The 'Forgotten' Language of Middle English Alchemy: Exploring Alchemical Lexis in the MED and the OED

Abstract

Joining recent studies that attempt to re-evaluate the legacy of alchemy, this article explores the recording of alchemical vocabulary from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the MED and the OED. By considering labeling practices in the dictionaries, the alchemical sources that they employ, and principles of inclusion and exclusion, it shows that the dictionaries give only a partial, inconsistent, and sometimes misleading picture of alchemical vocabulary in Middle English. I complement this study of the dictionaries with an investigation of an unedited fifteenth-century codex of alchemical writing, which reveals that numerous alchemical words and meanings remain unrecorded in the MED and OED. In the past two decades, scholars of the history of science have begun to re-evaluate the legacy of alchemy. Reclaiming it from accusations of being thoroughly unscientific or pseudoscientific (judged by modern standards) and from entrenched associations with fraud, the occult, and spiritual betterment, these scholars emphasize the many contributions of alchemy to science, technology, and medicine in the medieval and early modern periods. 1 This reclamation should also be extended to the editing of alchemical texts in English and the study of the English language in those texts. Although numerous alchemical texts from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries attest to the profound interest in alchemical writings and in alchemical experimentation in late medieval and early modern England, they remain largely unedited and unstudied. Because of this lack of attention, we know very little about the strategies used by writers as they struggled to translate texts, adopt and adapt words for concepts never before expressed in English, and shape appropriate scientific discourse. All of these aspects have implications for our knowledge of the larger issues of the development of English scientific prose and the history of the language as a whole. However, alchemy's contributions to the English language have not been completely neglected. In fact, both the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the Oxford English Dictionary