Standard narratives about the history of science from Greece to the Arabs to Europe to the Scientific Revolution have many problems. This lecture focuses one such problem, the near-total omission of the Byzantine Empire from these narratives, and considers how our Byzantine sources on what is typically called Greek alchemy can help us revise such narratives. Once we learn to read Byzantine alchemical texts with conceptual tools developed by anthropologists and historians of science over the course of the last century, it becomes clear that such texts are crucial evidence not only for how Byzantines thought about the transformation of matter but also for how we narrate the history of science in western Eurasia from antiquity to the modern era.
Speaker
Prof. Alexandre M. ROBERTS
Department of Classics, University of Southern California
Alexandre M. Roberts is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on Byzantine and medieval Middle Eastern intellectual history. He is the author of Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl (California, 2020). His current work focuses on chemistry and its consequences in Byzantium and the Islamic world, a project that investigates technical treatises of the sort typically called alchemical, as well as philosophical, theological, and legal sources and the Greek and Arabic manuscripts that contain them.
ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183
