2022 Cozzarelli Prize Recipients

Class I: Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Winner:

Exploring the ancient chemistry of mercury

Marianna Marchini, Massimo Gandolfi, Lucia Maini, Lucia Raggetti, and Matteo Martelli

Alchemy is often considered a mythical and esoteric discipline. However, alchemy shares similarities and a common historical origin with chemistry. The authors of this study analyzed Greek, Latin, and Syriac alchemical texts from the first to fourth century CE and experimentally replicated historical methods for the extraction of mercury from cinnabar ore. The team reproduced mercury extraction techniques, including grinding cinnabar with various metals or heating cinnabar in closed vessels. The reconstructed methods included procedures not otherwise documented in modern chemistry. Translating alchemical lore into the language of chemistry, the results provide insight into the early history of chemistry as a discipline.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2123171119

The origin of a series of illustrations in the papers of Jacob Martin, household member of the Ephrata Cloister, up until now was unknown. Recently it was discovered that these illustrations are copied from a treatise by German theosopher and mystic, Johann Georg Gichtel, printed in 1696. Why Martin did these illustrations, and the connections to Gichtel and the Ephrata Community are the subject of this paper. Many of the papers of Jacob Martin have been translated, but these illustrations were given less attention. Research into these illustrations have yielded some interesting results, and sheds new light on the esoteric beliefs of Ephrata and one of its most interesting members.

https://www.academia.edu/34675864/Natura...at_Ephrata

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgW3OSlmUZo

Originally published in 2013, the new, revised edition of Alchemical Traditions is an expanded edition in every sense. Most notably, it features the addition of two substantial research chapters focusing on Islamic alchemy (integrating original translations from Henry Corbin’s work on The Book of Seven Statues) and Carl Jung (focusing on the deification experience at the root of his Red Book). It also includes an important theoretical chapter exploring the relationship between internal and external alchemy. The volume as a whole is richly illustrated with over a hundred images from the alchemical canon, both ancient and modern.

https://rubedo.press/alchemical-traditions

Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical papers online:

https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts...alchemical

Ethan Allen Hitchcock: Soldier—Humanitarian—Scholar, Discoverer of the "True Subject'' of the Hermetic Art

by Bernard Cohen

'Throughout an active military career. General Hitchcock devoted himself to the study of philosophy, theology, mysticism, and, eventually, alchemy. Under the most adverse conditions imaginable, in the barracks or in his tent at some encampment, he studied the writings of the Far and Near East, of antiquity and the middle ages, of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, insofar as they bore on questions of human existence or the nature of man. The result of his scholarly studies and meditations led him, eventually, to a radical interpretation of the subject of alchemy.'


https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proc...615697.pdf

Jenny Rampling podcast:

https://archive.org/details/podcast_clar...0360249905

Adam, l think she was a colleague of yours?

https://www.academia.edu/11691550/The_Ma..._Colquhoun

Listed as open source (courtesy of Princeton UP I think). Grab it while you can:

https://archive.org/details/the-jewish-a...k/mode/2up

Thesis by James Campbell. Uploaded by the author.

This thesis examines the alchemical patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–1598), Principal Secretary and later Lord Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. Through an examination of Cecil‘s surviving papers, along with other primary manuscript and printed works, it places Cecil‘s patronage of alchemy within the context of both his previous examined patronage and the intellectual context of sixteenth century England. This thesis analyses why Cecil, a key member of government for over fifty years and Elizabeth‘s most trusted councillor, believed in the legitimacy of alchemical solutions to both national and personal problems.

https://www.scribd.com/document/60762873/Thesis