Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Runstedler, Curtis
- Title
- Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Runstedler, Curtis. Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. xii, 205 pp.
- Review
- Runstedler's book addresses at length five samples "of the moral uses of alchemy in Middle English poetry" (4), focusing on the "exemplarity" of these samples: the alchemical passage in Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Book IV, 2457-2632; Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale"; an alchemical version of John Lydgate's poem "The Churl and the Bird" in British Library, Harley MS 2407; and two anonymous fifteenth-century alchemical "dialogues/recipes between Merlin and Morienus and between Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves" (5). To provide context and to narrow his field of inquiry, he uses later English alchemical texts by George Ripley, Thomas Norton, and Elias Ashmole to shape his readings of his focal texts. He also briefly surveys philosophical and scientific backgrounds to alchemy in Greek, Arabic, and Latin texts, with even briefer comments on alchemy in "The Roman de la Rose" and Dante's "Inferno." This is a wide panorama with alchemy firmly in its center. But the focus is on the five sample works and how--or, more accurately, that--each of their authors "used alchemical examples for moral reflection or as cautionary tales against covetousness and unethical practice," "revealing," Runstedler tells us, the "interconnectedness" of the five, and the "exemplary role" (14) of alchemy, which was "used in different exemplary ways within diverse literary contexts"; "more importantly, such exemplary readings present complex treatments of the subject" (195). Runstedler gives Gower's "alchemical exegesis," as he labels it recurrently, pride of place among the works he discusses: it "launches," he tells us, "the literary pattern of alchemy being appropriated within an exemplary framework" in late medieval vernacular English literature (6 and 65), which helps "to establish the notion of alchemical narratives as exemplary in Middle English poetry" (83). N.B. The volume is a somewhat revised and reformatted version of Runstedler's 2018 Durham University dissertation; some readers may find the .pdf format of the dissertation (available at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12593/; accessed 4/1/2023) easier to use than the Palgrave e-book. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2023
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis