His recipe collection is preserved in only one copy, a late fifteenth-century manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This essay revisits one such experiment in the literary history of medieval alchemy: a largely overlooked Latin collection of alchemical recipes written by someone calling himself Leonard. Alchemy occasioned widespread, and often imaginative, literary experimentation across medieval textual genres. By the fifteenth century, one could read alchemy as versified into vernacular lyric poetry or liturgical Latin song. But readers looking for convenience rather than compendiousness could consult alchemical florilegia, collections of short recipes, factoids, and rules of thumb culled from wider reading. Latin writers, for instance, systematized alchemical knowledge as summae: thoroughgoing treatises arranged by some overtly rationalizing logic, a favorite genre of scholastic theologians. Alchemical writers seemed to delight in concocting new and different ways to communicate knowledge, as they put their doctrine to paper in forms drawn from disparate fields of medieval discourse. Alchemy’s textual culture was, in its own ways, experimental. Alchemists encountered the knowledge of their discipline as it was embedded in a textual culture and expressed through the particular literary conventions of authorship, genre, and character of that culture. Alchemy was a literary endeavor: its texts were pored over by readers and copied out by scribes under candlelight. Medieval alchemy, however, was not only practiced over the fires of the workshop furnace. Their texts show that they took up purposeful “experimental probing,” as William Newman says, in a belief that “their art could arrive at fundamental truths by means of experiment with natural materials.” 1 Where all their experimentation really got them is another question but this image of a bleary-eyed technician bent over a workbench, devising a way to prove some metallurgical principle with recourse to a repertoire of practical techniques, recasts the medieval alchemist into a more amenable predecessor of the research chemist in the modern laboratory. Their readmission has been helped along by the recognition that, even back in the Middle Ages, alchemists often thought and worked experimentally. After years on the outside, however, medieval alchemists have since been invited in from the cold as deserving subjects of attention by the respectable historian of respectable science.
ALCHEMICAL MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS TRIAL
With their mistaken theories of physical matter and bogus claims to turn baser metals into gold, alchemists could be easily dismissed as practitioners of a crude form of chemistry by trial and error at best at worst, alchemy was pseudoscience dressed up in mystical language or practiced in bad faith. Medieval alchemists have spent centuries skulking around on the edges of our histories of proper science.
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