The Alchemical Feminine

A sweeping panorama of images of women in alchemical manuscripts, early printed books, prints and paintings

The images of women compiled in this pioneering volume evolved from alchemical philosophy, in which gendered and sexualized concepts are used to describe physical matter and laboratory processes. When alchemical imagery arose in the late Middle Ages, and over the next three centuries, images of women developed in ways that reflected wider social pressures. Building on scholarly studies of the increasing exclusion of women from public arenas in the early modern period, The Alchemical Feminine examines the transformations of alchemical images of women and the increasing masculinization of earlier feminine imagery. When alchemy returned to the Latin West, metals were thought to be composed of hot, dry, fixed Philosophic Sulphur and cool, moist, volatile Philosophic Mercury. In the laboratory, these lovers fused in a "Chemical Wedding" that produced their child, the "Philosophers' Stone," a mysterious catalyst enabling the transformation of base metals into silver and gold. As alchemical imagery developed, women appeared as ancient philosophers, religious figures, royal queens, sexual partners, cosmological personifications, deities, allegorical symbols of Nature and the wives of fools. Herbal alchemy also had ancient roots and it is in this realm that women as alchemical practitioners can be found. Using abundant illustrations, this book examines the alchemical feminine and the thematic diversity of alchemical images of women.