Biographical details for George Ripley (c.1415-c.1490), one of England's best-known alchemical authorities, are sketchy, but he is known to have travelled widely on the Continent in search of alchemical wisdom. Whilst a canon regular at the Augustinian priory at Bridlington in Yorkshire, he conducted alchemical experiments and wrote widely on the subject. Ripley's popular alchemical poem, The Compound of Alchemy, has survived in many manuscript versions, was first printed in 1591 with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth, and prompted many explications and commentaries during the two centuries following Ripley's death. Originally dedicated by Ripley to King Edward IV, the poem figures the King as a kind of alchemical aspirant who, having received instructions from Ripley, his alchemical master, is enabled to glimpse the arcane secrets of the art. The Compound of Alchemy is not only a treatise concerning mastery of the twelve stages of the alchemical process leading to the philosopher's stone, it is also a work of poetry composed in rhyme royal stanzas.This modern critical edition is based on the full text of the 1591 printed edition and is preceded by an introduction containing a chronology of Ripley's life, a survey of manuscripts, an analysis of the 1591 printed edition and its cultural context, and an examination of the ways in which Ripley's aims and objectives are closely linked to the work's verse format. The edition also contains a commentary, bibliography, index, and illustrations.

Table of contents

The Ancient Hidden Art of Alchemie, Containing the right and perfect means To make the Philosophers Stone Aurum Potabile, with other Excellent Experiments, Divided lnto Twelve Gates. Sir George Ripley (c. 1415-1490) was an English Augustinian canon, author, and alchemist.

This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.

A 400-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects. Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.

Explores the myriad ways in which alchemy was conceptualised by adepts and sceptics alike, from those with recourse to a fully functioning laboratory to those who did not know their pelican from their athanor!

In this classic text, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a strange language to explore what it is a painter really does in the studio—the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colors will mix, and how they will look. Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction and preface by Elkins in which he further reflects on the experience of painting and its role in the study of art today.