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Midwestern Alchemy: The Global Context of a Small-Town Manuscript
- Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
- Midwest Modern Language Association
- Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2020
- pp. 81-103
- 10.1353/mml.2020.0009
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Our essay describes a previously unknown fifteenth-century alchemical manuscript in Denison University’s Special Collections, surveys its general position among the thousands of medieval text objects owned by smaller institutions in North America, and outlines the features of an interactive digital project to be constructed around it. The main text in the manuscript, John of Rupescissa’s Consideration of Quintessence (composed c. 1351), offers an unusual combination of interesting case studies in protest-writing, apocalypticism, and the history of medical chemistry. The manuscript (written 1459) and its scribal tradition further present needful projects, which undergraduate students and citizen-scholars, as well as manuscript specialists, may find compelling.