Dismal Science: Chaucer and Gower on Alchemy and Economy

Abstract

As his title suggests, Epstein pursues a double agenda in this essay: linking both Gower's and Chaucer's views on alchemy to their understanding of economics, first of all; and secondly, contrasting their views not just on alchemy, which we already knew were quite different, but on economics too. In his final paragraph, he writes: is, for both Chaucer and Gower, an essential trope for understanding economics. But whereas idealizes alchemy as a vision of natural increase and pure wealth that is opposite of economy, Chaucer reviles alchemy as obscurantist antithesis of both technology and economics, which are logical systems that, while artificial, can only be understood rationally and empirically (248). It is not a small part of merit of Epstein's essay that it provides a brief, very clear account of background, both classical and medieval, to both poets' understandings of both alchemy and economics. The connection between two in Chaucer's work is a bit more speculative than in Gower's. Epstein makes much of depiction of priest who is victim in Canon Yeoman's Tale as an unsophisticated gull in order to portray his lack of understanding of economics as somehow parallel to his susceptibility to deceptions of alchemy. Chaucer's scientific understanding of economics is inferred from his background as collector of customs, his understanding of nature of financial dealings as revealed in Shipman's Tale, and interest in measurement and calculation displayed in his Treatise on Astrolabe. It is rather more difficult to demonstrate that these experiences underlay his dismissal of alchemy as false science. Epstein has a bit more to work with in Gower's case since has much to say about profitlessness of quest for gold in an economic sense in his discussion of Avarice in Book V of CA, in seeming contrast to his approval of science, if not modern practice, of production of gold by alchemy in Book IV. Epstein explains Gower's allusion to the time, er gold was smite / In coign, that men florin knewe (V.334-35), when there was no deception and no war, as a reference not to some vague Golden Age in ancient past but to Edward III's minting of gold coins beginning in 1344, which and other contemporaries blamed for social divisions and other turmoil of their own time. In Book IV, on other hand, in praising ancient practice of alchemy, describes it as a natural process, not transmuting base metals into some other form but instead restoring them to their purest form. Epstein summarizes significance of this juxtaposition as he brings his discussion of to a close: Gower begins Book V of 'Confessio' with words 'Obstat auaricia legibus' (Avarice obstructs laws of nature). He endorses alchemy before he excoriates money because alchemy stands in contrast to mercantilism as a myth of natural wealth. Alchemy in Book IV is everything that money in Book V is not: ordered, organic, bounded by natural extremes, rational, obedient to consistent laws, commensurable, and equitable. One of qualities of money that most disturbed ancient and modern thinkers was that, through exchange and interest, it seemed to be able to multiply itself, and therefore to create wealth ex nihilo, without labor or material. But in Gower's understanding, alchemist's labor leads material, through the comfort of fire, to ideal form it most desires. Some of greatest minds of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worried that alchemy, by increasing amount of (natural or synthetic) gold and silver, could destabilize money economy. seems to have harbored greater concerns about destabilizing effects of money economy itself. Alchemy for was a myth of profit without money or exchange, of value that is absolute rather than relative, of wealth that is organic, natural, universal, elemental, and inalienable from innate value of material. Alchemy allowed him, as it must have allowed many of his contemporaries, to entertain a vision of labor, wealth, and profit while maintaining his belief in a moral social system rooted in ancient concepts of justice and fair exchange. The elixir, says, can refine every metal, 'And pureth hem be such a weie / That al vice goth aweie' (IV:2555-56). But, it is also lost. The science itself is true, but we cannot recover it to modern world, which, even by Gower's time, was thoroughly monetized (231-32). [PN. Copyright John Society. eJGN 34.1]