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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.

This paper investigates the Chinese American Chemical Society (CACS) as an organisation of the scientific diaspora at the end of the Cold War. Established in 1981 by mostly first-generation immigrants, the CACS adopted a non-political stance to boost the career of its members in the United States, China, and Taiwan. Tracing this non-political sensitivity to its founder, Jesse Hwa (1924-2008), the paper begins with Hwa's career as an immigrant scientist and his experience with China at the beginning of its economic reforms of the 1970s. It then studies the CACS's ambition to overcome the Cold War divide in the 1980s and reach out to Taiwan and China simultaneously. However, with limited success in technology transfer and facing issues in expanding the membership, the CACS faced a further crisis in the June Fourth Incident of 1989. As the officers tried to maintain the non-political stance amid varying responses from its members, the CACS increasingly turned attention to forging an identity for Chinese American chemists. By analysing the strategies of the CACS in building a community within the scientific diaspora, the paper enriches current scholarship on the history of twentieth-century chemistry and science diplomacy during the final days of the Cold War.

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.

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 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.

Starting from the insights gathered during the reconstruction of a small distillation furnace at the Fire Arts workshop, this paper begins to recover the significance of "low-heat technologies" in the early modern period. It asks how these were achieved technically and codified in the emerging practical literature, but also what was at stake theoretically - how did such low-heat technologies function within larger cosmologies and theories of matter? The works of Girolamo Cardano make for a pertinent case study since Cardano denied that fire was an element. Consequently, he placed fairly restrictive boundaries on its agency in manipulating matter, and especially in achieving his key material quality of "subtlety." At a second glance, however, I argue that Cardano makes remarkable exceptions for low-heat distillation as a technology that replicates Nature's most subtle material processes.

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.