The Alchemical Feminine - M.E. Warlick

The Alchemical Feminine: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Alchemical Images

M.E. Warlick

"The product of more than 25 years of research, M.E. Warlick's The Alchemical Feminine is a pioneering analysis of a hitherto neglected aspect of alchemy. Framing the subject's rich and diverse iconography within chronological, geographical, and thematic terms, Warlick's argument examines the shifting presentation and emphasis given to the feminine within an ever more masculine domain.

Summarising the book, the author notes: 'The images of women compiled in this volume evolved from alchemical philosophy, in which gendered and sexualized concepts are used to describe physical matter and laboratory processes. When alchemical imagery arose in the late Middle Ages, and over the next three centuries, images of women developed in ways that reflected wider social pressures. Building on scholarly studies of the increasing exclusion of women from public arenas in the early modern period, The Alchemical Feminine examines the transformations of alchemical images of women and the increasing masculinization of earlier feminine imagery.'

When alchemy returned from the Middle East to the Latin West, metals were thought to be composed of hot, dry, fixed, Philosophic Sulphur (masculine), and cool, moist, volatile, Philosophic Mercury (feminine). In the laboratory, these lovers fused in a 'Chemical Wedding' that produced their child, the 'Philosophers’ Stone,' a mysterious catalyst enabling the transformation of base metals into silver and gold. As alchemical imagery developed, women appeared as philosophers, religious figures, royal queens, sexual partners, cosmological personifications, mythological deities, allegorical symbols of Nature and the wives of fools. Herbal alchemy also had ancient roots, and it is in this realm that women as alchemical practitioners can be found.

With more than 200 illustrations, this ground-breaking book examines the alchemical feminine and the thematic diversity of alchemical images of women."

• Fulgur Press, the leading independent publisher for esotericism and magic in visual culture. United Kingdom

M. E. Warlick, Ph.D., Professor of European Modern Art at the University of Denver, teaches classes on 18th through 20th century European art. She has received DU’s Distinguished Professor Award (1991), and served as University Professor of the Arts and Humanities (1997-2000). Her books include: Max Ernst and Alchemy (University of Texas Press, 2001) and The Philosopher’s Stones (1997), rev. ed. The Alchemy Stones (2002). She has published on surrealist art and the occult, and on alchemical imagery from antiquity through the mid-17th century, analysed through a feminist lens, with articles in the Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Glasgow Emblem Studies, Culture and Cosmos, and in several anthologies published by the Association for the Study of Esotericism. Her essay on “Surrealism and Alchemy,” appeared in the Art and Alchemy exhibition catalogue (Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast, 2014). Her most recent book is entitled The Alchemical Feminine: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Alchemical Imagery (Fulgur Press, 2025).

Details:

1500 copies printed only
Hardback
30cm x 24cm
308 pages
196 coloured illustrations | 10 monochrome
2.5 kg
English text