| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores how four female poets—Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Hester Pulter (1607-1678), Katherine Philips (1632-1664), and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)—conceptualise poetry as an alchemy of the mind that nonetheless has real, practical implications for themselves and for their readers. The ‘alchemical poetics’ of these women writers thus exhibit a lively interest in, and radical transformation of, alchemical thought that grapples variously with the saving of souls, healing of the body, and transmutation of matter. More crucially, I contend that this grouping of women writers is actively participating in the evolution of alchemical thought through poetry. </p>
<p>Over the course of this thesis, I present the ‘alchemical poetics’ of Lanyer, Pulter, Philips, and Cavendish as creatively engaging with, and rethinking, a wide range of alchemical authors and ideas in ways that have hitherto been underappreciated by literary critics as well as historians of science. In this regard, my thesis integrates recent shifts in the history of science and the role of women, but also fruitfully extends them into new and exciting territory. The promotion of the importance of women in histories of alchemy, now widely recognised as important to a range of scientific activities in the early modern period, has occurred alongside renewed interest in female writers of the early modern period; yet only a handful of critics have actually seen how these fields are mutually informative—a missed opportunity that this thesis aims to redress. </p>
<p>In four chapters, each dealing with a single author, I reveal hitherto uncovered connections between alchemical communities and draw on newly identified alchemical source material to address the deeply-rooted interconnections between alchemical practice and its poetic representation. I interrogate what this alchemical material generates in a specifically poetic context, and map how this distinctly poetic engagement shifts over the seventeenth century. The content of this thesis as well as chronological arrangement therefore seeks to reveal new perspectives not only on how these female poets engaged with the substance of early modern alchemical thought, theology, politics, and literary culture, but also how serious their contemporaries also understood that engagement to be. </p>
|
|---|