The meager historiography of Ottoman alchemy has been to-date dominated by studies on the translations of Paracelsian texts from the Latin into Arabic and Turkish in the late seventeenth century and on the “the new chemical medicine” (al-tibb al-jadid al-kimyawi) movement precipitated by these translations. This singular focus on an admittedly important but also brief episode in the transmission of knowledge from the West to the Islamic world has led to a general disinterest in a wealth of texts written in later periods that follow the classical Islamic tradition, and thus left many a significant question unanswered: What was the nature of the production of knowledge in the field of alchemy in the eighteenth-century Ottoman world? How did Ottoman alchemist-authors in the long eighteenth century situate their works within the genealogy of alchemical knowledge? How do alchemical texts from this period reflect on the social and cultural milieu in which they were produced? The present talk will concentrate on the last question in particular and attempt to provide some answers through a reading of Ottoman works on alchemy as “ego documents.” Much of the discussion will revolve around the collection of writings left behind by the Syrian alchemist, poet, and sage Osman Bilani, whose life spanned the middle and the second half of the eighteenth century. I will argue that the autobiographical elements in Osman Bilani’s alchemical writings exhibit marked differences from those found in earlier Ottoman works treating the same branch of knowledge, especially with respect to the degree in which the author’s voice is self-revelatory. That this points to changing attitudes towards the relationship between the author, text, and audience in the long eighteenth century, rather than the possible idiosyncrasies of Osman Bilani as an author, will be revealed by additional evidence from a number of other alchemical works that also date from the period under consideration.