Alexandre Roberts

Why did medieval peoples keep trying to make gold if it never worked? This question may sound reasonable. But in fact, its basic assumption, that gold-making never worked, is deeply misleading. Surviving recipes for “making gold” do work in a certain sense. Something happens. Chemists today explain what these recipes do in ways that are mostly agreed upon today. But in the middle ages, the question was wide open: what had happened? What did these recipes accomplish? Metalworkers, mint workers, and goldsmiths could carry out various operations, causing surprising changes in the properties of metals. Sometimes the results had key properties of gold that anyone could observe. All this was empirical fact. The rest was interpretation: could that “something” be fairly described as “making gold,” or was it best understood as something else? That was the crux of the medieval debate over chrysopoetic chemistry, the chemistry of “gold-making”: how to interpret empirical facts.

At FRIAS I am completing a monograph, Chemistry and Its Consequences in Byzantium and the Islamic World, on the chemical theories that medieval scholars in the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world, developed and deployed to solve this and related problems of scientific interpretation. The result will be a significant contribution to the history of science in Byzantium and the Islamic world that will challenge us to rethink narratives of “the rise of Western science.”