"Lady Alcumy": Elizabethan Gentlewomen and the Practice of Chymistry

<p>This thesis explores the advent of gentlewomen's chymical activities in Elizabethan England. In the sixteenth century, chymistry gained widespread currency under Queen Elizabeth I. This thesis argues that the queen's significant chymical interests contributed to her iconography, thereby bridging England's previously discrete chymical and female realms. It shows that Elizabeth's influence and fundamental societal changes enabled women, beginning with the gentry, to acquire and apply chymical knowledge. Four case studies highlight the queen's impact on her female subjects through an examination of primary manuscript and printed sources. The Protestant gentlewomen Grace Mildmay, Mary Sidney Herbert, Margaret Hoby and Margaret Clifford may first have encountered chymistry in the manifestation of their religious beliefs through charitable healing, but they developed their knowledge in very different ways. Evidence of their engagement with chymical practitioners and writings provides context for their activities. Shared motivations led to divergent practices, indicating that chymistry in Elizabethan England took as many forms as there were practitioners. This thesis asserts the crucial importance of community to early modern chymists, noting courtly links and overlapping social circles. It contributes to limited historiography on Elizabethan alchemy as well as female alchemists.</p>

"Lady Alcumy": Elizabethan Gentlewomen and the Practice of Chymistry

<p>This thesis explores the advent of gentlewomen's chymical activities in Elizabethan England. In the sixteenth century, chymistry gained widespread currency under Queen Elizabeth I. This thesis argues that the queen's significant chymical interests contributed to her iconography, thereby bridging England's previously discrete chymical and female realms. It shows that Elizabeth's influence and fundamental societal changes enabled women, beginning with the gentry, to acquire and apply chymical knowledge. Four case studies highlight the queen's impact on her female subjects through an examination of primary manuscript and printed sources. The Protestant gentlewomen Grace Mildmay, Mary Sidney Herbert, Margaret Hoby and Margaret Clifford may first have encountered chymistry in the manifestation of their religious beliefs through charitable healing, but they developed their knowledge in very different ways. Evidence of their engagement with chymical practitioners and writings provides context for their activities. Shared motivations led to divergent practices, indicating that chymistry in Elizabethan England took as many forms as there were practitioners. This thesis asserts the crucial importance of community to early modern chymists, noting courtly links and overlapping social circles. It contributes to limited historiography on Elizabethan alchemy as well as female alchemists.</p>

A Publishing History of A Discourse of Life and Death, Translated by the Countess of Pembroke

The short meditation, A discourse of life and death was translated by Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke in 1590 from Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort by Philippe de Mornay, seigneur du Plessis-Marly. This article presents the publishing history of Herbert’s translation and how it was adapted twice in the seventeenth century. First, it is found as an incomplete manuscript by ‘T. H. Gent.’ (BL MS Sloane 1037). The manuscript has the correct licence to print, but the wrong author, and was used as setting copy in the print shop of George Eld and Miles Flesher in early 1624. All copies of that edition are now lost. In 1697 Herbert’s translation was revised again as the ‘contemplations’ of Sir John Fenwick before his execution for treason.

Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre

Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England. This collection uses adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches to analyze early modern transformations of Ovid, providing innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. The chapters explore Ovidian adaptations in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lyly, Hewood, among others. The volume is divided into four sections: I. Gender/Queer/Trans Studies and Ovidian Rhizomes; II. Ovidian Specters and Remnants; III. Affect, Rhetoric, and Ovidian Appropriation; and IV. Ovid Remixed: Transmedial, Rhizomatic, and Hyperreal Adaptations.” Focusing on these larger topics, this book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance. The book contains chapters by Simone Chess, Shannon Kelley, Daniel G. Lauby, Deborah Uman, Lisa S. Starks, John S. Garrison, Catherine Winiarski, Jennifer Feather, John D. Staines, Goran Stanivukovic, Louise Geddes, Liz Oakley-Brown, Ed Gieskes, and Jim Casey.

Sacred Bonds

This chapter explores the link between familial and religious devotion by comparing a sibling relationship enacted in poems by and about Mary Sidney Herbert, co-author of Renaissance England’s influential Sidney-Pembroke Psalter, to hagiographic sources reporting on the love between mothers and daughters in early Syriac Christian texts. While in the Syriac context, the accounts of mothers and daughters reveal Christians responding to the urbanization of asceticism by joining familial and ascetic bonds, the renewed biblicism in sixteenth-century England inspired poetry preoccupied with the relational dynamics of authorship, translation, and prayer. The chapter further explores the ways that these varied accounts of spiritual relationships might shed light on the relationality of pedagogy and the transformative potential of relationships between teachers and students.