Martin Ruland the Younger's Lexicon Alchemiae (1612) is one of the most influential alchemical dictionaries of the early modern period, yet its sources and compilation methods remain poorly understood. This study applies computational approaches to investigate the vocabulary underlying Ruland's lexicon and to identify potential textual influences. Using a TEI-XML encoded version of the Lexicon Alchemiae, a standard data format for encoding textual data in the digital humanities, we extract its headwords and compare them against large-scale digital corpora of Latin literature, including the Early Modern Latin Alchemical Prints (EMLAP) dataset and the broader GreLa database. By combining frequency-based lexical comparison with contextual word embeddings generated through a Latin BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model, the analysis traces both the distribution and semantic behaviour of terms across earlier alchemical and scientific texts. The article is accompanied by an interactive web application allowing readers to explore additional case studies. Our analysis indicates that Ruland drew not only on earlier Paracelsian word lists, but also on large-scale contemporary compilations such as Andreas Libavius's Alchemia (1597), suggesting that the Lexicon Alchemiae should be understood within a broader movement to systematise and professionalise alchemical knowledge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The promise of computational methods opens new epistemic horizons. Yet, as we discuss in this introduction to the special issue on computational approaches to the histories of alchemy and chemistry, it also brings new epistemic responsibilities. We situate this work within a broader digital and computational history, exploring its relationship with earlier traditions of quantitative history as well as with developments in digital humanities and computational humanities. We distinguish between digital, computational, algorithmic, and AI-driven approaches and we clarify methodological and epistemological concerns that keep the historian firmly in the loop. Claims about computational methods often imply that they enable entirely new modes of inquiry. Yet such sweeping claims can also obscure the limitations and conditions under which these methods operate. This introduction therefore explores both the opportunities and the constraints of computational approaches that more celebratory accounts sometimes overlook. It introduces the individual contributions to the special issue and concludes with a call for responsibility in the adoption of computational methods. We argue for making the histories of alchemy and chemistry more critical, global, and reflexive, while remaining attentive to the assumptions, limitations, and implications of the computational tools we employ.
This article demonstrates the power of computational methods to illuminate the history of chemistry across multiple scales - from the micro-level of individual scientific careers to the macro-level of global knowledge systems and geopolitical shifts. Grounded in a tripartite framework integrating the material, semiotic, and social dimensions of chemistry, five cases are analysed. These cases reveal how computational history enables historians to corroborate established narratives while generating new questions through the interplay of digital data, computation, and mathematical models. By examining long-term patterns in substance discovery, the evolution of the periodic system, the linguistic transformation of chemical discourse, the politics of the Nobel Prize, the influence of individual chemists, and the geopolitical reconfiguration of chemical innovation, the study shows how large-scale data analysis can validate historical narratives, uncover structural patterns, test hypotheses, and generate novel research questions. The article concludes by reflecting on the epistemological and methodological implications of the computational history of chemistry, arguing that its practice does not offer definitive answers, but rather reshapes the terrain of historical inquiry - opening new pathways for understanding science as a dynamic, distributed, and historically contingent enterprise.
With digital and computational methods becoming more visible both in scholarly and everyday contexts, it is timely to ask whether a distinct field of digital and computational history of science, knowledge, and technology can meaningfully be said to exist. This epilogue to the special issue on computational approaches to the history of alchemy and chemistry addresses this question, arguing that such an overarching field has not yet materialised. To fulfil its programmatic promises, a digital and computational history of science, knowledge, and technology must focus on conceptual clarity regarding its disciplinary position. If digital and computational approaches are to contribute meaningfully to the history of science and knowledge, they should support efforts to produce more global and inclusive historiographies rather than reproducing existing biases in available datasets and algorithms. Indeed, one of the most important tasks for the future may be the creation of datasets for under-resourced subfields and historical questions. Thus, this paper argues for a commitment to diversity in the subjects, cultures, languages, periods, and forms of knowledge considered: Only through employing a plurality of methods can a computational history of science, knowledge, and technology adequately reflect the diversity of knowledges represented within the broader field.
In this article, I argue that the computational history of chemistry offers a new way of engaging with the past: one that integrates narrative inquiry with algorithmic analysis, mathematical modelling, and large-scale data processing. I demonstrate how computational methods - distinguished by their digital foundations, algorithmic procedures, and computational purpose - can reveal patterns, model transformations, and test historical hypotheses across the social, semiotic, and material dimensions of chemistry. Crucially, I show how these methods allow historians to explore the interplay between history at different scales, from the micro to the macro: linking individual actors, local practices, and contested narratives with the longue durée of chemical knowledge. Yet I also reflect on the challenges that arise - particularly the need for historically meaningful categories, the risk of decontextualising data, and the persistence of bias in both sources and algorithms. By integrating historical narrative with computational analysis, I argue that the computational history of chemistry offers a critical and pluralist framework to reassess the unfolding of chemistry and to enrich its historiography for the digital age.
This article discusses how quantitative approaches to the history of chemistry gradually emerged in the first three decades of the postwar era, within the broader context of quantitative social and economic history, historical sociology of science, and quantitative science indicators. I suggest that influential publications in the 1960s, postulating logistic curves in the exponential growth of science and the role of a broad scientific community in producing and distributing scientific knowledge, stimulated subsequent quantitative research in the history of chemistry. With mainframe computers presenting technical difficulties in the foundational period to the mid-1980s, initial quantitative research usually involved sets of non-computerised data cards developed ad hoc for specific projects - here exemplified by databases including German and British chemists. Shifting to computerised databases during the 1980s and 1990s, as they confronted increasingly large amounts of data. Fortunately, simultaneous technological improvements, leading to more powerful desktop computers and more user-friendly software, greatly facilitated this transition. Early computerised databases may have been neither designed for wider use online, nor mutually compatible; without external support, they might not survive the careers of their creators. Preserving, integrating, and broadening access to such valuable raw data remains a crucial challenge for future scholarship.
This article documents the creation of EMLAP (Early Modern Latin Alchemical Prints), a machine-readable corpus of one hundred Latin alchemical printed works produced within the TOME (The Origins of Modern Encyclopaedism, 2023-2025) project. It first situates the corpus within both the digital humanities landscape and the historiography of alchemy, where the availability of reliable machine-readable texts remains limited. It then addresses the challenges of converting early modern Latin printed text into machine-readable format with a high standard of quality. The article argues that producing a high-quality transcribed corpus at scale still requires human scholarly intervention, and that a transcription project must balance the ideal of digital edition standards against the practical constraints of time and resources. The article describes the practical experience of building EMLAP: the selection of the Transkribus platform for AI-powered automatic text recognition, the choice of transcription models, the development of human quality standards to complement automated metrics, and the construction of a computational pipeline to process and enrich the transcriptions. The EMLAP corpus has been made publicly available in open access (Zenodo repository) as well as in the form of a website that offers different search opportunities for researchers.
This article examines the role of the logician Francesco Storella (active ca. 1550-1575) in contributing to the intellectual and social legitimation of alchemy in mid sixteenth-century Naples. Storella achieved this by leveraging the tradition of the "Hermetic Aristotle," focusing on his 1555 edition and commentary of the Secretum secretorum. The study first analyses Storella's philological strategies, including the historicisation of the text and the use of the Tabula smaragdina, to firmly link Aristotle's authority to the Hermetic foundation of alchemy. Second, it demonstrates how Storella mobilised his philosophical logic to defend the ars alchemica as a rational and demonstrable discipline, compatible with a physico-astrological framework (Albertine tradition) necessary for achieving genuine metallic transmutation. Finally, the study reconstructs the Neapolitan intellectual network linking Storella with the philologist Domenico Pizzimenti and the young naturalist Giambattista della Porta. This confluence, unified by a commitment to the rational justification of singularia and an Albertine-influenced physics, highlights Naples as an exceptional point of convergence where academic theory, philological rigour, and experimental practice merged. This robust synthesis conferred a decisive epistemological and social status upon alchemy within Renaissance Aristotelianism, providing the essential cosmological and rational justification for the transmutation of metals.
The supply of experimental materials greatly influences the practice of science. Before the establishment of modern commercial distribution systems for experimental materials, researchers often used mundane substances. The wires of the harpsichord, a representative keyboard instrument of the Baroque era, were used as "multifaceted materials" in physical and chemical experiments from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Because the wires were made of largely pure iron, they were utilised as a standard substance in permanganometry until their impurities proved experimentally problematic. Although the early wires gradually disappeared from chemical experiments around the beginning of the twentieth century, they were reincarnated as steel wires with the advent of the modern harpsichord and reemerged as actors on the musical stage in the context of Neoclassical music. As a result of shifting practices in the use of harpsichord wires, the concept of a standard substance in titration gradually took shape at the intersection of the histories of science and music.
Historians suggesting an early phase of globalisation in the decades before the First World War have pointed to new specialist learned societies as among the agents in the process. This paper explores the international dimensions of national chemical societies in this era of empires. During the nineteenth century, national chemical societies were established in many countries. Four of the earliest and largest - the [British] Chemical Society (founded 1841), the Société Chimique de France (1857), the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (1867), and the American Chemical Society (1876) - recruited numerous members living abroad, so that, by the early twentieth century, such "extra-national" members - members, that is, who lived outside the state in which the society was based - constituted a substantial share of their memberships. Our paper examines this phenomenon. It argues that an analysis of extra-national members can help us chart the spread of chemistry around the globe. It considers whether the extra-national memberships of these chemical societies can be seen as constituting early, overlapping global networks of individuals, based on their common membership of leading societies.
The article studies the strategies that late-medieval scribes used to present alchemical texts to their audience. Investigating two late fifteenth-century alchemical codices - Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS O.5.31 and R.14.37, both almost exclusively written in English - we demonstrate that the copyists took considerable pains to present reader-friendly texts. They provided neatly separated textual units, furnishing them with headings, manicules (pointing hands), and even a table of contents. This organisation is supported by the use of various ink colours, letter sizes, and framing devices. The appearance suggests significant pre-planning, perhaps even in a commercial context. We argue that these manuscripts highlight how readers engaged with alchemical texts and, by extension, that they reveal the importance afforded to texts and the vernacular as a vehicle for disseminating alchemical knowledge. In other words, it is not only the number of surviving manuscripts and their alchemical contents that are good indicators of late-medieval valuations of alchemy. Our study underscores how the visual materiality of extant textual artefacts also constitutes crucial evidence for our understanding of how practitioners used alchemical texts. It also exposes the place of alchemical texts in the text production industry of the time and illustrates the status of fifteenth-century alchemy more widely.
This paper describes a programme of practice research that combines historical technology (small charcoal-fired furnaces) with contemporary digital making methodologies (digital CNC milling). The intention was to create small spherical granules of precious metal suitable for granulation, an ancient metalworking technique. The authors begin by providing an overview of granulation's historical background and the different traditional methods used to create granules. They give an account of the equipment used in the physical experiments and describe the rationale behind specific design decisions. In particular, they reflect on the nature and properties of producing a reducing atmosphere inside the firing chamber of the furnace, and the relevance of this to the granulation process. They detail the digital making methodologies that were used to create setters made from graphite to encourage the formation of perfectly spherical granules, and how these relate to recent developments of the technique by contemporary makers. The project is a case study that demonstrates how practical reflexive experimentation can broaden our understanding of unrecorded but crucial skills such as fire management and that practising such skills in conjunction with digital methods of making can offer new insights into past technologies and processes.
In this article we reflect on the reconstruction and operation of a lung-powered, portable melting furnace used by ancient Amerindian goldsmiths. Variations of this kind of furnace were operated by different metallurgical traditions in the northern Andes and Mesoamerica to transform refined metals and alloys like tumbaga (copper and gold) into metalworks such as ornamental artefacts. The social and technological shifts that began in the sixteenth century, particularly following European contact, led to a progressive decline of the ancient Amerindian melting procedures associated with these metallurgical furnaces. Our research utilises performative and reconstructive methods to offer a reparative approach to this lost fire-and-wind technology, taking the Quimbaya furnace as a working model. By assessing the historical and archaeological evidence as well as more intangible experiential insights from our reconstruction, we intend to understand the functioning of such furnaces, and to suggest embodied and social meanings of the arts of fire among ancient communities in the tropical valleys of the Andes.
In the study of early modern glassmaking, scholarship has traditionally focused on the production of raw glass and the transmission of glassmaking recipes and knowledge. This article extends that focus by examining the subsequent transformation of raw glass into finished objects, using enamelling as a central case study. We argue that enamelling was a distinct, skill-intensive practice requiring specialised knowledge separate from that of glass production. Combining historical source analysis with experimental reconstructions, the study investigates how fire management critically influenced enamel quality. By applying a range of firing techniques to reconstructed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enamels, we demonstrate that variability in heat application significantly affected the final outcome. Our experiments suggest that historical enamellers developed a deep, practice-based understanding of several key factors: (i) controlling heat for optimal adhesion and colour development; (ii) manipulating flame intensity and furnace atmosphere to enhance bonding; and (iii) employing layering techniques to improve durability. These findings invite a rethinking of fire not merely as a tool, but as an active and variable ingredient in the enamelling process.
This article describes a programme of experimental reconstruction, involving the building and firing of a series of charcoal-fired assay furnaces, and the findings generated by this activity. The furnace builds drew from designs described and illustrated in nineteenth-century technical manuals for assayers and two sixteenth-century texts: De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola and A Treatise on Ores and Assaying by Lazarus Ercker. Comparing the resulting "chimeric" structures' performance generated insights into how such solid-fuel assay furnaces behaved in practice, what roles specific structural elements described in different primary sources played in their overall function, and the fire management skills needed to operate them. Consequently, it was possible to identify how the designs materialised technological choices that prioritised either responsiveness or long-term operation. The experimental reconstructions also led to a reappraisal of the nature and wider relevance of a selection of the primary sources used in the project.
The introduction to this double special issue lays out our core questions: how was fire understood within premodern cultures of knowledge and practice? What could fire do, and what could humans do with fire? The introduction details our hands-on exploration of these issues through a range of fire technologies at an interdisciplinary workshop on "Fire Arts, Pasts and Futures" at Texas A&M University. It outlines the issues and new questions raised by this practical work, and shows how these are addressed in the contributions to this issue. These case studies explore the practices of premodern artisans, alchemists, metalworkers, natural philosophers, and chemical practitioners, ranging from low-heat technologies such as distillation to high-heat smelting furnaces, and from ancient metallurgy to modern-day jewellery practice. Collectively, we argue, the articles contribute to three main areas of historical scholarship: the place of fire in changing cosmologies and matter theories, debates about the agencies of art vs. nature, and methodological reflections on using performative methods as part of an interdisciplinary exploration of past material worlds.
The goddesses of metal and fire were the patron deities of Chinese smelters. This article examines this artisans' cult through historical texts, ethnographic reports, and historical reconstruction of the smelting processes. It demonstrates that the cult was initially tied to the state-managed iron industry under Mongol rule (1271-1368), and later spread across geographical regions, encompassing diverse fire-related industries, including casting, bell making, tin smelting, and pottery. I argue that the cult constituted an integral part of artisans' material imaginary - a worldview that helped them comprehend the material transformation through fire, their bodily experience of extreme heat and danger, and the anxieties that were inherent to fire-related crafts. However, this widespread religious practice appears differently in historical texts, where Confucian scholars and state officials reframed the narratives about the goddesses, contributing to the cult's gradual disappearance in textual records. This study emphasises the limitations of conventional historical sources and advocates for combining historical reconstruction and folklore with archival research to recover marginalised forms of artisanal knowledge. Moreover, it argues that artisans' religious practices should not be separated from technological processes but rather treated as important components of artisanal knowledge systems.
While fire played an obvious role in the work of early modern European metalworkers, glassworkers, earthenware potters, and other "high-heat artisans," this article examines how "low-heat artisans" engaged with fire in their workshop practice. It focuses on painters, bleachers, launderers, and dyers, and it looks for traces of their fire-related practices in manuscript and printed how-to texts, particularly craft manuals and books of artisanal recipes and secrets. By examining not only the various fire technologies and tools these artisans used but what they could do with fire, this article shows what we gain when we read for procedural and performative language rather than merely people, places, and concrete things. This study concludes that the use of low-heat fire among artisans was extensive and subtly varied; there are reasons to consider the sun a critical low-heat fire technology; and light, as a byproduct of fire, was just as carefully exploited or mitigated in low-heat artisanal work as was heat.
