Holy Alchemists, Metallurgists, and Pharmacists: The Material Evidence for British Monastic Chemistry

Abstract

The history of alchemy has relied primarily on textual evidence with few studies of pictorial sources, and even fewer focusing on the material culture of alchemical practice. Building upon the small body of work in this area and applying it to monastic sites this paper analyses twenty-three assemblages from monastic sites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland to show that distillation, cupellation, and sublimation were all practised at British monastic sites. An attempt is made to explore the specific uses of these chemical processes at each site with alchemy, medical chemistry, and metallurgy all being indicated. It is concluded, that although explaining specific uses of chemical apparatus at any one site may be beyond the reach of current scholarship, more work is needed in this area so that monastic chemistry can be better understood through its material culture.