The New Murrey and Blue blog

When we think of alchemy and alchemists, we tend to categorise them as men. But no. There were women alchemists as well, as I discovered when I came upon this article which lists ten such women through history.

One of the ten caught my eye. She lived in the reign of Elizabeth I, who was herself interested in alchemy and had her own alchemist (of the more usual male sex), one Cornelius de Lannoy, whose task it was to discover the Philosophers’ Stone.

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, practised alchemy in a laboratory along with a large group of male researchers. She was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and like him was known for writing. Her name was apparently listed along with him, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. So a minor talent she was not!

When widowed she became well travelled, and died of smallpox on 25 September 1621, aged 59, at her London house in Aldersgate Street “….shortly after King James I had visited her at the newly completed Houghton House in Bedfordshire….” She seems to have been quite a bluestocking, with an interest in alchemical matters on the side. After a splendid funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral she was laid to rest in Salisbury Cathedral, beside her late husband in the Herbert family vault.

All of which simply doesn’t chime with my usual notion of alchemists!

You can read much much more about her here Mary Sidney – Wikipedia and here Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke | Poetry Foundation