https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721264

This essay analyzes the known evidence for Byzantine engagement with what are conventionally termed “alchemical” texts, theories, and practices of the Islamic world. Much of the evidence is difficult to date. Nevertheless, the aggregated direct, indirect, and circumstantial evidence sug…[Read more]

Scientific diagrams could and did appear in more unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important,…[Read more]

The famous middle Byzantine alchemical manuscript Marcianus graecus 299 contains annotations from the late Byzantine period, most prominently in its opening quire. This article examines a text on the very first page of the manuscript, a text written in a late Byzantine Greek script, but in a language other than Greek. A number of words in this…[Read more]

This article examines the dedicatory epigram of the earliest and most important witness to the Greek alchemical corpus, the tenth-century manuscript donated by Cardinal Bessarion to the Republic of Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana MS gr. 299, as a window onto the cultural coordinates of the manuscript’s middle Byzantine readers. Scrutiny of…[Read more]