As Abraham points out in her informative Introduction, alchemy as practised and commented upon in the Renaissance is a combination of science and philosophy. By the eighteenth century, alchemy ‘separated itself into a materialistic chemistry and an esoteric spiritual discipline’. While its scientific status declined, it continued to have a powerful influence as a form of mystical philosophy, an influence that can be traced through figures as diverse as Jung, Yeats, Klee and Pollock. Alchemy, as a system of thought, has its own language and, apart from a few obvious terms, its incredibly complex terminology is almost impenetrable to most people today. This is, indeed, an intended outcome, as alchemists saw themselves as operating at the heart of a mystery which needed to be concealed from lay people, and they set out to ensure that those outside the mysteries remained ignorant. Abraham aptly quotes Geber on this point: ‘Wheresoever we have spoken plainly, there we have spoken nothing, but where we have used riddles and figures, there we have hidden the truth.’

Because alchemy was such a complex and self-enclosed system of thought, a dictionary such as this one is essential if you want to understand the myriad references strewn through Renaissance literature, and the more modern writers and artists who continued to find in alchemy a source of inspiration. As a teacher of Renaissance literature, I will be making good use of this dictionary when puzzling my way through the obscurer parts of poems such as Donne’s ‘Love’s Alchemy’ and plays like Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and my students will certainly be much wiser if they consult it. (It might be worth noting, in parentheses, that at least libraries, despite diminishing resources, are still buying dictionaries and reference books, so one can assume that students will have access to Abraham’s work, especially considering its quite reasonable price in paperback.)

A reviewer of a dictionary needs to try it out as it would normally be used, and this dictionary passes that test. I used ‘Love’s Alchemy’ as a test case and, in looking up ‘elixir’, was directed to both red and white elixir: white is ‘a subtle, penetrating medicine with the power to transmute base metal into pure silver’, while red is the universal panacea, the philosopher’s stone itself, which changes all metals into gold and cures all ills (alas, Abraham supplies no recipe for this). ‘Pregnant’ led me to ‘bed’: the place where the chemical wedding takes place between male and female principles to produce the philosopher’s child. This child is, in fact, the stone itself, ‘sometimes personified as a female child representing sophia or wisdom’, and ‘When it has grown to maturity this infant has the power to conquer all disease and transform all things to perfection’. Abraham provides not just brief definitions, but entire histories of the use and development of the concepts and terms, so that, for example, her account of the philosophical child quotes from Newton and Andreae, and looks at various opinions expressed about its nature. The rich cross-referencing, quotation and layering of sources means that individual entries are like small historical essays. Some larger entries, such as the main one on the philosopher’s stone, may be read as highly informative essays in their own right.

Few readers are likely to move from using the dictionary in this way to a sustained reading of it, but anyone who moves beyond the Introduction and reads through from ‘ablution’ to ‘zephyr’ will accumulate an overview of alchemy throughout history. Ablution is ‘the stage in the circulation of the matter of the philosopher’s stone in the alembic when the blackness of the nigredo is washed and purified into the whiteness of the albedo’. This entry typically opens up from a description of the process to an account of its implications and allusions: Abraham explains that ‘The alchemists believed that in order for a metal to be transmuted it first had to be “killed” or dissolved into its prima materia’. This leads to a fascinating reference to Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, which describes the resultant alchemical rain: ‘Yet judg’d like vapours that from Limbecks rise, / It would in richer showers descend again.’ ‘Zephyr’ is ‘the mercurial vapour which rises in the alembic during the process of distillation and sublimation’, and we are provided with a quotation from The Alchemist as illustration.

Finally, on the subject of illustration, the dictionary is generously illustrated with a wide range of black-and-white images, drawing our attention to the powerful influence of alchemy on art, both scientific and more purely creative. The volume as a whole is beautifully produced and a credit both to Cambridge University Press and to its indefatigable author.