Fleshly wisdoms: image practices, bodies, and the transmission of knowledge in a sixteenth-century alchemical miscellany

Abstract

This article explores the composition of Glasgow MS Ferguson 6, a sixteenth-century alchemical miscellany that combines almost every known image cycle in the related period corpus. Some of the manuscript’s illuminations draw directly from print sources, but edit their content to create more affect for the reader. Others rework existing manuscript sources, culminating in a wordless copy of the Aurora Consurgens, a simultaneously erotic and scientific text. This article argues that love—carnal and visceral, as well as the traditional sense of philosophy as love of wisdom—is the motivation behind the creation of learned manuscripts of this kind.