Alchemy, Agency, and Religious Conversion

There’s a strong conceptual affinity between religious conversion and alchemy. In both cases, a material undergoes a radical – even fundamental – change. Conceptualizing such a change requires drastic, even mystical, vocabulary. Jeffrey Shoulson has recently argued that Shakespeare draws on alchemical tropes in Merchant of Venice to analogize religious conversion. I will build upon his analysis to interrogate how such an analogy affects the agency of religious conversion. While Post-Reformation conversion narratives tend towards the internal, how do alchemical analogies complicate such interiority?

Specifically, I will analyze the writings of the natural philosopher and serial religious convert Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) alongside Jonson’s Alchemist and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Digby claimed to have found the recipe for the “powder of sympathy,” a compound which purports to cure a wound when applied — not to the wound itself — but rather to the object that created the wound. I argue that his “sympathetic powder” offers a useful opportunity to meditate on questions of agency and transformation.

Like Digby, Ben Jonson conformed to the English Church for a period of years before returning to the Roman Catholic faith. Yet in The Alchemist, as in perhaps all of his city comedies, one might ask: Are his characters capable of conversion? I will argue that alchemical metaphors will hold one clue to developing a Jonsonian theory of religious conversion. In returning to Shakespeare, my hope is that the discussion of sympathy, agency, and alchemy will then allow us to bring the same set of questions back to Shylock and Jessica: They seem both “forced” and yet “not allowed” to “turn Christian.” Perhaps a set of alchemical principles will help us understand that double bind.   

Selected Sources

Craig, Martin. Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014.

Digby, Kenelm. A late discourse made in a solemn assembly . . . touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy. London, 1658.  

Lobis, Seth. Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015.

Shoulson, Jeffrey S. Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2013.

Watson, Robert N. Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.

Brief Bio

I am an Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. My work has dealt with serial converts in early modern England as well as the role of the senses in idolatry discourse. In this paper, I will see if I can merge my two projects.