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Historical person

Perenelle Flamel

c. 1320–1397

Perenelle Flamel was a prosperous fourteenth-century Parisian woman who married the scrivener Nicolas Flamel in 1368 after two earlier marriages. Her wealth contributed substantially to the couple’s property holdings. Together they supported churches, religious sculpture and charitable works in Paris, leaving a documentary record that is more securely historical than the alchemical legends later attached to their names.

Perenelle died in 1397. Like Nicolas, she was retrospectively incorporated into stories about the Philosopher’s Stone and transmutation, although the evidence for the historical couple concerns property, philanthropy and urban religious life rather than successful alchemy. The distinction between the documented benefactor and the legendary adept is central to her later cultural reputation.

Perenelle Flamel appears in Jeri Westerson’s Shadow of the Alchemist, where her disappearance drives Nicolas Flamel to hire Crispin Guest and turns later legends about the Philosopher’s Stone into the motive for a London kidnapping and murder investigation.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Perenelle 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