CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is hosting their first annual conference in 2024.

Participation is hybrid, please see the CERAE homepage for full programme and registration details.

Alexandre M. Roberts, University of Southern California and currently guest researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, is offering the opening keynote of this new series.

Abstract: What can medieval Greek and Arabic commentaries on recipes for the artificial production of gold tell us about how intellectuals in western Afro-Eurasia conceptualized the transformation of matter in times and places typically treated as marginal to the history of chemistry? A tremendous amount; indeed, the history of chemistry makes little sense without considering these crucial but neglected sources. After introducing a conceptual vocabulary that replaces the fraught term “alchemy” with more useful terminology, the present paper examines two chrysopoetic commentaries — one in Greek, by an early medieval author known as the Anonymous Philosopher, and the other in Arabic, by the fourteenth-century scholar Aydamir al-Jildaki — assessing their aims, self-presentation, and potential for changing how we tell the story of how human beings have thought rigorously about the transformation of matter.

Biography: Alexandre Roberts is a Byzantinist, Graeco-Arabist, and intellectual historian specializing in Byzantine and medieval Middle Eastern scholars and their engagement with ancient intellectual traditions. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2015 and taught at Columbia University in the City of New York before moving to USC in 2018 where he was appointed Associate Professor in 2022. He is currently working on a monograph entitled 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. He is also the author of Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl (University of California Press, 2020), and his articles have appeared in various journals, including Isis, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Dumbarton Oaks Papers.
Online link: https://ceraejournal.com/conference-keynotes/