Abstract
Alchemical poetry’s well-known obscurity presents something of a limit case for understanding what it meant to produce or receive practical knowledge—information about how to do something—in the later Middle Ages. Medieval readers eagerly sought out many different kinds of knowledge about the material world and its uses across a wide range of topics and genres, but one of the most popular was the way to change base matter to better and so ultimately arrive at the Philosophers’ Stone. And yet: English alchemical texts (and many of their continental counterparts) are for the most part symbolically esoteric and linguistically florid—that is, difficult—by design. It is against this broader context of the tendency to mystify that the everyday aesthetic of Thomas Norton’s 1477 Ordinal of Alchemy appears all the more remarkable. Norton’s regular recourse to common knowledge—including, at times, knowledge of the literal landscape of England itself—in order to convey information suggests that the Stone is achievable precisely because producing it depends upon recognizing the everyday and the ordinary as the path to alchemical success. This paper argues that Norton’s aesthetic choices celebrate both a familiar language and a familiar world, choices that can help us to continue rethinking the relationship of knowledge to the textual forms it takes.
Presenters
Lisa H. CooperProfessor, English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Alchemy, Esoterism, Poetry, Science, Practicality, Information, Aesthetics, Medieval, England
