Rebecca Vaughan

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Rebecca Vaughan († 1658 in Wapping / London ) was an alchemist and wife of the Welsh alchemist and mystic Thomas Vaughan .

Rebecca Vaughan came from the place Meppershall in Bedfordshire and was the youngest of eleven children of the local clergyman (rector) Timothy Archer (1597-1672) and married in 1651 the alchemist Thomas Vaughan. Like Vaughan herself, like her father and her family, she was a supporter of the royalists in the English Civil War (her father was therefore expropriated and imprisoned in Fleet Prison for 18 years). The family was destitute, according to a letter from George Starkey to Robert Boyle , according to which Vaughan married the daughter of a cleric with no fortune. The couple pursued alchemical studies together, as Thomas Vaughan noted in a notebook after Rebecca's death. The only evidence of her alchemical activity comes from her husband's writings. The diary or laboratory book of their experiments was discovered by Arthur Edward Waite in the 19th century . Waite published from the manuscript in 1888 also the biographical information from Thomas Vaughan, for example on the death of Rebecca Vaughan on April 17 (old calendar) and her marriage in 1651. She was buried in Meppershall. The complete alchemical manuscript from the British Library (Sloane manuscript 1714) was published by Donald Dickson.

Another contemporary early alchemist or chemist from her environment was the mother of Thomas Henshaw , with whom Thomas Vaughan had close contact in London. Rebecca Vaughan lived with her husband in the home of Henshaw in Kensington, who then gathered a circle of alchemists and Rosicrucians in his home under the name of a Christian learned society. They belonged to the circle of Samuel Hartlib .

literature

  • Jette Anders: 33 alchemists. The hidden side of an ancient science. Past Publishing, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86408-204-7 .
  • Donald R. Dickson: Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan's Aqua vitae: non vitis, Tempe, Arizona Studies for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 217, 2001
  • Donald Dickson: The alchemystical wife: the identity of Thomas Vaughan's Rebecca, The Seventeenth Century, Volume 13, 1998, pp. 34-46, doi : 10.1080 / 0268117X.1998.10555440

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted in the review of the Dickson edition of Aqua vitis by Alan Rudrum
  2. ^ AE Waite (ed.): The magical writings of Thomas Vaughan, London 1888, pp. VIII, IX, Archives
  3. ↑ Review of Rudrum, Seventeenth-Century News, pdf
personal data
SURNAME Vaughan, Rebecca
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English alchemist
DATE OF BIRTH 16th century or 17th century
DATE OF DEATH 1658
Place of death Wapping