Venue: Museum Plantin-Moretus, Vrijdagmarkt 22, Antwerp, Belgium

A meeting sponsored by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, ‘The Royal Typographer and the Alchemist: Willem Sylvius and John Dee’, will take place on 26 October at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. Coinciding with the 450th Anniversary of the publication of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, this colloquium will bring together specialists on John Dee and specialists on late sixteenth-century print culture and humanistic activities in Antwerp. The aim of the colloquium is to investigate the links between Antwerp’s vibrant print culture and its relationship to alchemy and the occult philosophy in the late sixteenth century.

Programme

09:45 | Welcome

10:00-11:30
Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London), “The printer and the alchemist: John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica after 450 years”
Peter J. Forshaw (University of Amsterdam), “John Dee and the Stars (Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy)”

11:30 | Coffee Break

12:00-13:30
Steven vanden Broecke (University of Ghent) “Spirit, print, and the public good in the productions of Willem Silvius”
Manuel Mertens, “Willem Silvius and the archive”

13:30 | Lunch

14:30-16:00
Goran Proot, “The typographical identity of the Monas hieroglyphica”
Jeroen J. M. Vandommele, “Mount Parnassus in print. Silvius and the printed edition of the Antwerp landjuweel of 1561”

16:00 | Coffee Break

16:30-17:15
Arjan Vandixhoorn (University of Utrecht), “Printers and the Culture of Knowledge in Sixteenth Century Antwerp: The Vernacular Perspective”

Registration fee: €20. To register for this colloquium, or for further information, please contact Stephen Clucas, s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk.