Pearce the Black Monke

Among the manuscripts of the Mellon collection, which now forms part of Yale University’s Beinecke Library holdings, there is an alchemical miscellany of a diversity not unusual for sixteenth-century notebooks. The four (ex)tracts are mainly anonymous, written in both English and Latin, prose and verse. Rather dishevelled and incomplete in appearance, the volume is devoid of its original context; indeed we do not know much about its provenance, except for a palaeographical dating for circa 1575. This note is intended to shed light on the identity of a previously unidentified alchemical verse text in the manuscript, which has occupied a marginal position (both literally and figuratively) since it was copied into MS. Mellon 43.¹

It is perhaps not surprising that the text’s incipit, ‘With prayer penaunce & pity/ & to god ever a lover to be’, did not seem familiar to scholars working on the manuscript: on closer inspection these forty-eight lines represent a medial fragment from a poem printed in Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum under the title of ‘Pearce the Black Monke upon the Elixir’ (henceforth ‘Pearce’).² The full text of up to 200 lines originates in the second half of the fifteenth century and circulated in manuscript form until the mid-seventeenth century. The poem comprises an alchemical recipe including instructions for making the philosophers’ stone as well as philosophical and theoretical background for the work.³

The selection of the text contained in the fragment does not represent this recipe as a whole; nor does it select a simple, self-contained part of the poem. Instead, the fragment presents a section of the full text placed between the end of the preceding and beginning of the following sections. Consequently the fragment, even though it contains a somewhat independent part of the poem, appears cryptic at the beginning and lacks a conclusion. The reasons for such a selection of a medial part of the poem is not clear, much less so since all other surviving fragments exhibit a clear rationale in this respect, mostly founded on the alchemical interest of the individuals copying them. It should also be noted that the text of the fragment shows some textual variations which are specific to this copy. These variations are diverse in nature: one emendation clearly changes the alchemical information provided in the passage, but is probably sign of a lapse of concentration. Others occur in lines containing the religious topos of appealing to God’s goodwill for the alchemical work, and remove some of the religious imagery from the text; here it is not possible to tell whether the alteration is deliberate or accidental. A third category of variation, which bears no relevance to the content of the passage, may be the result of a slip of memory, and would then be indicative of an oral tradition of the passage in question. However, the evidence is not strong enough for us to trace the personality of the fragment’s writer, or indeed the circumstances of its inclusion in MS. Mellon 43.

The physical appearance of this fragment in the manuscript may bear relevance to further investigations into the history of the latter, and shall therefore be described here. The last item in the manuscript, it was compressed to fit under the previous text, which occupies half of the page on f. 7v. In relation to other items, the text of ‘Pearce’ protrudes into the left margin; the secretary hand of the manuscript, minute though tidy, is further reduced in size, and the poem occupies two columns, whereas all other texts in the manuscript are written in a single column. It is also worth noting that these two columns occupy only half of the page’s width. While a virgil at the end of the medial fragment marks it as completed, we find neither title, nor author, nor any other indication of the text’s nature at the beginning.

Regarding its textual history, it is not possible to identify a manuscript copy which served as an original for this copy of ‘Pearce’. Nor does the copy contained in MS. Mellon 43 appear to have served as an original for a later copy. It is to be hoped, however, that the information provided here will instigate further research into the history of the text and manuscript, as well as support studies on copying practices and the role of marginalia in late medieval and early modern alchemica.

Anke Timmermann, U. of Cambridge

NOTES

1. The relevant catalogue refers to the poem as an ‘unidentified English poem’, ‘not identified in the literature consulted’. See Witten, Laurence C., II, and Richard Pachella, Alchemy and the Occult: A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts from the Collection of Paul and Mary Mellon Given to the Yale University Library: Vol. 3: Manuscripts 1225-1671 (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1977), entry for MS. Mellon 43, p. 296. The entry also includes reproductions from the manuscript, among them f. 7v, which contains ‘Pearce’. The weblink to the relevant entry in the Beinecke catalogue is: http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.MELL043.htm.

2. Elias Ashmole, comp. Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1652), p. 269-74.

3. Further details on the poem are contained in Anke Timmermann, An edition of the medieval alchemical poem Verses upon the Elixir (unpublished M.Phil. thesis, Glasgow 2003); and Anke Timmermann, The Verses upon the Elixir: a Middle English Alchemical Poem (Ph.D. thesis, forthcoming).