London, British Library, MS Harley 2407 is remarkable for the variety of Middle English alchemical poems that it contains. Comprising six booklets and mostly written by two fifteenth-century scribes, Harley 2407 has over twenty hands dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century tucked into its margins and written in spaces left blank by the earlier scribes. Among the recognisable hands are those of John Dee (1527–1608) and Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), representing two distinct classes of alchemical reader: the former, as Elizabeth I’s advisor and court alchemist, practised alchemical operations in his laboratory in Mortlake; the latter was an armchair alchemist, an amateur who saw alchemy as the means through which ‘the perfection of Liberall Sciences are made known’ and through which ‘the whole Wisdome of Nature may be grasped’. The entries of Harley 2407 cater for all tastes, as evinced by the marks, notes, and poems left by later readers. The manuscript contains practical recipes and it contains imaginative forays into alchemical philosophy. Alchemy is by turns materialistic and divine in Harley 2407 and always confusing. Having explored the ways in which alchemy is perceived by those who are outside its language, let us now turn to the multifarious voices of alchemists themselves.

Scientific and encyclopaedic information was often versified throughout the medieval period for mnemonic reasons; important information is easier to remember with meter and rhyme. These days, we tend to favour the acronym or the acrostic as mnemonic tools (Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain; Never Eat Shredded Wheat; MR VANSTRAMPED; BODMAS), and yet it seems that the medieval mind was more attuned to the memory-jogging qualities of verse. In the introduction to his annotated bibliography of English Magical and Scientific Poems to 1700, Robert M. Schuler notes that ‘by far the most popular subject [of scientific verse], both before and after 1500, is alchemy (127 entries); medicine in all its forms (about 100 separate entries) ranks second’. This might lead us to conclude that there were more alchemists than physicians throughout the late medieval and early modern period, which is unlikely. As explored in the introduction to this book, alchemy had a long and particular relationship with poetry in ways that other sciences did not, especially in the Greek and Arabic tradition.