The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616–1619

342 Pages·2015·3.09 MB·English

University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap
A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick
http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/71980
This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright.
Please scroll down to view the document itself.
Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to
cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page.
Women's Alchemical Literature 1560-1616 in Italy, France, the Swiss

Cantons and England, and its Diffusion to 1660

Penny Bayer

Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies
University of Warwick

Submitted for the degree of PhD in Comparative Literature

April 2003

(This electronic version created August 2015 with minor changes in presentation)
Contents

Acknowledgements

Summary

Chapter one Introduction 1

Chapter two The Cultural Context 45
The impact of Paracelsianism on women 46
Reading Paracelsian-cabalistic-alchemical ideas 55
The significance of alchemy in court culture 63
Humanism and women's education 70
Alchemy, theology and spiritual practice 73
Alchemy and household management 86

Chapter three La Signora Isabella Cortese's I Secreti and the context:
other Italian women's participation in alchemy 95

Chapter four Madame de la Martinville, Quercitan’s Daughter,
circulating manuscripts, and the context:
participation by other French/Swiss women in alchemy 147

Chapter five Lady Margaret Clifford, an alchemical receipt book, and
the context: other Englishwomen's participation
in alchemy 204

Chapter six Conclusion 263

Bibliography 285

Tables and Figures

Table one Manuscripts referring to women in the circle of
Joseph du Chesne (Quercitanus) 149

Table two Main manuscripts discussed in relation to
The Margaret manuscript 206
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three people who have contributed significantly to the shape of this
thesis. Susan Bassnett guided, developed and energised my thoughts, and helped with Italian
translation. Jane Stevenson fostered creative writing, offered support, and helped with French
and Latin translation and palaeographical problems. Charles Webster offered encouragement
and ideas on some chapters.
Special generosity was shown by Lyndy Abraham, who put aside work on a similar
subject, and Jayne Archer, who lent her thesis. Members of the internet-based Alchemy
Academy shared their knowledge, particularly Jan Bäcklund, Michal Pober, Corey Hollis,
and Adam McLean. Mark Haeffner, Heidi Collins and Heather Ummel were also generous
with their help.
Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson kindly commented on the hands in The Margaret
manuscript. Stephen Clucas, Stephen Johnston, Diane Purkiss, Sue Maxwell, Mark Haeffner
and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke provided helpful information or ideas. Tony Smith translated
specific Latin phrases, and Piotr Kuhiwczak and Emil Wagner advised on a Czech text.
Numerous Librarians and Archivists have helped this project: thanks are due to Richard Hall
and Anne Rowe in the Cumbrian Record Office; Isabelle de Conihout, Conservateur,
Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris; Bengt Rur, Riksarkivet, Stockholm; Palle Ringsted, Det
Kongelige Bibliotek, Kopenhagen; Zaoal Roman for help in the state archive, Olomouc, and
Olomouc University; Karla Faust, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; Christine Butler, Archivist,
Corpus Christi College, Oxford; staff of the Bodleian Library, particularly Jack Flavel, and
all in Duke Humphries and the Upper Reading Room.
Finally, the biggest acknowledgement is to my partner Malcolm, who sacrificed a
great deal to enable me to study. This thesis is dedicated to him, and to the memory of my
sister Venetia.
This dissertation is written in accordance with the MHRA Style Book: Notes for
authors, editors, and writers of theses (London: Modern Humanities Research Association,
1996). In transcription of primary sources I have normally retained the form of the original
except for expansions of contractions which are indicated by underlining. In the rare cases
that any further amendment has been made this is explained in a footnote.
This thesis is 75,810 words in length exclusive of appendices, footnotes, tables and
bibliography, in accordance with the regulations of the University of Warwick.
Summary
This thesis seeks to show that there were alchemical writings associated with women from
Italy, France, the Swiss Cantons and England which originated in the period 1560 to 1616,
and that these writings were read, translated, circulated, and referred to, at least up to 1660.
The main evidence is provided by case studies: a printed book of secrets by Isabella Cortese
(Venice, 1561); a sequence of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century manuscripts
associated with Madame de la Martinville and Quercitan’s daughter (Jeanne du Port); and
material, including an alchemical receipt book, associated with Lady Margaret Clifford
(1560-1616). Supporting evidence suggests these women represent a wider participation of
women in philosophical and practical alchemy, and adds to the evidence for evaluating
women's participation in early modern philosophy and science. Women apparently read and
wrote about alchemy, and assisted its diffusion through their work as editors, compilers,
translators and patrons.
The thesis compares writings from different genres and languages, and addresses
issues such as the problem of defining alchemy, complexities of textual interpretation, and
the difficulty of ascertaining women’s authorship or symbolic representation. Through a
comparative process, the thesis discusses possible reasons for representations of women's
alchemical practice based in key cultural themes: Paracelsian ideas, ambiguous readings of
texts, women’s education, spiritual practice and household work, and their liaison with male
experts and European networks. The underlying association of the alchemical metaphor of
knowledge, that the material world could be returned to a perfected heavenly state, is
interpreted with varying sophistication.
The thesis considers how these women accommodated gender to alchemical
philosophy. It suggests that there was scope for ambiguous interpretation, both of alchemical
texts and of shared injunctions for early modern women and medieval alchemist monks to be
silent, chaste, and obedient. Women may have used alchemy as an area in which to resist
passivity and demonstrate their agency.
Introduction
I deliver you the health of the soule; which is this most pretious pearl of all perfection, this rich
diamond of devotion, this perfect gold growing in the veines of that excellent earth of the most blessed
Paradice, wherein our second Adam had his restlesse habitation.
Aemilia Lanyer to Lady Margaret Clifford, 1610/1611.1

Aemila Lanyer’s use of the alchemical metaphor in her poetic address to Lady Margaret
Clifford was specifically targeted, since Lady Margaret practised alchemy. Nevertheless, the
allusion would have been intelligible to a wider audience. During Lady Margaret’s lifetime
(1560 to 1616) interest in alchemy was a European phenomenon, expressed through craft,
intellectual discussion, and literary and artistic forms. It was associated with natural
philosophy, spiritual practice, science, medicine, crafts such as dyeing, metal-working,
horticulture, and the distillation of perfumes and waters, and through metaphors and
representations in literature and art.2 The absorption of the medieval alchemical tradition into

1 Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum. Containing, 1. the Passion of Christ, 2. Eves Apologie in defence
of Women, 3. The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem, 4. the Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie
(London: Richard Bonian, 1611), prefatory poem at p. 31 hand numbered in Bodleian Library, Vet A2 f. 99. The
nine extant versions, all of which include the prose dedication to Margaret Clifford, are described by Susanne
Woods in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. l - xlvii. Woods suggests
that as the Victoria and Albert copy, presented to Prince Henry, James I elder son, bears the annotation
"Cumberland", it might have been presented originally to Margaret Clifford. See also Barbara Lewalski,
'Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems', in Writing Women in Jacobean England, ed. by
Lewalski (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 212-41; and Renaissance Women: The Plays of
Elizabeth Cary and the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. by Diane Purkiss (London: William Pickering, 1994) pp.
xxx-xxxvii, particularly fn. 76, p. xlvi, where the presentation copies are discussed.
2 See Eric John Holmyard, Alchemy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); William Eamon, Science and the Secrets
of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of
George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1994) p. 84-7; Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Science History Publications,1977); Charles Webster,
‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. by
Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 301-333. On alchemy as a cultural
phenomenon also see Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, transl. by M. Cook (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Mark Haeffner, The Dictionary of Alchemy (London: Aquarian Press,
1991) pp.12-13. Despite rigorous criticism Frances Yates’ work on the far-reaching impact of Renaissance
hermetic-alchemical-cabalistic ideas remains significant, and has been extended by Peter French and R.J. Evans.
A comprehensive study of alchemical literature is provided by Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hieroglyphicks
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996) who shows that references to alchemy appeared in a wide
range of genres. Robert Schuler argues for a variation of “spiritual alchemies” from one cultural context to
another (‘Some Spiritual Alchemies of Seventeenth Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41
1
humanist trends resulted in what might be termed a “golden age” of alchemy.3 The allegorical
nature of some alchemical literature lent itself to humanist appropriation, but the wider
alchemical metaphor was also expressed in a large corpus of sources of theory and practice
for the alchemist, ranging from learned works to scrappy manuscripts.4
This thesis seeks to show that this alchemical corpus included work associated with
women, from several countries. It draws on evidence which has not been previously
examined in great detail, probably because standard histories of alchemy have not focused
primarily on the issue of women’s role in early modern alchemy.5 However, this study adds
to, and is situated within, a body of work written from different scholarly perspectives, which
illustrates shifting trends in the treatment of women and gender in twentieth century literature
on alchemy. Early works focus on canonical figures of “great men”, with any slight
discussion of women alchemists scattered, without focus on the question of women’s role.
Arthur E. Waite’s Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers, 1888, and John Read’s The
Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art, 1947, fail to include a single life of a woman
alchemist.6 The beginnings of a more inclusive approach appear in the late 1960s and early

(1980), 293-318. See also John Read, The Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art (Largs, Scotland: The Banton
Press, 1990, first pub. 1947).
3 The social range of alchemical interest before this period is suggested by Thomas Norton of Bristol (fl. 1470s),
reprinted by Elias Ashmole in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London: J. Grimmond, 1652) p. 6, who
describes the wide appeal of alchemy, to popes, cardinals, archbishops, abbots, priors, friars, kings, princes,
lords, merchants, common noblemen, goldsmiths, weavers, Freemasons, tanners, parish clerks, tailors, glaziers
and tinkers, but indicates that many have been too credulous “For it is most profound Philosophie/The subtill
science of Alkimy”. The “endemic” nature of alchemical activity in the late sixteenth century is described in
Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian medicine’, p. 313. On the justification for calling the Renaissance a
golden age of alchemy see p. 6 of this thesis.
4 Newman, Gehennical Fire, p. 135.
5 See Holmyard, Alchemy; Read, The Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art; Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1972), The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London:
Routledge, 1979), Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964); Lynn
Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923); Arthur
Edward Waite, Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers (London: G. Redway, 1888). Throughout this study I
use "early modern" to designate the broader period, from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, within which the
narrower period of the material in this thesis is situated: it is recognised as a useful but artificial modern
category.
6 Waite, The Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers. Carl Jung's pioneering analysis of the alchemical corpus
is significant for discussions of the psychological meaning of "the feminine principle", but does not address the
cultural issue of women's embodied participation. He regards alchemy and its formulations to be of a mainly
masculine character. C.W. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953);
2
1970s, contemporaneously with second wave feminism. John Holmyard makes passing
reference to occasional women practitioners, such as Anne of Austria, Anne of Denmark,
Marie de Medici, Perenelle Flamel, and the wife of Helvetius, though without consideration
of gender issues.7 Jack Lindsay’s 1970 standard work on semi-mythical women of the
Græco-Egyptian period draws on the work of Marcelin Berthelot, the collector and translator
of Greek alchemical texts, to describe alchemical literature attributed to Isis, Maria the
Jewess, Cleopatra, Theosebeia, and Paphnutia, whose stories resurface in the European
alchemical tradition from the twelfth century onwards.8
During the late 1970s seeds of a more comprehensive approach were sown. In 1978
Cherry Gilchrist noted potential for further research on women with alchemical interests,
expressing the opinion that there probably had been women alchemists as yet unrecorded in
history.9 Charles Webster, in 1979, described the important role of Lady Mary Herbert in her
sixteenth century ‘academy’ at Wilton, suggesting that alchemical practice was taking place
in a literary milieu.10
When, in the 1980s and 1990s, feminist literary critics and historians directly
addressed the question of gender in alchemy, it was argued that Renaissance alchemy
developed as a “men only” activity, by which men sought to understand and recreate
women’s biological and psychic secrets. In 1980 Sally G. Allen and Joanna Hubbs argued
that a masculinist bias in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens indicates that the alchemist
sought “nothing more than the magic of maternity conferred on the ‘lesser’ half of the
species” with a “vehement absorption and denial of the feminine by the masculine”, a process

Alchemical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968); 'The Psychology of the Transference', in The
Practice of Psychotherapy (London: Routledge, 1993, 1st ed. 1954) pp. 163-320 (p. 296).
7 Holmyard, Alchemy, pp. 210, 212, 238, 240-6.
8 Jack Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London: Frederick Muller, 1970) pp. 194-209,
240-261, 343; Marcelin Berthelot, Collection des Anciens Alchimistes Grecs (Paris: Steinheil, 1887).
9 Cherry Gilchrist, Alchemy: The Great Work (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1978) pp. 88-90.
10 Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian medicine’, pp. 301-333 (pp. 306-7).
3