WALCHEMY · Early Modern Women and Alchemy, 1550-1700
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2021-03-31
- EU contribution
- €175,572
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Early Modern Women and Alchemy, 1550-1700
Principal objective, the problems addressed, and the importance of the project for society: The principal objective of WALCHEMY was to produce the single-authored monograph: 'Women Writers and Alchemy in Early Modern Britain'. During the Renaissance, alchemy referred to the craft of chemical transmutation. Scholars have demonstrated that the invention and flourishing of printing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries facilitated the wide dissemination of alchemical knowledge in Europe. Whilst Renaissance male authors’ use of alchemical language is well known, women writer’s appropriation of chemical discourse is often overlooked. This monograph proposes that a vibrant female alchemical literary culture developed in early modern Britain in which women writers manipulated alchemical discourse to foreground the transformative physical, spiritual and intellectual agency of the female chemical practitioner. This monograph is important because it uncovers a previously unrecognized female-authored chemical culture and in so doing challenges the assumption that scientific discourses and traditions are exclusively male. The full manuscript of this monograph has been completed and is currently being prepared for peer review with Cambridge University Press.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In 2017 UNESCO pointed out that only 30% of the world’s scientific researchers are women. One reason for this low statistic (according to UNESCO) is the lack of visible female role models. Feminist scholars such as Sarah Hutton, Alisha Rankin and Meredith Ray have turned to the era of the European scientific revolution – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – to investigate women’s contribution to the history of science. This research is important because it has spotlighted women scientists from the past and demonstrated that scientific enquiry is not simply a male phenomenon. There is, however, one area in the history of science that is noticeably understudied in relation to women writers but in which they were paradoxically most active: alchemy. Lyndy Abraham and Tara Nummedal have shown that alchemical knowledge – the craft of chemical transmutation, both physical and spiritual – was widely disseminated in this period because of the invention and flourishing of printing. I will concentrate on Anglophone female authors because scholars such as Stanton Linden and Robert Schuler have foregrounded a British male alchemical literary tradition, but have overlooked women’s participation in that tradition. I will produce the first in-depth book-length study to explore the influence of alchemy on early modern Anglophone female authors’ works. In so doing, my project seeks to recover a previously unrecognized female-authored alchemical culture that privileged the transformative power of the female mind, word, body and spirit. By adding the hitherto absent dimension of women’s literary thought and practice to our understanding of the alchemical and holistic mind-set of early modern Britain, this study will make a landmark contribution to the histories of science and women’s writing. As such, it will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in women’s engagement with science and the cross-fertilization between scientific discourses and literary language.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN · LeidenCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/839419
- https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/sajed-chowdhury/publications
Data: CORDIS, © European Union