Everyday Alchemy

"Everyday Alchemy" travels to kitchens and stillrooms, paper mills and printhouses, gardens and beehives to consider how men and women in early modern England used animal, domestic, and artisanal practices to engage in alchemical speculation and experimentation. Examining texts across genres and media, I demonstrate that textual use and production was central to this alchemical speculation and experimentation. Following Paracelsus's promotion of alchemical approaches to medicine, alchemical theories and practices proliferated in English manuscript and print. Vernacular print texts shared alchemical knowledge and advocated for the epistemic value of experience. Readers and compilers assessed, tested, revised, and distilled what they read, incorporating alchemical knowledge into early modern household science, especially household physic. The first two chapters, "Reading" and "Writing," trace alchemical knowledge across print and manuscript to show how different early modern people used and repurposed what they read. The third chapter and coda, "Paper" and "Ink," explore how even the material text was inflected with alchemical wonder. Ultimately, examining alchemical knowledge within a variety of textual genres and media illuminates that early modern alchemy was not exclusive to eccentrics or elites. Instead, alchemical texts could be popular, printed, and vernacular; alchemical practices could be domestic and routine; and alchemical practitioners were diverse in their beliefs, practices, and identities.