Entre littérature, science et politique: les oeuvres alchimiques de Thomas Norton et George Ripley
Published in Revue Historique, 658, 2011/2. See http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=RHIS_112_0243
The alchemical works of Thomas
Norton (The Ordinal of Alchemy) and George Ripley (The Compound of
Alchemy) are two of the most important testimonies of the popularity of
alchemy in England, in the second half of the fifteenth- century.
Nevertheless, they generally have been studied only for their
pseudo-scientific content, and very much depreciated. However, their
writers address, especially in their prologues, some important questions
on literature, language and knowledge, and also on the prince and the
relations of power in the society. Their choice to transmit a discipline
located at the junction of science and art (in the medieval sense of
the term) and characterized by secrecy, in a poetical form and in an
accessible vernacular language, raises, indeed, many interrogations. It
points to the facts that the established boundaries between literary and
scientific texts are not always pertinent; that in the second half of
the fifteenth-century, English has indeed became a language of
transmission of knowledge. Overall, these alchemical treatises in verse
contribute to the formation of a lay culture marked by its English
identity. At the same time, they are an invitation to think about the
multiplicity and the complexity of contemporary conceptions of knowledge
– even with regards to a specific type of knowledge, alchemy. Finally,
the political aspects of these texts are important: both Norton, and
more openly, Ripley, want to help to transform the prince, who must be
actor and object of this change, to improve the governance of the
country. This is all the more necessary in a political society
destabilized by the Wars of the Roses.
