René d’Anjou, his Entourage and Alchemy From the Workshops of Forgers to the Literary Crucible

The allusion to alchemy in the Livre du Cuer d’amour espris by René of Anjou is well known. It is less known that members of his family solicited alchemists and that the duke himself was the victim of an alchemical deception. Other texts from his court or from the court of Charles of Orléans, with whom he was in contact, also evoke alchemy, sometimes in an anecdotal way, other times in a more surprising way, like the poems of Pierre Chastellain.