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A Previously Unidentified Fragment of ‘Pearce the Black Monke Upon the Elixir’ in MS. Mellon 43

A Previously Unidentified Fragment of ‘Pearce the Black Monke Upon the Elixir’ in MS. Mellon 43

Timmermann, Anke

Marginalia, Vol.1 (2005)

Abstract

Among the manuscripts of the Mellon collection, which now forms part of Yale University’s Beinecke Library holdings, there is an alchemical miscellany of a diversity not unusual for sixteenth-century notebooks. The four (ex)tracts are mainly anonymous, written in both English and Latin, prose and verse. Rather dishevelled and incomplete in appearance, the volume is devoid of its original context; indeed we do not know much about its provenance, except for a palaeographical dating for circa 1575. This note is intended to shed light on the identity of a previously unidentified alchemical verse text in the manuscript, which has occupied a marginal position (both literally and figuratively) since it was copied into MS. Mellon 43.

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