Of Catalogs, Cupboards, and Chemists: Revising the Handlist of the Ordinal of Alchemy

This essay tells several related stories concerning the provenance, loss (including, as it shows, the imagined loss), and re-emergence of some of the witnesses of Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy (1477), one of the central texts of late medieval English vernacular alchemy. Taking into account the kinds of infrastructure and digital labor that make such discoveries possible, it untangles several bibliographic knots which have confused the record of this poem’s material survival since the late nineteenth century. It also traces several previously missing or otherwise untraced manuscripts of the Ordinal to their current institutional homes, uncovers several previously overlooked witnesses, and introduces a new, previously unknown manuscript that recently emerged from a private collection. An appendix includes a fully corrected and updated handlist for the poem, whose now forty-seven known witnesses are held in nineteen archives across six countries.