As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate disclosure.

Home / People / Nicolas Flamel

Historical person

Nicolas Flamel

c. 1330–1418

Nicolas Flamel was a successful Parisian scrivener, manuscript seller and property owner, probably born around 1330 and active in the commercial world of late-medieval Paris. He married the wealthy widow Perenelle in 1368, and the couple became known for charitable giving to churches and poor relief. Surviving records place Flamel firmly in the world of writing, books, property and civic philanthropy rather than in a documented laboratory tradition.

Flamel’s famous identity as an alchemist developed after his death in 1418. Seventeenth-century texts attributed alchemical writings and the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone to him, transforming a historical scrivener into one of Europe’s best-known legendary adepts. Modern historical accounts distinguish those later stories from the documentary evidence for his life.

Nicolas Flamel appears in Jeri Westerson’s Shadow of the Alchemist, where he asks Crispin Guest to find his missing wife Perenelle and becomes entangled in a ransom plot involving the legendary Philosopher’s Stone.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Nicolas Flamel (1 series)

Crispin Guest Medieval Noir in Order

by Jeri Westerson 15 books 4.2(13,395)

The Crispin Guest Medieval Noir mysteries follow a disgraced former knight who survives in late-fourteenth-century London as the Tracker, an investigator hired to recover lost objects, expose secrets and untangle crimes that official justice cannot or will not solve. Crispin’s fall for treason gives him unusual access to…

All books in this series