The Alchemical Code in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'

Amongst the most striking allusions in 'To his Coy Mistress' are those to 'the lovers and the tomb' and to the 'amorous birds of prey', both well known images of the alchemical union of man and woman, and two of the most memorable emblems in the visual representation of the alchemical process. The union ofman and woman in alchemy signified the magical moment of the coniunctio or chemical wedding in which opposites were united to form an integrated whole. In treatises such as Mylius' Philosophia reformata (1622), which describe and represent the progress of the opus with a sequence of dramatic emblems, we encounter a whole series of male and female couplings and copulations. These emblems symbolized the union, at certain stages, of various substances and qualities such as sulphur and mercury, hot and cold, dry and moist, active and passive, and fixed and volatile. In his Lexicon of Alchemy (1612), Ruland defines the final 'union ofman and wife' as the 'copulation ofthe congealed spirit with the dissolved body'. From the chemical union of the congealed spirit with the purified body came the precious Philosopher's Stone, the third principle or divine knowledge which arose at this resolution of opposites. The Stone was poetically referred to as the 'son' or 'child' of the copulation of male and female, and was capable of converting lead into gold, and base man into the divine. But while male and female were kept apart, this crucial generation of the 'son' or Stone could not occur and so the opus was unable to proceed. The state of the matter in the alchemical vessel before the 'copulation' was said to be in a state of 'separation'

The Science of Pronominal Usage: He and It in Co-Reference to Inanimate Objects in Late Middle English Texts on Alchemy

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424210384225This article explores the variation between he and it in coreference to inanimate entities (such as mercury, sulfur, and salt). Using alchemical texts from the fifteenth century as material, the article demonstrates that there was much more variation in pronominal reference in this period than has previously been shown. Of the possible explanations suggested by previous research, the earlier grammatical gender system and transference from Latin do not seem to play a role, while pronoun clustering and pronominal reanalysis appear to influence the quantitative distribution. The scale of individuation used by Siemund and Stenroos to explain similar usage is shown not to be a straightforward predictor. Other factors such as personification and perceived similarities between animate and inanimate entities may affect the degree of perceived individuation. The choice of he over she seems to be influenced by pronominal reanalysis and straightforward personification in some cases. In other instances, it is speculated that the he usage reflects (stereotypical) gender conceptions in the Middle Ages