Women Writers and Alchemy in Early Modern Britain

Scholars have long known that writers such as Shakespeare, Milton and Marvell drew upon alchemy – the craft of chemical transmutation – to depict the transformative operations of the male literary imagination. But how did the female contemporaries of these male authors utilise alchemical discourse? Sajed Chowdhury shows that alchemy had particular relevance for women because of its affiliation with 'kitchen chymistry': the domestic production of medicine, culinary ingredients and cosmetics. He analyses how women writers manipulated 'chymical' discourse to foreground the transformative intellectual agency of female alchemical practitioners. Diverse authors and genres are discussed, including medical papers and prose meditations by Grace Mildmay, poetry by Hester Pulter and plays and fiction by Margaret Cavendish. Reintegrating women's literary thought and practice to early modern British 'chymical' understandings of mind, soul and body, this study is a landmark in histories of science and women's writing.