Female Alchemists | AlchemyHQ

If you have ever heated a beaker of water in a saucepan in a chemistry class, you have used an apparatus that medieval alchemists called the balneum Mariae — “Mary’s bath.” The name commemorates Maria the Jewess, also called Maria Hebraea or Mary the Prophetess, a figure of the third or fourth century CE who is credited in the later Greek alchemical tradition with the invention or refinement of several pieces of laboratory glassware that became standard (Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, pp. 18-19; Kahn, L’Alchimie et la Tradition, 2014). The water bath, the tribikos (a reflux still), and the kerotakis (a sealed vessel for heating metals under controlled atmospheres) are all attributed to her in the Byzantine corpus. The attribution is not certain; the corpus is anonymous, and “Maria” may be a way of signing work to an authority. But the tradition is consistent enough that the name has stuck for more than a millennium. Maria the Jewess is, by any reasonable accounting, the most important female figure of the early alchemical tradition, and her name is on a piece of equipment still in use.

The historical Maria

The fragments attributed to Maria survive in the Greek alchemical manuscripts of the Byzantine period, edited by Marcellin Berthelott for the Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs (1888). The most reliable of the fragments is the short text On the water bath, which is a technical discussion of distillation at low heat. Other fragments touch on the theory of metallic composition, but the attributions are uncertain. Several modern scholars — Kahn, Priesner, and Principe among them — treat the corpus as the work of a school rather than a single individual. That is the right reading, in my view. The “Maria” of the alchemical tradition is at least partly a literary figure standing for a workshop practice that was already ancient when the name was attached to it.

But the literary status of Maria is itself significant. The alchemists who came after her treated her as a foundational authority on laboratory technique, and the treatment tells us something about how the early alchemical community understood its own history. The balneum Mariae is the most enduring of her contributions, and the name is still in chemistry and cooking. That is not nothing.

Cleopatra the Alchemist, and others

Cleopatra the Alchemist — not to be confused with Cleopatra VII — is a similar figure. She is credited with a treatise on the weights and measures used in the alchemical laboratory, and her name appears in the Greek alchemical corpus. The historical Cleopatra the Alchemist is shadowy in the same way Maria is, and the works attributed to her are probably by later authors working under her name (Priesner, Geschichte der Alchemie, 2011). Theosebeia, mentioned in Zosimos’s Authentic Memoirs as a respected teacher of the alchemical art, is the most securely attested female figure of the period. Paphnutia, mentioned in Zosimos’s Final Account as a practitioner, has been conflated with St. Paphnutius of Thebes; the conflation is modern and not supported by the standard hagiographic sources. The Greek tradition also refers to unnamed women who appear as practitioners, students, and patrons, and the references are the documentary base for any honest history of women in the tradition.

The medieval Latin record

The medieval Latin alchemical tradition is thinner on women, and the most important figure is also the most legendary. Perrenelle, the wife of Nicolas Flamel, allegedly participated in the alchemical work of her husband and allegedly achieved personal immortality with him. The historical record is not kind to this picture. Perrenelle appears in the Flamel legend, not in any document that Flamel himself signed. The 1760s excavation of the 1418 grave by Paul Lucas reportedly contained a single male skeleton (Kahn, L’Alchimie et la Tradition, 2014). The Lucas account is in the Recueil des antiquités and is discussed by Douet-d’Arcq in the Revue archéologique (1860s). I think the standard conclusion — that Perrenelle is a later literary addition — is right.

The medieval Latin tradition also includes women who worked in scriptoria and laboratories, and women of the courtly tradition who patronized alchemists. Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, owned alchemical manuscripts including British Library MS Sloane 2 (Kahn, 2014). The claim that Isabella of Portugal, wife of Philip the Good of Burgundy, was an alchemist rests on no contemporaneous source and should be set aside.

The early modern period: more evidence, harder cases

The early modern period brought a real increase in the documentary record for women in the alchemical tradition, and a real increase in the difficulty of interpreting it. The cases fall into two groups: women who are remembered because they were punished, and women who are remembered because they published.

Anna Maria Zieglerin (d. 1575) is the most striking of the punished. She was a German alchemical impostor executed for fraud, not the author of a treatise. The “Geheimnis” text associated with her name is in fact by Heinrich Wöller, and Zieglerin’s case is documented in the Wöller Geheimnis of 1582 and in the trial records. Historians used to treat Zieglerin as an alchemist of unusual accomplishment. The documentary evidence does not support that reading, and Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (2013, pp. 18-22) is firm on the point.

Marie Meurdrac (c. 1610-1680) is the more encouraging case. Her La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames (1666) is one of the earliest chemical treatises written by a woman, and the book is best described as a household chemistry and cosmetics manual drawing on the Paracelsian and Helmontian traditions. It is not a work of speculative alchemy, but it is a serious practical treatise, and the fact that it exists — and was reprinted — is itself significant (Kahn, 2014; Priesner, 2011).

Jane Leade (1624-1704) is a different kind of figure. An English mystic and founder of the Philadelphian Society, Leade was influenced by the Hermetic tradition, by Jakob Böhme, and by the Christian Kabbalah. The alchemical link is indirect, but it is real. Isabella Cortese (1561), author of I Secreti della Signora Isabella Cortese, is an alchemical and medicinal recipe book aimed at women, and the book had a long print run.

The claim that the Marquise de Pompadour organized an “alchemical salon” in the way some accounts suggest is not supported by the sources. Pompadour hosted the Count of Saint-Germain at the Petit Trianon and the Tuileries, but her salon was philosophical and political, not alchemical (Kahn, 2014). The Saint-Germain link is real. The alchemical salon is a modern embellishment.

The modern esoteric tradition

The modern esoteric tradition has been more welcoming to women than the earlier alchemical traditions, and the shift is partly the work of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky treated the alchemical tradition as one of the major sources of her system, and the Theosophical inheritance made room for women in a way the earlier traditions had not (Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, 2008). Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Mary Anne Atwood (1813, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery) are all part of the modern Theosophical and post-Theosophical inheritance, and the alchemical tradition is one part of that broader current.

The obstacles

The obstacles women faced in the alchemical tradition were the obstacles they faced in every other learned tradition. The universities, the major institutional settings for the transmission of alchemical knowledge, were closed to women until the nineteenth century. Alchemy was not formally guild-organized, but women’s access to the workshops, courts, monasteries, and apothecary shops where alchemists worked was mediated by family and patrons, and the mediation made entry harder. The alchemical literature was overwhelmingly written by men, and women’s contributions were often attributed to male authors or simply not recorded. Women in the alchemical tradition were sometimes suspected of being witches, and the suspicion made open practice dangerous. The obstacles are real, and the absence of more women from the documentary record is partly explained by them. It is not entirely explained. The historiographical recovery of women in alchemy — the work of Kahn, Priesner, Principe, and others — is still in progress.

The contemporary situation

The contemporary alchemical tradition is more welcoming than the historical one. The spagyric revival, the Hermetic orders, and the modern alchemical associations all have significant female participation, and the Weleda company is only the most visible of a larger population of practitioners. The recovery of women’s historical contributions is now an explicit project in the historiography of alchemy, and the project is producing real results. The reader who is interested in the women of the alchemical tradition should know that the record is partial, that the recovery is still in progress, and that Maria the Jewess — the woman whose name is on a piece of equipment still in use — is the appropriate place to start.