Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production: A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group by Alpo Honkapohja (review)

The “Voigts-Sloane Group,” which consists of eleven fifteenth-century medical and alchemical manuscripts in Latin and Middle English, was originally described by Linda Voigts in 1990 (as the “Sloane Group”). The manuscripts were grouped together on two rather different criteria: some are “strikingly similar” in layout (while having little textual overlap), whereas others contain an “anthology” of twelve texts in almost identical order (while being dissimilar in appearance); one manuscript fits both criteria, providing a link. The Voigts-Sloane Group has been of interest to scholars for two main reasons: the possibility that the Group is evidence of coordinated, commercial book production prior to print, and the bilingual nature of the manuscripts, in a time when many scientific and medical treatises were available in the vernacular. In Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production, Alpo Honkapohja addresses and ultimately revises these and other prevailing notions about the Voigts-Sloane Group.

Chapter 1 briefly discusses the English book trade prior to printing: while earlier centers of literary production might be the university, the monastery, or the courts, by the early fifteenth century there was burgeoning commercial book production in London, with various artisans organizing themselves into guilds. Most books at this time seem to have been “bespoke” productions, specifically commissioned by patrons and carried out by individual artisans collaborating with one another. Honkapohja sets out the criteria, as established by previous scholars such as Linne Mooney, A. I. Doyle and Malcolm B. Parkes, P. R. Robinson, and Ralph Hanna, by which one might detect in a manuscript the involvement of professional scribes, commercial scriptoria, or speculative production, as well as the criteria for identifying a booklet (“a self-contained codicological unit”), all of which could point to coordinated book production.

Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to applying those criteria to codicological examination of the manuscripts. Chapter 2 examines the “Sibling Group” (Honkapohja’s term for those manuscripts that contain the anthology of “Sibling Set Texts” but are physically dissimilar), whereas Chapter 3 examines the “Core Group” (those manuscripts that share layout features while having little in common textually). As mentioned, one manuscript, London, British Library, MS Sloane 2320, “links the Sibling and Core groups, as it contains the Sibling Texts copied in the characteristic mise-en-page of the Core Group” (p. 50); this was key to Voigts’s earlier analysis of the eleven manuscripts as constituting a group.

Honkapohja concludes that while the Sibling Set Texts “did constitute a standard exemplar” (p. 63), available to professional scribes, the codicological evidence does not otherwise support the notion that the Sibling Group manuscripts were produced speculatively or in scriptoria. Analysis of the Core Group manuscripts reveals that they definitely or probably consist of booklets, and this, combined with the lack of textual overlap, suggests that they were “commissioned by an individual or institution that wanted a library of medical, scientific, and magical works in a similar format” (p. 63).

Chapter 3 also contains a short but interesting section on alchemy, due to the presence of alchemical texts in the Core Group. Alchemy, unlike the practice of medicine, was disreputable and illegal in fifteenth-century England, making it “hard to imagine” that the Core Group manuscripts were offered for sale openly (p. 87). Two Core manuscripts mention the name John Kirkby, who was one of three men allowed by special license of Henry VI to practice alchemy, and who was active during the period of the Core Group’s compilation (1454–62). Honkapohja’s position is that although it is “tempting” to imagine that whoever commissioned the Core manuscripts was somehow connected to Kirkby or other famed alchemists, there were plenty of other practitioners, and the evidence does not point to his “personal involvement” (p. 99).

Chapter 4 addresses the...