Abstract
As with so much else of value in Chaucer criticism, Chaucer and the French Tradition established the critical terms in which the Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale have been discussed.1 There Prof. Muscatine dismissed as unproductive the debate about Chaucer’s biographical relation to alchemy, arguing instead that the tale was a prophetic warning directed against “the blind materialism” that leads to a “complacent faith in science that despises God.” “In the light of later history,” he concluded, “the poem is reactionary.”2
Science searches for perpetual motion. It has found it; it is itself
Victor Hugo
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Notes
The Ellesmere manuscript rubricated the text as a Prologue (554-719) followed by a two-part Tale, Prima Pars (720-971) and Pars Secunda (972-1481). It is printed this way by Skeat, Robinson, and Larry C. Benson, gen. ed. Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Judith Sherer Herz, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale,” Modern Philology 58 (1961), 233
Samuel McCracken, “Confessional Prologue and the Topography of the Canon’s Yeoman,” Modem Philology 68 (1971): 289–91
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Unwin, 1985), 107–8
Robert Cook, “The Canon’s Yeoman and His Tale,” Chaucer Review 22 (1987-88): 28–40.
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 213–21.
This in opposition to Pauline Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer’s Knowledge of Alchemy,” Studies in Philology 41 (1944): 371–89
Dorothee Finkelstein, “The Code of Chaucer’s’ secree of Secrees’: Arabic Alchemical Terminology in ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,’” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 207 (1970): 260–76.
In “Chaucer and the Commonplaces of Alchemy,” Grennen says, I doubt that there is a single feature of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, or of the first section of the tale (Prima Pars), which can not be seen as an imaginative reshaping of the details of alchemical theory and experiment as these were set down in written treatises. (308) A similar point was also made by Edgar H. Duncan, “The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: Framework, Theme, and Characters,” Speculum 43 (1968): 633–56.
For these and other comparisons, see Grennen’s articles and John Gardner, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale: An Interpretation,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 1–17
Bruce L. Grenberg, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: Boethian Wisdom and the Alchemists,” Chaucer Review 1 (1966–67): 37–54
K. Michael Olmert, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: An Interpretation,” Annuale Medievale 8 (1967): 70–94
Glending Olson, “Chaucer, Dante, and the Structure of Fragment VIII (G) of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 16 (1981–82): 222–36
Bruce A. Rosenberg, “The Contrary Tales of the Second Nun and the Canon’s Yeoman,” Chaucer Review 2 (1967–68): 278–91
Bruce A. Rosenberg, “Swindling Alchemist, Antichrist.” Centennial Review 6 (1962): 566–80
John Scattergood, “Chaucer in the Suburbs,” in Myra Stokes and T. L. Burton, eds., Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 145–62.
Grennen, “Saint Cecilia’s ‘Chemical Wedding,’ ” 472-73; see also Traugott Lawler, The One and the Many in “The Canterbury Tales” (Hamden: Archon Books, 1980), pp. 125–46.
James Dean, “Dismantling the Canterbury Book,” PMLA 100 (1984), 751.
A. V. C. Schmidt, ed., The General Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales” and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), pp. 38–9.
Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 150
Britton J. Harwood, “Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” PMLA 102 (1987): 338–50.
There are partial exceptions to this critical consensus. Scattergood says that the tales of both the Second Nun and the Canon’s Yeoman are about the confrontation between unorthodox belief and authority: “new ideologies constantly present a challenge to the establishment” (“Chaucer in the Suburbs,” 160); and David Raybin, “‘And Pave It Al of Silver and of Gold’: The Humane Artistry of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” in Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin and Peter C. Braeger, eds., Rebels and Rivals: The Contestative Spirit in “The Canterbury Tales” (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), pp. 189–212
A comprehensive survey of the widely varying medieval attitudes toward alchemy is provided by Will H. L. Ogrinc, “Western Society and Alchemy, 1200–1500,” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 103–32.
J. M. Manly’s speculations about Chaucer’s personal involvement (Some New Light on Chaucer (New York: Henry Holt, 1926), pp. 235–52).
Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 386
William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Text, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson [London: Athlone Press, 1975], p. 419
H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 15.
For the sources of the tale see Sherry Reames, “A Recent Discovery Concerning the Sources of Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” Modern Philology 87 (1990): 337–61
On the theme of conversion by reading, see Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (Paris: E. Broccard, 1950).
Susan Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
Robert S. Sturges, Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
Indeed, this account is almost a parody of the General Prologue, since the narrator figures out the Canon’s identity only in slow motion, a dim-wittedness all the more marked because the Canon’s dress would have made him instandy recognizable: see Marie P. Hamilton, “The Clerical Status of Chaucer’s Alchemist,” Speculum 16 (1941): 103–108.
For the source of this dialogue, see Edgar H. Duncan, “Chaucer and ‘Arnold of the Newe Toun,’” Modern Language Notes 58 (1942): 31–3
For similar accounts of the spiritual and physical changes of the alchemist, see Noel Brann, “Alchemy and Melancholy in Medieval and Renaissance Thought: A Query into the Mystical Basis of their Relationship,” Ambix 30 (1985): 127–48.
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 287.
The primary texts are available in two collections: Lazarus Zetzner, ed., Theatrum chemicum, 6 vols (Strasbourg: Zetzner, 1659–61)
Jean Jacques Manget, ed., Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1702; reprinted Bologna: A. Forni, 1976).
This passage from the Greek Book of Crates is the epigraph to Maurice P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
Lee Stavenhagen, ed. and trans., A Testament of Alchemy: Being the Revelation of Morienus to Khalid ibn Yazid (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1974)
Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 93.
See Dorothea Waley Singer, ed., Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland Dating from Before the XVI century, 3 vols. (Brussels: Maurice Lambertin for the Union Académique Internationale, 1928–31)
The text is found in Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1408, 135-50; the citation is derived from Robert M. Schuler’s fascinating article, “The Renaissance Chaucer as Alchemist,” Viator 15 (1984), 318.
For medieval instances of the argument that the figurative writing used by alchemy is necessary in order to make clear what would otherwise be obscure, see the citations from the works of Petrus Bonus and Arnold of Villanova in Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe-XVe siècles) (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), pp. 50–1.
Arthur Edward Waite, ed., The Turha Philosophomm (London: George Redway, 1896
Petrus Bonus, The New Pearl of Great Price, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: Vincent Stuart, 1894), p. 149.
For 600 names, see Crosland, Historical Studies, p. 24 n. 24; for 10,000, see Robert Halleux, Les textes alchimiques (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), p. 116.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, ed., Aurora Consurgens, trans. R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover, Bollingen Series 77 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 117–119.
George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Washington: Williams and Wilkins, 1948), 3.751–2.
Chiara Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella,” Ambix 20 (1973): 165–81.
Halleux, Textes, pp. 97-109; see also Thorndike, History, 3.63-5. For an expert survey of the Lullian material, see Michela Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, 18 (London: The Warburg Institute, 1989).
The cited phrases are from Jacques Derrida, “Limited, Inc.,” Glyph 2 (1977), 236.
For other discussions of alchemical language, see Michel Butor, Répertoire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960), pp. 12–19
Chiara Crisciani, “Experientia e linguaggio nella tradizione alchemica,” in Atti del XXIV Congresso Nazionale di Filosofia (Rome: Società Filosofica Italiana, 1974), 2.357–64.
James Dauphiné, “De ‘L’Ésprit de l’or.’ Langage et alchimie au moyen âge,” in James Dauphiné, Ésotérisme et littérature (Nice: C.E.M., 1987), pp. 29–48.
Leicester, The Disenchanted Self, p. 28. For a somewhat similar argument about alchemy, see John Reidy, “Alchemy as Counter-Culture,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 24 (1971-72): 41–51.
John Read, Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy. 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966 [1936]).
In part this capacity was a function of alchemy’s mixed heritage: on the one hand is a metallurgical interest expressed in a tradition of very pragmatic recipe books (see Pierre Cézard, “L’alchimie at les recettes techniques,” Métaux et civilisations 1 [1945]: 5–10
Brian Stock, “Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages,” in David C. Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 15–16.
Trent Eglin, “Introduction to a Hermeneutics of the Occult,” in Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, in Harold Garfinkel, ed., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 134.
The “spiritual turn” of alchemical theorizing around 1300 has been best discussed by Barbara Obrist, “Die Alchemie in der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft,” in Die Alchemie in der europäischen Kultur-und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Christoph Meinel, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 22 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986), pp. 33–59.
Cited by George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 86.
This point is demonstrated in the important book by Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection, countering the claims made by Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)
Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80, pt. 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990).
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, trans. Janet Sondheimer (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 303.
This point is well made by Derek Brewer, “Class Distinctions in Chaucer,” Speculum 43 (1968): 290–305.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #124Z, cited by David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 20.
See Daniel Lerner, “Modernization, I: Social Aspects,” in David L. Sills, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1968), 10.391.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Cited by David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 100–11.
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© 2006 Lee Patterson
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Patterson, L. (2006). Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self. In: Temporal Circumstances. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4_8
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