Abstract:

This talk will focus on the chrysopoetic commentary Nihāyat al-ṭalab fī sharḥ al-Muktasab by the fourteenth-century scholar ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir ibn ʿAlī ibn Aydamir al-Jildakī, which comments expansively on a single, concise treatise on gold-making. The aim will be to situate this commentary within the broader textual tradition to which it belongs, to consider its rhetorical framework — how it presents itself, its purpose, and its intellectual contribution to a reader — and, finally, to assess this self-presentation by considering the text as a chemical commentary: a textual exegesis that elucidates one particular way of thinking rigorously about the transformation of matter.

Speaker:

Dr. Alexandre M. Roberts is Associate Professor of Classics and History at the University of Southern California (in Los Angeles). In 2023–2024 he is a Visiting Scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he is working on a monograph entitled Chemistry and Its Consequences in Byzantium and the Islamic World.