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Chemistry’s relationship with literature reaches back to philosophers and classical poets like Epicurus and Lucretius; to alchemy’s rich symbolic representations in verbal and visual media; and to natural philosophy, with its abundant references to literary sources as support for scientific observation and interpretation.

Alchemy is probably the most popular chemical topic in the history of literature, and it has been given renewed actuality in today’s fantasy genres. Literary approaches to alchemy are recurrent in the remaining parts of this volume, beginning with section four, Histories of Alchemy. This section starts with Matteo Pellegrini’s historical survey, “Alchemists and Alchemy in Italian Literature from its Origins to Galileo Galilei”, which analyses written representations of the alchemist and his “science”, ranging from the medieval Bonagiunta Orbicciani and Cecco d’Ascoli to Dante Alighieri, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from the Renaissance of Ariosto to Galileo and the scientific revolution.

The subsequent chapter by Lillian Jorunn Helle, “On the Role of Alchemy and Chemistry in Russian Literature and Culture from Peter the Great to the Post-Soviet Period”, examines the intertwining of the arts and the sciences in Russian cultural and intellectual history, investigating how topics from scientific and proto-scientific spheres are narrated in literary and cultural settings. It draws attention to the portrayal of Peter the Great and Lenin as God-like alchymists, capable of modelling the New Human. Lillian Helle argues that the esoteric and spiritualistic aspects of alchemy, the alkimia speculativa, was equally important as the alkimia operativa; she emphasises the idea that transmutation was not limited to metallurgical processes, but included ultimately the transmutation of the human from a lower creature to a higher, perhaps even immortal, being.

The historian of science Bernard Joly, in his chapter “The Literary Distortions of Alchemy”, presents a more practical and less speculative version of “the arcane art” than that of several other chapters’ hermetical readings of alchemical imagery. Bernard Joly claims that the modern literary figure of the alchemist, as seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Gustave Meyrink’s The Angel at the Western Window (1927), and Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (1968), are deformations produced by the esoteric movements of the nineteenth century and do not correspond to well documented historical reality. He analyses the causes of these distortions and their consequences for the modern image of alchemy.