The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe

[Paul Ferguson]

"The second part of the book concludes with Allison Kavey’s essay on popular English alchemical texts in the seventeenth century, which represent, she argues, an alternative tradition to the dominant Aristotelian model of the natural world. Instead of a system of binaries, as in most early modern medical and other scientific works, Paracelsian alchemical discourse was based on ‘systems of sympathy’ exemplified in the metaphor of the ‘chemical marriage’ (p. 223); and if that metaphor seems simply to reinforce Aristotelian principles of balance or tension between opposites, Kavey suggests that in alchemical writing the element mercury – often associated with Ganymede – ‘hermaphroditically confounds these divisions’ (p. 223) and in effect dissolves the apparent difference between male and female elements into a unitary or ‘shared, fluid essence’ (p. 228). Kavey does not actually discuss human same-sex desire or love; rather, she focuses on the use writers on alchemy made of figures of gender instability and metamorphosis, including (albeit rarely) images of male-male coupling, to illustrate the otherwise occult process of chemical transformation."

The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe
edited by: Kenneth Borris, George Rousseau
London, Routledge, 2008, ISBN: 9780415446921; 292pp.


https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/701