Alchemical Laboratories. Texts, Practices, Material Relics

The edited volume Alchemical Laboratories / Texts, Practices, Material Relics - Alchemische Labore / Texte, Praktiken und materielle Hinterlassenschaften (Lang, 2023)
emerged from the international symposium on alchemical laboratories held in Vienna in early 2020, only days before the pandemic lockdowns began. The event remains fondly remembered by its participants, and the volume brings together most of the papers presented at the symposium.

The alchemical laboratory was a seminal site for the birth of modern science. Before their institutionalization, chymical laboratories were typically makeshift and multipurpose, necessitating an interdisciplinary approach to fully comprehend their role in the evolution of experimental knowledge-making.

The international symposium “Alchemical Laboratories: Texts, Practices, Material Relics,” which took place in Vienna and Oberstockstall in February 2020, offered a comprehensive exploration of this topic, addressing themes like alchemical experiments as courtly spectacles, the materiality of courtly chymical practice, and the day-to-day operations within early chymical laboratories. The early modern alchemical laboratory is discernible through both textual and material evidence, indicating its significance among practitioners, scholars, aristocrats, and royalty. For instance, the 16th-century laboratory excavated at Oberstockstall Manor (Lower Austria), along with aristocratic correspondence and alchemical medals from the Coin Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, illuminates the cultural resonance of chymical practices of the era. These relics not only reveal the more technical aspects of alchemy but also its role as an exclusive form of entertainment in elite social circles.

Beyond the editor’s introduction (Lang, 2023), I contributed to an article on using Transkribus for automatically generating transcriptions of alchemical and other early modern scholarly texts (Fröstl et al., 2023).