“As Licour Out of a Lambyc Ful Faste”: Love and Alchemy in Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

Love and alchemy make strange bedfellows in medieval literature. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, vernacular poets utilized the materials and methods of alchemy as a means of articulating the complicated process of falling in love. This poetic strategy was used by authors ranging from Jean de Meun to John Gower, who seamlessly weave long passages on alchemy into the fabric of their poetry. In the Roman de la Rose, for example, human bodies—afflicted by “lovesickness”—are understood in terms of alchemy’s furnaces and distillations: the god of Love, like an alchemist, operates the lover’s “athanor” (Arabic: at tannūr), an alchemical digesting furnace used for heating the alembic, which is made analogous to the lover’s own heart (3.6382–404).¹ Indeed, the final product of a courtly lover’s repeated bodily distillations is the refined tears of fine amor—the “purified” and perfected love.² Alchemy’s transmutations, Jean later argues, are vivifying in comparison to a painted scene of courtly ladies and handsome bachelors holding one another in love’s dance.³ In the Confessio amantis, Gower’s alchemy in Book 4 (lines 2457–632) also shifts in meaning within the context of fine amor and his discussion of the lover’s sloth. In sum, medieval poets would successfully amalgamate imagery drawn from both alchemical treatises and the well-known handbooks on love, as the behavior and experience of medieval lovers in many ways reflected the art of alchemy itself. This literary tradition perhaps originates from the famous Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem, an allegorical poem known by Chaucer (see chapter 3), which compares the chemical combination of alchemy’s metals to the bonds of love between a wife and husband, embracing one another in sexual union.