By Wendy J. Truran

"A careful reading of Yeats’s oeuvre reveals a form of poetic and affective alchemy that places the transformative capacity of joy at its heart."


https://www.academia.edu/49343443/Affect...esy_of_Joy

A novel about Mary Sidney by Naomi Miller.

https://www.allisonandbusby.com/book/imp...alchemist/

Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/891835/8743767

"England, 1575. Young Mary Sidney is bearing a devastating loss while her father plans her alliance to Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. But Mary is determined to make her mark on the world as a writer and scientist."



"Mary Sidney was the most educated woman in England, comparable only to Queen Elizabeth. She was fluent in Italian, French, and Latin, and probably Greek; played the lute and virginals; sang; had all the refinements of an aristocratic woman, such as medical training, falconry, hunting, court life, etc. She had an alchemy laboratory and was close with the leading ”magicians“ of the day, including John Dee and Giordano Bruno."

https://shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org/mary-sidney

"par damoiselle M.M." (Marie Meurdrac)

"Marie Meurdrac (c. 1610 – 1680) was a French chemist and alchemist known for writing La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames [Easy Chemistry for Women]. It is through this book that her name has survived to the present day, and scholars have argued that this was the first work on chemistry or alchemy by a woman since that of Maria the Jewess in the late classical period. Historian Lucia Tosi described Meurdrac as the first woman to publish a book on early chemistry. Though she was reluctant to write, concerned about criticism from those who didn't believe women should receive an education, she was a proto-feminist, and believed that "minds have no sex."


https://archive.org/details/BIUSante_74616/mode/2up

https://scientificwomen.net/women/meurdrac-marie-68

Chemistry, Women, and Gender in the Enlightenment and the Era of Professional Science

Elena Serrano, Joris Mercelis & Annette Lykknes

Full text, from Ambix:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...22.2100954

By Sarah Hutton.

Full text.

"In this essay, I consider where alchemy sits in the spectrum of interests that make up women's knowledge in early modern Europe by considering evidence from a group of women whose work is not usually discussed in relation to alchemy: namely, philosophers. I shall examine the writings of Oliva Sabuco (b. 1562), Anne Conway (1631–1679), and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) to discover what their philosophy reveals about their engagement with alchemy and other branches of knowledge, such as medicine and pharmacology. In so doing, I argue that women not only had practical knowledge in these areas, but also engaged with them at a theoretical level."

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/788022

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conway/

The painting below, by Samuel van Hoogstraten, is believed to be a portrait of Anne Conway (in the background!!!)

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Laura Van Dyke.

Full text.

“An Eco-Alchemical Vision: Hermetic Writing in Twentieth-Century British Literature” examines the intersection of alchemical thinking with contemporary green discourses. This project focuses on four writers from the last century: W. B. Yeats, Charles Williams, Lindsay Clarke, and Patrick Harpur. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay and poetry. While each of the texts under consideration figures the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world in different ways, reading them alongside one another reveals a shared preoccupation with the status of the
material world. For these writers, the alchemical tradition offers a way of both speaking and thinking about physical phenomena that affirms our complex entanglement with materiality. Like the medieval and Renaissance alchemists, all four writers seek to disrupt the rigidity of the boundaries often erected between what dominant modes of thinking in the Western philosophic tradition have categorized as organic and inorganic.

https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/...thesis.pdf

By Maureen Roberts.

Full text.

https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ron/199.../005734ar/

By William Gorski.

At Scribd:

https://www.scribd.com/document/45551748...iam-Gorski

In Indian mythology, mercury has a cosmic origin: it derives from the semen of the god Shiva. In this Indian Pahari painting from about 1770, a horse-riding virgin entices mercury out of a well and then over to an outdoor alchemical festival shown at top right.

Credit: Skulpturensammlung und Museum
 für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche / Sammlung L. Habighorst, Koblenz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahari_painting

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Lyndall Abraham

Abstract
Lepidus: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile. (II.vii.26-7) The phrase "the operation of your sun" is a distinctly alchemical term. It refers to the opus alchymicum as a whole and is first known to occur in one of the oldest and most famous alchemical documents, the Emerald Table: "What I have said concerning the operation of the Sun is finished." The Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Table, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus or the Egyptian Thoth, was not only one of the most important sources of medieval alchemy, but continued to be considered as the basis of alI alchemical law by alchemists right through to the seventeenth century.


5 pages. Open access.

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu....e/view/390