Lawrence M. Principe

Lawrence M. Principe

Drew Professor of the Humanities; Director, Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe

PhD, History of Science, Johns Hopkins University; PhD, Organic Chemistry, Indiana University

Gilman 376
410-516-4807
lmafp@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

I am broadly interested in early modern (1500-1750) science and technology. I am currently at work on a long-term project studying the intellectual and institutional developments in chemistry at the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences, 1666-1730, especially in the work its chief chymist Wilhelm Homberg. This project requires a broader examination of 17th and 18th century France, on which I am currently teaching graduate seminars. I also teach classes on Ancient & Medieval Science, the Scientific Revolution, and Science and Religion, as well as specialized graduate seminars such as “Wretched Subjects” (alchemy, astrology, and magic). I also hold an appointment in Chemistry where I teach Organic Chemistry.

My research specialization lies in exploring and understanding the history of chemistry/alchemy. While I am especially active in the study of early modern (1500-1750) chymistry (a term intended to include both what we call “chemistry” and “alchemy” in a time before there existed any clear distinction between the two), I also have a keen interest in the alchemy of the Greek, Islamic, and Medieval periods, and even its revival in the modern era. My broad research goals include resituating alchemy in its due context--intellectual, social, philosophical, technological, religious, and experimental--and displaying its importance and influence in the history of science and in European culture more broadly. I want to understand both how alchemists thought about the world and their work and what they actually did practically on a daily basis. Consequently, my approaches include both the traditional historical methods of textual analysis/contextualization and archival research as well as the more innovative method of replicating alchemical processes in a modern laboratory (using historical apparatus and materials that try to approximate the impure substances ordinarily used in the past) in order more fully to understand the historical texts and their authors’ motivations as well as the practical aims, abilities, and observations of the original practitioners. This dual approach allows for a richer exploration of the interactions between theory and practice,  between mind and hand--a feature that characterizes not only alchemy throughout its history but also its descendant, modern chemistry.

I am also committed to bringing the latest and most reliable historical discoveries and understanding to wider audiences outside the academy. Thus, in addition to several scholarly monographs, I have written two books for a general audience, both of which can be used as textbooks: The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction published by Oxford University Press in 2011 (now available also in Spanish, Chinese, Swedish, Japanese, and soon in Arabic), and The Secrets of Alchemy published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013.

The Transmutations of Chymistry: Wilhelm Homberg and the Académie Royale des Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).

Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle,  and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. With William R. Newman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  2002).

The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

 

Selected Articles:

“Rêves d’or: La surprenante longévité de l’alchimie au coeur de la chimie,” L’Actualité chimique, no. 424, (December 2017):68-71.

“Chymical Exotica in the Seventeenth Century, or, How to Make the Bologna Stone,” Ambix 63 (2016):118-44.

“From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again: Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science,” (with Hjalmar Fors and H. Otto Sibum), Ambix 63 (2016):85-97.

“The End of Alchemy? The Repudiation and Persistence of Chrysopoeia at the Académie Royale des Sciences in the Eighteenth Century,” Osiris 29 (2014): 96-116.

“Sir Kenelm Digby and His Alchemical Circle in 1650s Paris: Newly Discovered Manuscripts,” Ambix 60 (2013):3-24.

“John Locke and the Case of Anthony Ashley Cooper,” with Peter Anstey, Early Science and Medicine 16, (2011):379-503.

“Alchemy Restored,” Isis 102 (2011):305-312.

“Wilhelm Homberg et la chimie de la lumière,” Methodos: Savoirs et textes 8, (2008); http://methodos.revues.org/

“Revealing Analogies: The Descriptive and Deceptive Roles of Sexuality and Gender in Latin Alchemy,” pp. 209-229 in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in Western Esotericism, eds. Wouter Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

“A Revolution Nobody Noticed? Changes in Early Eighteenth Century Chymistry,” pp. 1-22 in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007)

“Georges Pierre des Clozets, Robert Boyle, the Alchemical Patriarch of Antioch, and the Reunion of Christendom,” Early Science and Medicine 9, (2004):307-20

"Some Problems in the Historiography of Alchemy." With William R. Newman. Pp. 385-434 in: Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William Newman and Anthony Grafton, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

"Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake." With William R. Newman. Early Science and Medicine, 1998, 3:32-65.