Chapter 12 - ‘Of the parfite medicine’: Merita Perpetuata in Gower’s Vernacular Alchemy

Summary

When one speaks of models of virtuous, productive labour in the medieval period, the alchemist is not a figure that springs immediately to mind. In the sixteenth century Reginald Scot lambastes those who made use of alchemical language and practices as ‘ranke couseners, and consuming cankers to the common wealth, and therefore to be rejected and excommunicated from the fellowship of all honest men’, a forceful opinion which is far from unfamiliar in earlier centuries. In fact, outside of those who claim to practise alchemy and produce texts of their own, it seems that little good can be said about it. Alchemy is satirized, condemned and generally mistrusted. It is probably heretical. Its literature fails to describe it clearly because the practice is a shadowy, immoral sham. False coining, charlatanry and out and out theft – all were dangers when entering into an alchemist's laboratory, to say nothing of violent explosions and other experimental disasters. In short, there is a reason that Dante condemns alchemists to one of the lowest circles of Hell.

Yet it is in this very environment of mistrust and suspicion that Gower writes book IV of the Confessio Amantis, with its surprising validation of alchemy as the highest possible form of human labour. The ‘problem’ with Gower's treatment of alchemy, I will argue, has less to do with its presence in the poem and more to do with the plainness of its presentation. After all, there are many things that Gower might well find attractive about the practice of alchemy – its focus on unification and purity, its demands for studious discipline, the faith it puts in divine intervention – but all of these qualities are dwarfed by the science's insistence on transformational labour and the virtue of its adepts. This last element, that of labour (both textual and material) is critical to Gower's characterization of alchemy as a remedy for the sin of Sloth but also to the larger confessional framework of the poem. Through alchemy Gower shows his audience how to become virtuous readers who are able to materially change themselves through the abstract and immaterial world of the text.