RAMPLING, Jennifer. The englishing of medieval alchemy

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Ambix

ISSN: 0002-6980 (Print) 1745-8234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yamb20

The Englishing of Medieval Alchemy Jennifer M. Rampling To cite this article: Jennifer M. Rampling (2016) The Englishing of Medieval Alchemy, Ambix, 63:3, 268-272, DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2016.1256108 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2016.1256108

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Date: 17 December 2016, At: 03:28

ambix, Vol. 63 No. 3, August 2016, 268–272

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The Englishing of Medieval Alchemy “Misticall Wordes and Names Infinite”: An Edition and Study of Humfrey Lock’s Treatise on Alchemy (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 367). By PETER GRUND. Pp. xii + 350, illus., bibl. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Tempe. 2011. $72. ISBN: 978-0-86698-415-7. Verse and Transmutation: A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry (Critical Editions and Studies). By ANKE TIMMERMAN. Pp. xvi + 374, illus., bibl., index. Brill: Leiden and Boston. 2013. €136. ISBN: 978-90-04254-848. The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England: Plantagenet Kings and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone. By JONATHAN HUGHES. Pp. 296, illus., index. Continuum: London. 2012. £28.99 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-4411-8183-1.

Elias Ashmole, English alchemist and antiquarian, was disappointed by his countrymen’s failure to appreciate the alchemical masterpieces written in their own tongue. Although “no Nation hath written more, or better” than the English, he observed, “at present … few of their Workes can be found.”1 As an enthusiastic collector of alchemical manuscripts, Ashmole understood that editing and publishing their contents was an essential part of bringing them to a wide and attentive audience. His complaint prefaced the very collection in which he sought to remedy his countrymen’s neglect: the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1652), a volume which, more than 350 years later, remains the preeminent compilation of English alchemical verse. Since Ashmole penned his “Prolegomena,” the situation has of course improved. Digital collections have made an ever-wider range of English primary sources available to interested readers, while finding aids like the eVK simplify the task of identifying and locating specific texts.2 The seventeenth century, age of Boyle, Newton, and George Starkey, also continues to be well served.3 However, the medieval and early Tudor periods still cry out for in-depth studies (this in spite of Jonathan Hughes’ two books on late medieval alchemy, of which more below). Although alchemy has featured in several significant studies on the vernacularization of English scientific and medical literature,4 both scholarly and popular accounts 1 2

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Elias Ashmole, “Prolegomena,” Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1652), sig. A2r. Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, comps., Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Newton’s alchemical manuscripts are online at The Chymistry of Isaac Newton website (www.chymistry.org), for instance, and William Newman and Lawrence Principe have contributed several monographs on seventeenth-century English “chymistry.” The work of Linda Voigts and Irma Taavitsainen has been particularly valuable in this regard. See, for instance, Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “Multitudes of Middle English Medical Manuscripts, or the Englishing of Science and Medicine,” in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. Margaret Rose Schleissner (New York: Garland

© 2016 Jennifer M. Rampling

DOI 10.1080/00026980.2016.1256108

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have tended to accrete around a handful of famous names and canonical texts: including the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, whose literary excursions into alchemy were eagerly taken up by practising alchemists; of George Ripley and Thomas Norton, whose celebrated poems provided the authoritative backbone of fifteenth-century English alchemy; and of William Blomfild and Thomas Charnock, whose sixteenth-century verses echoed the style and content of their late medieval forebears. One thing that all these writers have in common is that their verses were included in the Theatrum. We should therefore be grateful that recent years have seen the publication of several studies that push the envelope of the Ashmolean canon. The books of Peter Grund and Anke Timmermann – both based on doctoral dissertations – provide much-needed editions of English alchemical writing, framed by historical studies and scholarly apparatus. Their work differs both in the nature of the material edited, and in the scope of their investigations. Grund has edited a single, previously unpublished, prose treatise written by a known individual, supported by a focused study of both author and text. Timmermann’s ambitions are broader: she has identified a corpus of interrelated verses based on a fifteenth-century poem, which she uses to investigate the issue of anonymity in alchemical writing. By taking us back to the archive, these studies remind us of the extent to which our knowledge of medieval English alchemy still relies on printed editions. For instance, many Ambix readers will already know the Verses on the Elixir (Timmermann’s proposed title) as the enigmatic poem printed by Ashmole as “Pearce the Black Monke.”5 The major contribution of Timmermann’s study is to detach the poem from Ashmole – and from the unknown and probably unrelated “Pearce” – and to identify it as the keystone of a whole corpus of related English verses. These vary in date, length, and style, from intriguing fifteenth-century variants, like the “Ripley Scroll” verses, to the transcriptions of a scholarly Elizabethan reader. The treatise studied by Grund is also a composite affair: the outcome of an Elizabethan alchemist’s rifling of material from medieval sources, reassembled into a new work. Each case therefore offers important evidence for the strategies used by late medieval and early modern alchemists to translate and adapt earlier authorities – turning Latin into English, English into Latin, and poetry into prose (and, in many cases, back again). The two studies diverge, however, in their treatment of authorship. Grund’s task is technically more straightforward: having identified the likely compiler of an anonymous sixteenth-century treatise, he devotes the early part of the introduction to 4

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Continued Publishing, 1995), 183–95; Voigts, “The Character of the Carecter: Ambiguous Sigils in Scientific and Medical Texts,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge and Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1989), 91–109; and the papers in Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, eds., Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). England is also mentioned in Michela Pereira, “Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 74 (1999): 336–56. Ashmole, Theatrum, 269–74.

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situating his author in time and space. The writer, he argues, is Humfrey Lock (fl. 1560s–1570s), an English engineer who relocated to Russia in the service of Ivan the Terrible. Grund suggests that Lock, having fallen out with the community of English merchants in Russia, composed his Treatise on Alchemy (Grund’s title) in 1572 as part of an attempt to have himself recalled home by Elizabeth I’s alchemically-inclined Lord High Treasurer, William Cecil. In retrieving the activities of a particular alchemist, who is somewhat (if incompletely) known from the historical record, Grund is able to underscore connections between alchemy, reading, and patronage in a specific context – 1570s England and Russia. Yet he goes on to complicate Lock’s authorship by tracing the sources of the Treatise back to a variety of mainly fifteenth-century texts, including Latin treatises attributed to Albertus Magnus, George Ripley, and Guido de Montanor, as well as anonymous works. This is perhaps his most valuable contribution, and one that reveals deep familiarity with both Middle English manuscripts and the issue of alchemical pseudepigraphy.6 In selecting one manuscript witness as the basis for his edition (with variants from six other complete copies recorded in the apparatus), he also greatly simplifies the task of editing. The edition is accompanied by a commentary and a glossary, but unfortunately no index. Timmermann’s project is rather different. The heroes of her study are not identifiable alchemists, but the verses themselves: unstable textual travellers whose relationships with their offspring are not always easy to reconstruct. Accordingly, Timmermann is less interested in identifying unknown poets than with the problems posed by anonymous corpora – most fundamentally, our apparent inability to know anything of them other than the texts and physical manuscripts themselves. The book is thus an enterprise in textual archaeology, “intended to lend voices to hitherto silent parts of alchemical history” (p. 8). Such a complex web of connected writings cannot be captured even by a critical edition of a single work; accordingly, Timmermann condenses a considerable amount of archival research into a series of excellent editions, including the most important variants of the Verses, as well as related prose texts in Latin and English. By showing how verses and individual phrases were quoted in other works even in the absence of authorial attributions, Timmermann makes the case for not equating authorship with authority. It is a good case, although seeking to identify individual writers is still, surely, worthwhile – texts are, after all, written by people, and their opinions and practices do shape what they choose to set down, and how they do so. There may therefore be good historical reasons for seeking to track down these writers and compilers, while acknowledging that names become attached to manuscripts for many reasons, and are not necessarily the best guide to historical identifications. 6

Also on view in his earlier papers: for instance, Peter Grund, “Textual Alchemy: The Transformation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s Semita Recta into the Mirror of Lights,” Ambix 56 (2009): 202–25; Grund, “‘ffor to make Azure as Albert biddes’: Medieval English Alchemical Writings in the Pseudo-Albertan Tradition,” Ambix 53 (2006): 21–42.

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One theme that arises from both books is the extraordinary fluidity of alchemical texts, which prolonged and renewed the reception of medieval material well into the seventeenth century. For instance, Grund shows that an unknown redactor shaped Lock’s Treatise into another new work, The Picklock to Riplye his Castle: possibly in an attempt to infuse Lock’s lesser-known work with the authority of the famous Ripley, although the title still puns delightfully on Lock’s name. Medieval alchemy was continually reinvented; the Verses and the Treatise, like much-extended houses, fluctuated in form and function as they passed through different hands. What is missing, perhaps, is a sense of how the matter of alchemy changed alongside its form. Did successive readers interpret conceptual and practical content differently over time? And why did some approaches appeal more than others? Grund’s commentary on his edition is not geared towards responding to questions of this kind; typically, he seeks to identify related references in earlier writings, such as Ripley’s Medulla alchimiae, rather than reflecting on what terms like the “vegetable stone” or “resoluble menstruum” might have signified to those who used them. Such problems are not, however, at the core of Grund’s and Timmermann’s focused studies – and now that their scholarly editions are available, further answers are bound to follow. That leaves us with the wider social and intellectual context in which medieval English alchemica was produced. If Jonathan Hughes’ recent book lived up to its title, we would have a valuable complement to the careful editions of Grund and Timmermann. Unfortunately, The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England pursues speculation too far in the opposite direction, and is rife with errors great and small. As in his earlier book, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy, Hughes sets out to argue that the medieval kings of England were deeply invested in alchemy, and that the iconography of their rule is consequently infused with alchemical themes. An exciting thesis, if proven: yet much of the evidence he cites is not properly alchemical, or not reliably linked to English kings; or else it rests on superseded secondary literature, or it is inaccurate or irrelevant for other reasons. Take, for instance, Roger Bacon’s well known commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum. Hughes posits that Bacon could have written it for the king – suggesting hopefully that Bacon “may have seen himself as Aristotle to King Henry III” (p. 29). The fact that Bacon did write for a patron – but for the Pope rather than the king – is subordinated to the book’s concern to link all English alchemists to the royal court; a misprision that leaves Hughes searching the pavement of Westminster Abbey for imagery that might support Henry III’s otherwise undocumented interest in alchemy, and prove that “during his reign the English court was becoming the focus for the study of alchemy and the occult” (p. 29). In consequence, the book reads as a lost opportunity. English kings were undoubtedly interested in alchemy (or, at least, in a supply of cheap bullion) as we know from fourteenth-century legal records,7 but a successful 7

Dorothea Waley Singer, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland dating from before the XVI Century (Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1931), vol. III.

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synthesis must be accurately grounded in both primary documents and their historical and material contexts, and cannot be powered by speculation alone. That such work can be done Sophie Page has shown in her recent monograph, Magic in the Cloister.8 Page uses medieval library catalogues and surviving books to shed light on monks’ collecting habits, and to reveal the role played by Continental settings – such as the University of Paris – in furnishing Englishmen with magical and alchemical knowledge. But the meticulous work of Page, Grund, and Timmermann has no parallel in Hughes’ study, where alchemy is conflated with magic and “the occult” (never defined), and authorship is uncritically ascribed to whole corpora of texts (including those problematically attributed to John Dastin). Even minor characters suffer: Vincent of Beauvais is identified as the compiler not of the Speculum maius, but of the De proprietatibus rerum (p. 28), an earlier work that makes no reference to alchemy, and was, besides, composed by Bartholomaeus Anglicus; while the spelling of names like al-Razi (pp. 15, 19, 23) and Ibn Umayl (pp. 22, 23) varies from page to page. One could go on, but perhaps it is better to draw a line and observe merely, “Here be dragons.” The fourteenth century is still waiting for its Ashmole. Princeton University

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Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).