It has long been established by scholars such as Stanton Linden, Lyndy Abraham and Margaret Healy that the medieval and Renaissance discourse of chemical transmutation – alchemy – had a profound impact on the literary works of early modern male writers including John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Andrew Marvell. But how did the female contemporaries of these male authors utilize alchemical language and concepts? The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow’s single-authored monograph, ‘Women Writers and Alchemy in Early Modern Britain’, is the first book-length study to analyze how and why sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglophone women writers deployed alchemical discourse. Through archival research and close textual analysis, the monograph reconstructs a hitherto forgotten female alchemical literary culture which did not place the male chemical practitioner at its centre, but brought to the fore the authority of the female alchemist. The full manuscript of this monograph has been completed and is currently being prepared for peer review with Cambridge University Press. This monograph will be of significant interest to scholars and students interested in Renaissance literature, women’s writing and the history of alchemy, science and medicine. Studies on the history of alchemy also attract readers beyond academia, attested by the open-access online resources: the Alchemy Website (
https://www.alchemywebsite.com/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) and Levity (
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). The monograph will thus appeal to readers beyond academia.
The Forum of essays on ‘Women and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe’ (edited by the Fellow and published in the spring 2021 issue of ‘Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal’), has pushed the scholarship on women’s involvement in the history of science further by identifying an early modern pan-European female chemical culture.
The Fellow’s public lecture on ‘Alchemical Literature, the Elements and Gender’ (which was delivered via Zoom on 17 February 2021) introduced a non-specialist audience to the history of early modern women alchemists. This lecture was advertised on Twitter (via @RECIRC_) and Instagram (via ASV Prometheus) and brought the topic of women in the history of chemistry to a wide, non-academic audience.
