02-16-2026, 10:15 AM
Kayla Perez.
In the Afro-Mediterranean world, alchemy served as a vessel for women's medical expertise amidst a shifting landscape of medical authority. The procedural grammar found in alchemical manuscripts underscores the significance of embodied practices in reproductive health.
"Abstract: This working paper reframes the interpretive difficulty surrounding medieval and early modern alchemical imagery not as obscurity to be decoded, but as displaced procedural knowledge. Examining alchemical manuscripts alongside women’s medical practice in the fourteenth–sixteenth-century Afro-Mediterranean world, it demonstrates that alchemical imagery preserves a procedural grammar organized around sequence, containment, regulated heat, rest, and regeneration. Verbatim evidence from the Trotula corpus and documentary material from the Cairo Geniza shows that this grammar governed household reproductive medicine transmitted through embodied practice rather than discursive text. As medical authority became increasingly institutionalized, this knowledge was reclassified and displaced from legitimate medicine while surviving within alchemy under new philosophical interpretations. The paper proposes a methodological shift from symbolic decoding to procedural analysis, restoring women’s medical labor to the history of early scientific knowledge."
https://www.academia.edu/161247769/Alche..._Centuries
In the Afro-Mediterranean world, alchemy served as a vessel for women's medical expertise amidst a shifting landscape of medical authority. The procedural grammar found in alchemical manuscripts underscores the significance of embodied practices in reproductive health.
"Abstract: This working paper reframes the interpretive difficulty surrounding medieval and early modern alchemical imagery not as obscurity to be decoded, but as displaced procedural knowledge. Examining alchemical manuscripts alongside women’s medical practice in the fourteenth–sixteenth-century Afro-Mediterranean world, it demonstrates that alchemical imagery preserves a procedural grammar organized around sequence, containment, regulated heat, rest, and regeneration. Verbatim evidence from the Trotula corpus and documentary material from the Cairo Geniza shows that this grammar governed household reproductive medicine transmitted through embodied practice rather than discursive text. As medical authority became increasingly institutionalized, this knowledge was reclassified and displaced from legitimate medicine while surviving within alchemy under new philosophical interpretations. The paper proposes a methodological shift from symbolic decoding to procedural analysis, restoring women’s medical labor to the history of early scientific knowledge."
https://www.academia.edu/161247769/Alche..._Centuries