Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky (review)

In Chaucer the Alchemist, Alexander N. Gabrovsky proposes to read Chaucer's poetry for the ways he "exploits the scientific thinking of his day in order to conceptualize and aestheticize his own unique philosophy of physics," and more broadly, of worldly change and mutability. Chaucer is cast as a perceptive observer of a world ever in motion and ever in flux; these natural-scientific interests encouraged him to study up on physics, alchemy, and logic, and then to translate this learning into a number of his poems as narrative programs or interpretive keys. Gabrovsky praisingly calls these poems "thought experiments," and so described, these texts are made to exemplify Chaucer's genius as both literary maker and natural philosopher. Chaucer the Alchemist invites readers, in its title and in its arguments, to reimagine his poetry as the thoughtful, methodical reworking of elemental subject matter: contemporary medieval philosophies of the mutable, the transforming, and the contingent.

An introduction argues that references to physical transformation across Chaucer's poetry together reflect that captivation by worldly change. Gabrovsky here provides a survey of "clerical cultures" that may have served as conduits of learning to medieval society broadly and Chaucer's London milieu specifically: namely the mendicant orders and medieval universities; he also places his arguments within the scholarship on Chaucer and medieval science. Four chapters then focus upon one poem matched with a series of academic concepts or modes of thinking. Gabrovsky argues that The House of Fame follows a "philosophical formula for [its] action" (29) as a "product of fourteenth-century debates on the science of mechanics" (28). Two subsequent chapters scour The Franklin's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde for "a network of alchemical imagery" that "guides Chaucer's whole narrative project" in each (189). The fifth chapter understands the avian debate of the Parliament of Fowls to be a logical exercise in conditionals and possibilities, written expertly after a Scholastic pattern of ars obligitoria. A conclusion suggests that the monadic and dyadic concepts of Neoplatonist thought offered Chaucer another way to think abstractly about change, and to write about it.

Gabrovsky deserves praise for how Chaucer the Alchemist assembles anew a set of natural-scientific texts and ideas from the corners of medieval intellectual culture for a generalist Chaucerian readership. For instance, his chapter on The Franklin's Tale highlights an alchemical discourse of astrological and sexual conjunction with reference to the Latin Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem. This is the "book Senior" of the Canon's Yeoman's reading list, translated from the Arabic of Muhammad ibn Umail. The mingling of the astrological with the alchemical in the Epistola serves well to warrant Gabrovsky's claim that the zodiacal preoccupations of the learned "philosopher" of Orléans and his client Aurelius chimed with a cognate alchemical allegory, the wedding of sun and moon. Passages from the Epistola and texts such as Albertus Magnus's Liber mineralibus and the De compositione alchimiae of Morienus illuminate how alchemical theory might underwrite an interpretation of the physical and psychological transformations wrought by the tale's narrative. Gabrovsky grounds another tidy claim for Chaucer's poetic adaptation of physical concepts on solid, convincing ground in his chapter on The House of Fame. Geffrey's changing sense of the wicker labyrinth's motion—whirling from without and "stente" from within—presents readers with a problem of relative perception and, more broadly, worldly and celestial mechanics. Gabrovsky tracks how such questions were taken up in Aristotle's De caelo and Aquinas's commentary upon it, as well as via figures of thought such as John Buridan and Nicole Oresme's example of the observer on a moving ship. When Geffrey claims to "know where he stands" with confidence, to his readers he appears to stand unsteadily and with uncertain shiftiness in the chaotic, spinning world of the poem. At a few points like these...