2025
“Crucified upon Metals and Alphabets: Alchemical Iconography of the Sixteenth-Century Illustrated Treatises by Martin Sturtz”.
The British Journal for the History of Science Themes, pp. 29–47.
Read open access ↗Historian of Science and Visual Culture
Sergei Zotov
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
I study how images became tools for making and transmitting knowledge in premodern Europe. My work centres on manuscripts and follows visual ideas across natural philosophy, medicine, magic, alchemy, and artisanal practice from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
British Academy project
Albums of Secrets in the Age of Reason
The project identifies a neglected genre of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript albums that combine alchemy, medicine, astrology, and magic through serial images, often accompanied by very little text.
I reconstruct how these books were produced, annotated, owned, exchanged, copied, and transformed. Codicological evidence, marginalia, ownership marks, correspondence, and the visual genealogy of individual motifs reveal how compilers borrowed from prints, altered existing images, and created new ones. I describe these sequences as allegorical how-to narratives: visual forms that fuse allegory with practical instruction.
A digital catalogue will record provenance, codicological metadata, images, and patterns of reuse across the corpus. The wider aim is to show how manuscript culture sustained forms of vernacular science in which imagination and empiricism, belief and technique, continued to operate together during the Enlightenment.
Forthcoming academic book
Imagine Green Lion
Allegorical Iconography in European Alchemical Manuscripts
The book argues that alchemical images were not merely illustrations but instruments for organising, transmitting, and legitimising knowledge about matter, transformation, experiment, and nature.
Based on a corpus of roughly 3,500 images from around 150 manuscripts, it reconstructs how allegorical motifs and image series circulated across European manuscript traditions and how their meanings changed as compilers copied, rearranged, and adapted them. The study follows visual connections between alchemy, mining, laboratory practice, cryptography, and other forms of practical knowledge.
By combining iconographical analysis with the material study of manuscripts, the book treats alchemical visual culture as a distinctive medium of knowledge in its own right rather than as a decorative supplement to text.
Accepted for publication in the Synthesis series, University of Chicago Press.
Selected publications
Articles and book chapters
2024
“Smelling Good While Conjuring the Spirits: Use of ‘Perfumes’ in Medieval and Early Modern Magic Books”.
In Stefan Laube, ed., Tracts of Action. Leiden: Brill, pp. 237–267.
DOI ↗2024
“Sources of Alchemical Cryptography”.
With Sarah Lang and Megan Piorko. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Historical Cryptology HistoCrypt 2024, pp. 161–173.
Open access ↗2024
“Merian’s Juggling with Motifs – Juggling with Merian’s Motifs: Iconographical Borrowings in and from Merian’s Alchemical Works”.
In Berit Wagner and Corinna Gannon, eds., Opus magnum. Matthäus Merian d. Ä. und die Bebilderung der Alchemie, pp. 219–233.
Read open access ↗2023
“Allegorical Iconography of Alchemical Furnaces in 16th and 17th Century Manuscripts”.
In Sarah Lang, ed., Alchemical Laboratories, pp. 285–295.
Read open access ↗2022
“Vial Movies — The Driving Forces of Nature and Their Visualisation”.
With Stefan Laube. Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 37, pp. 1–41.
DOI ↗In press / accepted
“Visualisation of Magic in Late Medieval Alchemical Manuscripts”.
Arcana Naturae 7, accepted, 2026.
“Magic and How-To Books”.
In The Handbook of How-to Studies. Brill, in press, 2026.
“It is a Stone but Flesh: The Use of Animal and Human Ingredients in Alchemy”.
Palgrave Macmillan, in press, 2026.
Editorial work
Journal editing
2028
Guest Editor, British Journal for the History of Science – Themes
Cambridge University Press / British Society for the History of Science
Allegorical Man: Anthropomorphic Diagrams and Visual Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Science.
2026
Alchemy between Science and Magic
Arcana Naturae, co-edited with Tom Fischer.
Events organised
Conferences and seminar
Trinity Term 2026
History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Seminar, Maison Française d’Oxford.
24–25 October 2025
“As stiffe twin compasses”: Allegory and Sciences, 1300–1700
Conference, The Warburg Institute, with keynote lectures by Sachiko Kusukawa and Sophie Page.
16–17 June 2025
Visita Interiora: ReImagining Allegory in Alchemical Tradition
Conference, Warwick Centre in Venice, with keynote lectures by Jennifer Rampling and Peter Forshaw.
Selected teaching
Teaching
2025
Visual History of European Alchemy
Guest Lecturer, The Warburg Institute, University of London.
2020–2024
Renaissance culture and visual history of science
Fractional Teaching Assistant, University of Warwick. Seminars and lectures on Renaissance culture, Christianity, print, allegory, alchemy, icons, and manuscript culture; undergraduate assessment and curriculum development.
Appointments and fellowships
Academic trajectory
2026–
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.
2026
Associate Fellow
The Warburg Institute, University of London.
2025
Frances A. Yates Long-Term Fellow
The Warburg Institute, University of London.
2024–2025
Early Career Fellow
Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick.
2020–2024
PhD in Renaissance Studies
University of Warwick. Thesis: Alchemical Iconography as a Mediator of Knowledge: Visualising Science in European Alchemical Manuscripts, 1400–1700.
2017–2020
Junior Researcher
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.
Projects: Bilder aus der Phiole: Untersuchungen zur Bildsprache der Alchemie in der frühen Neuzeit (with Stefan Laube), and Private Gebetbücher aus niedersächsischen Frauenklöstern: Instrument und Interaktion (with Gia Toussaint).
Earlier research in Germany was supported by fellowships from the DAAD, the German Historical Institute, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at Research Center Gotha, and the Academic Foundation of the House of Representatives of Berlin. More recent research has been supported by the British Academy, the Royal Society, and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.
Public history
Books and wider audiences
Alongside academic research, I write and speak about medieval and early modern visual culture for wider audiences.
I have given more than 200 public talks, book presentations, and interviews in the UK, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. I also run a public lecture series in London. My five Russian-language books address Christian iconography, alchemy, magic, Orthodox imagery, and votive practices.
2022 Wax Legs and Iron Eyes: Votive Practices from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, with Mikhail Maizuls and Dmitry Antonov.
2022 Medieval Magic: Visual History of Witches and Sorcerers, with Dilshat Kharman.
2021 Iconographical Mayhem: The Unusual in the Orthodox Icon.
2020 History of Alchemy: The Journey of the Philosopher’s Stone from the Bronze Age to the Atomic Age.
2018 Suffering in the Middle Ages: Paradoxes of Christian Iconography, with Mikhail Maizuls and Dilshat Kharman.
Suffering in the Middle Ages received the 2018 Enlightener Prize; Iconographical Mayhem received the 2022 Alexander Belyaev Prize.
Contact