Curtis Runstedler’s study of Middle English poetry’s varied engagements with alchemy is notable for its clarity and accessibility, impressive achievements when alchemical texts themselves, so prone to deliberate obscurantism, have always had a reputation for impenetrability. Two useful preliminary chapters introduce and contextualize the key ideas structuring Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature, most importantly that reading these alchemical poems morally--and specifically through the lens of exemplary writing--will yield new understandings of alchemy’s place in late medieval English discourse poetic and otherwise. In Runstedler’s view, such texts “directly address the ambiguity” of alchemical practice and deploy alchemy “for moral purposes to offer examples of ethical or unethical practice” (5). Subsequent chapters focus on, respectively, the alchemical material in the fourth book of Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the author’s moral emphasis on labor; language and narrative structure in Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, with its possible “redemption” narrative for the alchemical laborer; Lydgate the moralist and an anonymous alchemical expansion of his poem The Churl and the Bird; and finally two fascinating alchemical dialogues of the fifteenth century, namely those between Merlin and his father Morienus, and between Albertus Magnus and his own alchemical instructor the Queen of the Elves. Shared themes and concerns emerge across the primary sources, including “the failure of language and loss of communication” (6); “moral blindness” (7); and “the possibility of individual human transformation (or lack thereof) and the potential for moral improvement” (7). While at times the overarching arguments repeated in the book can become unnecessarily repetitious--simply stemming from that admirable drive towards complete clarity--and remain underdeveloped in certain respects that I will detail shortly, I cannot imagine a better introduction to the subject of alchemy’s appearances in the literature of this period. Runstedler’s exploration of medieval poets’ interest in alchemy in connection with literary exemplarity also represents a truly novel approach to works, in the case of Chaucer and Gower, otherwise quite thoroughly discussed in the existing scholarship, and the latter chapters prove that the more obscure alchemical poems deserved and indeed continue to deserve further scholarly attention.

Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature effectively includes two introductions, an opening chapter on “Alchemy and Exemplarity” and a second, far longer, chapter offering up “A Brief History of Alchemy.” Together they occupy roughly a third of the book’s total pages, and carefully lay a foundation for the closer readings of specific primary texts around which the latter chapters are organized. The first chapter begins with an overview of alchemy’s continuing signifying power in the present, and a brief consideration of its metaphorical uses since antiquity. Runstedler also provides various contexts for understanding the literary use of the exemplum, which he defines as “a short narrative with the purpose of moral instruction” (8), and specifically of the “new exemplum” as initially proposed in R. F. Yeager’s work on Gower, and as understood through J. Allan Mitchell’s articulation of the “ethics of exemplarity” (13).While neither chapter is labelled an introduction, the second obviously functions as an extension of one, exhaustively tracking in accessible prose the development of alchemy from antiquity to fifteenth-century England, including considerations of its vexed legal status and poets such as Dante and Langland who view it with far less moral complexity than Chaucer and Gower. Here Runstedler also provides detailed but never overwhelming explanations of crucial alchemical concepts that will come up again and again in later chapters such as the Mercury-Sulphur theory; the “multiplication” of metals via “seeds”; the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; and the rudiments of the symbolic grammar and often obscure imagery of alchemical texts.As such, it is much more than a mere “history” of alchemy, and the next time that I teach my undergraduate course on “Medieval Science and Medieval Fiction,” I will certainly consider assigning this second chapter as a multipurpose introduction to so many of alchemy’s intellectual, aesthetic, and political contexts.

Chapter 3 takes up the account of alchemy in the Confessio, used exemplarily by Gower’s Genuis as a counterbalance to the surrounding section’s subject of Sloth. In Runstedler’s reading, while Gower affirms that “contemporary alchemists will fail in their experiments, alchemy emerges as a useful model for labor and an efficient work ethic” (65); thus, Gower finds in alchemy “a paradoxical model for perfect yet unattainable human labor, recognizing it as an exemplary one that has been lost due to human shortcomings and postlapsarian decline” (15). As such, Runstedler finds Gower’s perspective on alchemy more positive than Chaucer’s and others’, but before moving into his discussion of the Confessio feels compelled to account for the apparently negative attitude towards alchemy expressed in Gower’s earlier Mirour de l’Omme. I read the relevant passage, however, as describing simple counterfeiting despite the application of the word “alconomie” to the process of adulteration, so do not think that Runstedler even needed to view it as a potential challenge to his argument about the Confessio that required addressing. For Gower, finally, the “use” of alchemy in the present is not so much practical as metaphorical, tied to an emphasis on “contemplation and mental labor, which leads to a better work ethic and productivity” (73): “While alchemical perfection is unattainable, the virtues and morals of alchemy present an exemplary model to which to aspire” (81).

The fourth chapter positions Chaucer as building on Gower’s pioneering use of the exemplum in an alchemical context with an analysis of the former poet’s more famous and more extensive descriptions of various forms of alchemy in his Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. Chaucer, in Runstedler’s “moral” reading, crafts a more complex, even subversive exemplum addressing, still much like Gower, “the loss of linguistic interpretation and communication, and more specifically alchemy as an ideal yet seemingly unattainable craft” (90). This approach brings out unexpected dimensions of the Canon’s Yeoman’s performance as a narrator in particular, and Runstedler finds a tale told by an imperfect teller in a confessio mode nevertheless on a “road to rehabilitation,” and perhaps a victim of an abusive relationship (90). The chapter also emphasizes The Second Nun’s Tale as implicitly offering a more positive “alchemical” model of pious self-transmutation and more productive “busy-ness,” as well as addressing previous alchemical readings of other tales (although it should be noted that Runstedler largely pushes back against over-reading alchemy into these texts). The chapter variously looks back to Gower with his emphasis on postlapsarian decline, and forward to the sixth chapter, where the “elvysshe” craft mentioned by Chaucer will be placed in the mouth of a literal elf in the later alchemical dialogue.

Chapter 5 considers a unique version of Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird in MS Harley 2407, which includes stanzas identifying the titular avian as the “Bird of Hermes” and otherwise overlays alchemical readings onto the moralizing symbolism in the poem. Guided by Elias Ashmole’s reframing of and commentary on the poem in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, Runstedler expounds the new alchemical interpretations and their implications when considered in light of the poem’s exemplary character, finding a constancy in how the two texts deploy exemplarity despite their differing allegorical referents. Once again we also find a concern with “moral blindness” and “a decline in language and a lack of understanding” (152, 139), those common interests of alchemical poetry that have recurred throughout the book. Strikingly, Runstedler also identifies the seeds of the exemplary alchemical reading in the original poem, as if waiting latently to be multiplied in the new stanzas, for example “the idea of unattainable or forbidden knowledge due to [the churl’s] ignorance” (148). The sixth and final body chapter analyzes two dialogues that uncritically celebrate alchemy, yet retain an exemplary character in their depiction of the dissemination of alchemical knowledge from adept to initiate, and insistence on “the potential for exemplary change” and the pursuit of the “right path” (165). The little-known poems treated in this chapter will interest scholars of Arthurian literature, medieval fairy lore, and more, with their “characterization of Merlin as a brilliant child” (163); an elf queen who is not a flirtatious deceiver but an alchemical magister; and a provocative chemical symbolism relying “allegorical incest” (172). A brief conclusion then caps this brief monograph, reaffirming that “exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding literary narratives containing alchemy in late medieval English poetry” and even gesturing in a few pages of overview to the explosion of early modern alchemical writing soon to follow (193).

Concision in scholarship is rarely a flaw, but I point to the brevity of this study only because I feel that the argument itself remains underdeveloped due to a significant omission. Namely, the scope implied in the title Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature and constructed within the text itself afforded the author a missed opportunity to engage much more deeply with Thomas Norton’s fifteenth-century poem The Ordinal of Alchemy. Runstedler does of course mention Norton, but directly references only a few lines from among Norton’s 3100 and more, the discussion of the Ordinal proper running to less than a full page (51-52); from my perspective, Norton merited an entire chapter of his own (or a monograph!). Perhaps the author judged Norton’s poem to lack the “exemplary” character of the other texts under consideration, and therefore less worthy of sustained attention in the same contexts. After reading Runstedler’s intriguing book with its expanded understanding of exemplarity, however, my own sense is that we could readily approach Norton’s work from the lens of the exemplum and gain productive insights. Perhaps such an enterprise could become a future project for Runstedler or others seeking to build on his work here. Moreover, I am insufficiently familiar with George Ripley’s work to comment on whether similar attention could or should have been given to it as well (Ripley being the other major author of fifteenth-century alchemical poetry, again mentioned almost in passing), but as I read Runstedler’s book I repeatedly noticed telling intersections and also divergences between the poems under discussion and many of Norton’s ideas, and even specific lines and episodes. Even setting aside such an exemplary framework for reading, the Ordinal is so substantial a poem that so many passages from it would have shed further light on alchemy’s place (and versification) in fifteenth-century England, and resonated with Chaucer and the dialogues especially: Norton’s repeated defenses of alchemy as a fundamentally Christian enterprise granted by God only to the worthy at his own discretion (the major dimension of the work Runstedler does emphasize); his raising and refutation of various objections to alchemy; his rejection of claims to the multiplication of metals; the acknowledgment and condemnation of the kinds of scams depicted in Chaucer and other poets; the insight he provides into actual and ideal labor conditions in the alchemical “lab”; and his own claims to have created the elixir of life and quintessence although they were stolen from him. In the end, perhaps it is a testament to the successes rather than failings of Runstedler’s book that it has inspired me to begin drawing such connections beyond its bounds.

Despite the complexity of the subject matter and the scope of the study, I noticed only a few stray mistakes throughout, such as a misidentification of the fragment of The Canterbury Tales in which The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale appears as VII rather than VIII (93). Also, this point is unconnected to the book’s argument, but it is not clear to me why the cover art features an image of a physician performing a uroscopy in a clinical setting rather than a more obviously alchemical (or exemplary?) scenario. While the physician in question represents a depiction of Abu Bakr al-Razi, a figure also known as an alchemist, he is not mentioned in the book except in a footnote as an interlocutor in other alchemical dialogues under the name Rhases (185); Runstedler also does not discuss alchemical medicine except to note rightly in the conclusion that it is largely a post-medieval development (194). If, however, we look past the potentially misleading cover art and the scanty engagement with Norton (as we should), Runstedler has produced a very useful study of the other alchemical literature of the period. The book is highly persuasive that English poets found alchemy “a useful motif for exemplary purposes” (17), and contributes to several important conversations about the relationship between literature and science across history.