John Herschel. He was a pioneering geologist; he wrote a lot of poetry—mostly landscape verse influenced by his intimate knowledge of Wordsworth’s, Southey’s and Coleridge’s poems (he had helped edit the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and Thalaba the Destroyer).   

The Chairman of SHAC, Professor Frank A.L.J. James, has written two open letters to Sir Duncan Wingham regarding open access. The letters can be read by clicking on the following links:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=22866
and https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=29243

A message sent through Mersenne that suggests possible future actions can be found here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind2005&L=MERSENNE&O=D&P=34745

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2020 Partington Prize is Dr Mike A. Zuber of the University of Queensland for his article “Alchemical Promise, the Fraud Narrative, and the History of Science from Below: A German Adept’s Encounter with Robert Boyle and Ambrose Godfrey.”

Dr Mike A. Zuber is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Queensland. He obtained his doctorate with distinction at the University of Amsterdam in 2017 and subsequently received grant funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a postdoc project based at the University of Oxford. He has published on the scientific, religious, and intellectual history of the seventeenth century, with particular expertise in German-speaking contexts.

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry established the Partington Prize in memory of Professor James Riddick Partington, the Society’s first Chairman. It is awarded every three years for an original and unpublished essay on any aspect of the history of alchemy or chemistry. The prize-winning article will appear in the Society’s journal, Ambix, in due course.

This summer, the Roger Bacon Research Society is hosting a reading group of Bacon’s Compendium of the Study of Philosophy. The text is in English, and will be provided to all who wish to join the group. The meeting on 1 May will be used as a planning session, and the group will pick a date and time that works best for the majority of people interested during that meeting.

More info about the reading group can be found here.