Western Medieval Manuscripts : Alchemical treatises

Western Medieval Manuscripts

This primarily alchemical compendium was condemned by M.R. James as 'A hideous book'. Although the famous bibliographer openly confessed his ignorance of alchemical materials, his descriptions in the 1900-1905 catalogue of Western manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, which contains the richest alchemical holdings in Cambridge, only occasionally hint at his frustrations. His unpublished notes on the manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, however, are sometimes more candid. For the present, 'hideous' manuscript, he judged rather harshly that it is written in 'many hands, all rough and ugly'; instead of providing a full collation, simply described it as 'a conglomerate of quires'; and distilled his distaste into the quoted one-phrase summary. What was this alchemical compendium doing in the University Library's collection? What James, as a scholar of his time, may not have been able to appreciate fully, is that the survival of an early modern alchemical manuscript outside of a specialist collection was in itself remarkable. It is worthwhile, therefore, placing MS Kk.6.30 into its historical context. This was one of a handful of alchemical manuscripts that entered the University Library in 1715 as part of, in James Henry Monk's words, 'the greatest benefaction which Cambridge ever yet received': the library of John Moore, the Bishop of Ely (1646-1714) (see Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D. (London, 1833), vol. I, p. 377). Moore was a voracious collector of early printed materials; indeed, Thomas Dibdin is said to have referred to Moore as 'the father of black-letter collectors in this country'. While he was Bishop of Norwich (1691-1707), Moore was able to develop and expand his library while delegating practical tasks such as paying for acquisitions to his chaplains. Among them was his son-in-law, Thomas Tanner (1674-1735), who was also a scholar and antiquary and took an instrumental role in recording Moore's collection (on which more below). Over time, Moore's library grew to be one of the most remarkable in England, with particular strengths in the areas of theology, history, and classics; and the many scholarly visitors to Ely Place in Holborn, London, where Moore housed his library following his translation to the See of Ely, enjoyed being granted access to it. At Moore's death, the library was believed to contain nearly 30,000 volumes and was, again according to Monk, 'valuable not only for its extent [...], but for the rarity of its treasures, both printed and manuscript'. The manuscripts, while only c. 1,790 in number, reflect Moore's rather wide-ranging interests. The epitaph on Moore's monument in Ely Cathedral celebrates 'his unrivalled medical knowledge', and therefore the presence of medical manuscripts in his collection is not surprising. The much smaller number of alchemical manuscripts, among them the present manuscript (see also Cambridge, University Library, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DD-00004-00045/1'>MS Dd.4.45</a>, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE-00001-00013/1'>MS Ee.1.13</a>, and potentially <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GG-00001-00008/1'>MS Gg.1.8</a>), reflects almost certainly a medically inclined individual's natural interest in historical chymical literature rather than an actual desire to make the philosophers' stone. In 1715, these manuscripts entered Cambridge University Library as part of Moore's collection, which had been purchased by King George I of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover following Moore's death and then been donated by him to the University in its entirety. If Moore's library had been dispersed, the fate of the alchemical manuscripts might have been very different.Focussing on MS Kk.6.30, a closer look soon reveals that the manuscript's identification as a 'book' is primarily thanks to the function of its binding. Between the boards – a later binding for Cambridge University Library retaining an older spine label reading 'ALKIMIA M.S.' – are at least seven distinct parts of different periods (in the 15th and 16th centuries), origins, and contents; written in several hands on both paper and parchment; and surviving in varying states of preservation. The volume ends with a stub that shows the potential fate all parts might have suffered if someone had not grouped them together at some point. This person was most probably Moore, as Thomas Tanner's historic manuscript catalogue (Cambridge, University Library, MS Oo.7.50(2), entry no. 898) provides nothing to suggest that the present volume was different – apart from the binding – when it was part of Moore's collection.Tanner prosaically described the volume as 'Several tracts of Alchimy and the Philosophers Stone in Latine and old English (imperfect) some by Geo. Riplay' (in fact, a fragment of George Ripley's Compound of alchemy, ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(90);return false;'>41v-45v</a>), and lists three items from the contents: the Breve breviarium of pseudo-Roger Bacon (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(181);return false;'>87-103r</a>), the Rosarium philosphorum of pseudo-Arnold of Villanova (but presented here anonymously, ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(229);return false;'>111r-117v</a>), and a piece explicitly attributed to Arnold of Villanova, 'Speculativa et practica...de lapide philosophorum' (now known to be a pseudonymous attribution, and a fragment of the Speculum alchimiae, ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(243);return false;'>118r-127v</a>). There are further a great number of untitled, unattributed, and anonymous alchemical recipes, texts, and fragments in the manuscript (e.g. two texts by pseudo-Albertus Magnus on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(7);return false;'>1r-29a verso</a>), which have only been identified in recent scholarship. Altogether, both the parts of the manuscript and the volume as a whole are a good representation of the alchemical texts that circulated in manuscript in Latin, and as time went on also in the vernacular, in England in the early modern period.As someone who has followed in James's footsteps, with early 21st-century resources at my disposal and a background in the history of alchemy, I would finally like to direct the reader's eye to a feature of this manuscript that has moved from something of a scholarly blind spot into the spotlight: the functional and instructive sketches of alchemical equipment that appear in parts of the text. There is, for example, a drawing labelled 'walworte' showing 'an erbe yat groweth in ye grounde' – recognisable, with some imagination, as the roots of what is now often known as danewort (Sambucus ebulus) – amidst the text of the pseudo-Albertus Magnus Mirror of lights (at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(27);return false;'>11r</a>). Overleaf (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(28);return false;'>11v</a>) is an assemblage of furnaces and flasks, neatly labelled and shown in action, and the following pseudo-Albertus Magnus text from the Semita recta features drawings of alchemical apparatus on several pages, one of them filled almost entirely with illustrations (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(39);return false;'>17r-17v</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(44);return false;'>19v</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(58);return false;'>26v</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(61);return false;'>28r-28v</a>). These and the other sketches in this manuscript, all accompanied by texts written in the same, serviceable hand, will never match the more obvious beauty of elaborate illuminations, but in the eye of this beholder, they elevate this manuscript from merely instructional to instructive. Like the manicule that points from the margin to the alchemical symbols explained in the text of f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(84);return false;'>38v</a>, they continue to ask readers to stop, observe, and learn.Dr Anke Timmermann