ABSTRACT

Popular alchemical texts printed in England between 1580 and 1680 seek to parse and manipulate the divisions and binaries structuring the natural and social worlds, particularly the fundamental categories of male and female, their relative power, and their relationships to reproduction. 1 These books refl ect the emergence of novel early modern ideas about anatomy, bodies, and natural philosophers’ relationships to their arts and the world they were trying to change. The books’ signifi cance as a site of negotiation for ideas about sex, gender, and sex differences and their place in the changing genre of alchemical writing and practice is epitomized by the image of the chemical marriage and the complicated sexual combinations that romantic image shields. Though becoming increasingly unique within seventeenth-century natural philosophy for championing the sympathetic powers of similarity and the power of metaphor in the face of growing emphases on difference and empiricism, alchemy was not merely a vestige of Renaissance hermeticism, for it prompted the drafting, translation, and printing of thousands of pages during that century alone. Including multiple editions of the same book, more than one hundred English alchemical texts were printed during this period by a large number of printers. No single printer dominated the alchemical book trade in England, though a few repeatedly collaborated.