Online Seminar on Jane Ewbank on Thursday, 21 November 2024

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The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Professor Matthew Daniel Eddy (University of Durham) who will present:

‘A Very Curious Subject’: Jane Ewbank, Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy in Late Georgian York

This will be live on Thursday, 21 November 2024, beginning at 5.00pm GMT (6.00pm CET, 12 noon ET, 9.00am PT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.

As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/society-for-the-history-of-alchemy-and-chemistry/t-rpojrkg 

The seminar will be also accessible live on YouTube at


Most previous on-line seminars can be found on the SHAC YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/SocietyforHistoryofAlchemyandChemistry 

‘A Very Curious Subject’: Jane Ewbank, Public Lectures and Experimental Philosophy in Late Georgian York

Matthew Daniel Eddy

In September 1809 the artists Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin published a popular print depicting the audience which had recently attended the public experimental philosophy course given in London’s Surrey Institution. Every seat was full and the audience stared with anticipation at the lecturer. Notably, at least half of the attendees were women and girls.  Though historians have observed that this was a common phenomenon at the time, studies which address the motivations and reactions of female attendees to the scientific ideas presented in such lectures have received less attention. This paper sheds new light on the subject by exploring the 1804 diary entries written by Jane Ewbank of York about the lectures of the traveling experimentalists Henry Moyes and Charles Sylvester. Ewbank’s notes represent one of the fullest known handwritten accounts of a woman who attended experimental lectures during the Regency period. The entries offer noteworthy examples of how Ewbank used scribal media to process and remember scientific information through recounting experiments from the lecture and related conversations that occurred later over tea with friends.  Overall, the paper reveals how these and other instances in the diary offer insight into how women learned to connect experimental philosophy to topics ranging from climatology to vitalism.

I look forward to you joining me at the seminar.

With Best Wishes

Frank James

Announcing the Brock Award and a call for nominations

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The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) has decided to establish the Brock Award which honours Professor William ‘Bill’ Hodson Brock, one of the leading historians of chemistry of the last fifty years. For most of that time he was based at the University of Leicester, where he also directed the Victorian Studies Centre between 1966 and 1990. His Fontana History of Chemistry (1992) is a masterly summary of the field, while his biographies of Justus Liebig (1997) and of William Crookes (2008) continue to provide invaluable insights into the subtleties of nineteenth-century chemistry. In terms of SHAC, he served as editor of Ambix between 1968 and 1983 and then as Chair from 1993 to 2007. He contributed extensively to Ambix and served on SHAC Council for fifty years from 1967 until 2017. He has given extensive support to the history of chemistry community, always ready to share his expertise and insights and creating a welcoming environment for new scholars, particularly through his service to Ambix as editor and as a frequent reviewer.

The Brock Award consisting of £500 and an appropriate framed image will be awarded every three years beginning in 2025. This will dovetail with the Society’s other two awards, the Partington Prize for an unpublished essay on any area covered by SHAC written by an early career researcher to be next awarded in 2026 and the Morris Award given for outstanding achievement in the history of post-1945 chemistry or the history of the chemical industry to be awarded next in 2027.

The Brock Award will be for outstanding contributions in the fields of the history of alchemy and chemistry. The individual’s impact on the community of historians of alchemy and/or chemistry, through historical research, publication, support and encouragement of students and fellow researchers and contributions to the wider promulgation of the subject will be significant criteria for selection.

The awardee will be determined by a panel appointed by SHAC Council; serving members of Council are ineligible for the award. Nominations, including a cv and at least two letters of support, should be sent by 30 June 2025 to Professor Annette Lykknes: annette.lykknes[a]ntnu.no.

It is expected that the announcement of the first Brock Prize winner will be made in the autumn.

Frank James

2025 Spring meeting on The Biographies of Alchemists and Chemists

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The SHAC Spring meeting

To be held on Saturday 29 March 2025 at University College London

on the subject of

The  Biographies of Alchemists and Chemists.

Over the last few years a number of excellent biographies of alchemists and chemists have been published and more are in preparation. So, now seems an appropriate juncture to consider the genre and content of such biographies as well as how they relate to the evolving historiography. In addition to reflective papers devoted to specific people, offers on topics, such as, for example, collective biographies of alchemists and chemists, autobiographies, the market for such texts, and the value of the biographic genre and so on will be welcomed.

As 2025 marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of SHAC, there will be an associated round table at this meeting where members will be able to recollect their connection(s) with SHAC.

Offers of papers with a short description should be sent to the SHAC chair, Professor Frank James (frank.james[at]ucl.ac.uk), by 17 December 2024.

Best wishes

Rob Johnstone

Hon Treasurer, SHAC

Davy Notebooks Launch

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The Davy Notebooks Project is glad to announce that we have fully transcribed all 120 of Humphry Davy’s notebooks and sets of lecture notes, the vast majority of which are held at the Royal Institution in London, the rest in Kresen Kernow in Redruth. In total, including our pilot project that took place in 2019, our volunteers transcribed 13,121 pages. We are so very grateful for the 3,841 volunteers who have us in this work and who have also, helped us to write notes on the people, places, chemical elements and compounds and many other interesting things. You can now see the results of this work on Lancaster Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/. 

The notebooks can be explored and searched, but we encourage you to let us know if you find anything amiss (e.g. a transcription or annotation error) and let us know using the feedback back form, which looks like two speech bubbles at the top right-hand side of the page. 

We’d also like to invite you to the official launch of the Davy Notebooks Project, which will take place in-person and simultaneously online at Lancaster LitFest on Saturday 19th October, 6-7pm BST. Tickets (for both in-person and online) cost £5 and can be bought here. At this event, Prof Sharon Ruston will discuss some of the highlights of the project’s findings and it will be an opportunity for her to thank everyone who has been involved in the project since it began in 2019. Thank you to all who have been involved in this project since 2019!


 The Davy Notebooks Project Team, September 2024

Registration for the Autumn one-day meeting at the Allard Pierson on 11 October 2024

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The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC), in collaboration with the Allard Pierson of the University of Amsterdam and the Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (HHP), will hold its Annual Autumn Meeting at the Allard Pierson, Amsterdam, on 11 October 2024, starting at 9:30 am and ending at 16:30 pm. The meeting will be hybrid, although we strongly encourage in-person attendance.

You can register here: https://allardpierson.nl/en/events/en-autumn-meeting-shac/

The emphasis will be on the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica State collection, one of the extensive collections housed at the Allard Pierson. This library holds approximately 4,400 rare manuscripts and printed works related to the hermetic tradition, assembled by the Dutch entrepreneur Joost Ritman.

The keynote of the day is Professor Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London):
‘Thomas Harriot and the alchemy of the Northumberland Circle’

Speakers and topics will include:
Sergei Zotov: ‘An image series in the Traumgedichte der siebe Säulen’
Tjalling Janssen: ‘Elemental beings, discourses of nature, and Paracelsian reception in Georg von Welling’s Opus mago-cabbalisticum et theosophicum’
Corey Andrews: ‘Alchemy in the Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians), with reference to an ‘extended’ 20th-century manuscript’
Kyra Gerber: “Es komt alles und allein” – Marginalia in a rare early edition of Kunrath’s work
Amber Richter: ‘The Fruit that Blossoms from the Daughter: The Hidden Dryads in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens’
Peter Forshaw: ‘Abraham Le Juif’s Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques’
Jennifer Rampling: ‘George Ripley’

Symposium Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

Next SHAC on-line seminar, Thursday, 19 September 2024, 5pm BST

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The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Joshua Werrett (University of Oxford) who will present:

Imitatio Christi and the Aesthetics of Martyrdom in The Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis


This will be live on Thursday, 19 September 2024, beginning at 5.00pm BST (6.00pm CEST, 12 noon EST, 9.00am PDT). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.


As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/society-for-the-history-of-alchemy-and-chemistry/t-dvqkvvg

The seminar will be also accessible live on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/live/CELBazvrfeQ

Most previous on-line seminars can be found on the SHAC YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/SocietyforHistoryofAlchemyandChemistry

Imitatio Christi and the Aesthetics of Martyrdom in The Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis

Joshua Werrett

The alchemical practice of Zosimos of Panopolis is not just about the transformation of metals; it is about the transformation of the self. This double meaning is found throughout Zosimos’ works, but is perhaps most noticeable in his Visions. In this text, Zosimos uses alchemy as a theurgic practice to understand salvation, a practice which is allegorised as having four major stages: baptism; violent punishment; the separation of body and soul in death; and rebirth as a spiritual entity. These steps, taken by several characters throughout the text, clearly mimic major points in the life and death of Christ. In this talk, I present the argument that the imitation of Christ and the imitation of early Christian martyrs, themselves imitating Christ, are key motifs in the violent, redemptive, sacrificial aesthetics of Zosimos’ text. Analysing the main ideas, images, and phrases in The Visions, I conclude that themes from the New Testament and martyrological literature are pervasive. Overall, I hope to demonstrate that those being reborn as spirits throughout Zosimos’ text are not being reborn in a vacuum; rather, Zosimos suggests that, in being reborn, they follow in the footsteps of alchemists and Christian martyrs before them, in a long imitative line of suffering and transformation, which ultimately starts with Christ.