This talk examines the connection of women to distillation in early modern Europe and the perceived divide between distilling medicines (viewed as women’s domain) and alchemy (viewed as a male activity). The close connection between women and medical distillation has been well established by historians and is reflected in myriad manuscripts and printed books across early modern Europe. In one particularly impressive example, an enormous handwritten tome compiled in 1580 by Countess Palatinate Elisabeth of Saxony (1552–1590) contains several thousand recipes for all kinds of distillates and cites hundreds of women as contributors, including prominent figures such as “the Queen in England” and “the Queen of Denmark;” numerous noblewomen in Countess Elisabeth’s circle of family and friends; and lesser-known women such as “Mrs. Otterstein,” “the stablemaster’s wife,” and “the young lady of Schwartzenburg.” This weighty book is just one of many direct testaments to the great interest in medical distillation in courtly circles and the close connection of women, especially noblewomen, to the practice. King Christian III of Denmark (1503-1559) turned to Countess Dorothea of Mansfeld (1493-1578) for advice when he was interested in setting up a distilling house in 1551. The prominent Swiss physician Johann Jacob Wecker (1528–1586) dedicated his printed book on medical distillates, published in 1569, to Countess Barbara of Waldeck because of the interest and inclination she had shown towards medicine in general and distillation in particular.
At the same time, Wecker situated his own book as part of a male line of succession, led by the “famous alchemist” Geber as well as the Arabic physicians Avicenna and Rhazes. Wecker framed his recipes as part of this learned tradition of distillation, claiming he had gathered them “in part from myself, in part from good friends, and in part from Latin and Italian books,” a statement intended to set his book apart from laywomen’s recipes. Other sixteenth-century authors, particularly the Frenchmen Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault (1564) and Olivier du Serres (1600), made deliberate attempts to distinguish women’s medical distillation from alchemical “abstractors of quintessences.” This talk argues that this divide was largely rhetorical and notes the many points of confluence between women’s distillation and early chemical processes.