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We are moving-slowly-beyond the old slurs against J ohn Lydgate as the apotheosis of dullness in fifteenth-century England. Leaving aside the massive poems that will never be read in full by college classes and admitting that his devotional poetry may remain in latter days a specialized taste, we could agree that his shorter secular poetry deserves a wider audience. Still, it may be a surprise that any reader would find Lydgate magical, even in his own time. At least one fifteenth-century reader-poet found Lydgate positively mystical and transformed Lydgate's Churl and Bird into an overtly alchemical poem. This version survives in an important alchemical manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2407, among the smears and stains of surrounding recipes actively pursued.1 In early modern England the same version appears in one of the major alchemical collections in early print, Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum (hereafter TCB).2 To this day some scholars continue to accept the alchemical Churl and Bird as an anonymous work in the tradition of hermetic poetry rather than a transmuted moral fable by England's Lancastrian laureate.
This error may contain deeper truths. First, the evidence suggests that the transformed Lydgate surviving in Harley 2407 may have been accomplished by the most famous adept of a century in England that was far less dull than its moralists intended-poet and alchemist George Ripley. Nine rhyme-royal stanzas inserted within Churl and Bird in that manuscript develop fully a latent alchemical reading of that poem. Furthermore, the usual assumptions about moralizing laureate poetry in late medieval England and its reception in early Tudor England are challenged by a tradition of alchemical poetry (with curious links to the Romance of Alexander), which remains virtually unknown to medieval scholars despite its important role in early modern literature. Gold itself as a signifier of literary authority comes into quite a different focus when we recognize that an occult aureate literature parallels that of Geoffrey Chaucer and Lydgate in late Middle English: collected by antiquarians and enshrined in early print, widely influential among early modern figures as different as J ohn Dee, Ralph Rabbards, and John Donne.
Churl and Bird (hereafter CB) is a short poem-fifty-five rhyme royal stanzas in the standard edition-that tells the tale of a peasant who captures...