The Philosophers’ Stone Is Real: How Chemistry Shaped Alchemical Allegory
Early modern alchemists did not invent their imagery in a vacuum. It emerged from engagement with real chemical and metallurgical processes observed in laboratories. This lecture explores how such processes generated the weird and often disturbing allegorical language of alchemy: hybrid bodies, hermaphrodites, cannibalistic kings, green lions, and Christ-eagles. I argue that these strange images often functioned as visual models for thinking about matter, transformation, and causality before the modern chemical theory of elements.
Drawing on illustrated alchemical manuscripts and albums from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the talk shows how allegory became a practical cognitive tool — a way to stabilise, remember, and communicate experimental knowledge in a world without standardised chemical notation.
Speaker Bio:
Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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