Sidrak and Bokkus: An Early Modern Reader Response

Abstract

The Middle English version of the encyclopedic verse dialogue Sidrak and Bokkus has received little attention in recent scholarship, and hence questions about its organization and appeal to readers remain unanswered. Discussing a previously unexplored version of the text in the early modern alchemical miscellany Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, MS M199, this article demonstrates how the text was read and interpreted by one late sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century reader in particular. Although the copyist took his text from the edition of the Middle English Sidrak and Bokkus printed in the 1530s by Thomas Godfray, he abbreviated and restructured the text to fit his own interests and needs. The numerous marginal annotations reveal that the copyist/annotator interpreted at least parts of the text as having alchemical or metallurgical significance. He also saw parallels in Sidrak and Bokkus to literary texts, most notably Chaucer's Monk's Tale, adding references to William Thynne's third edition of the Canterbury Tales (c. 1550). The article thus provides detailed information both on the interpretation of Sidrak and Bokkus in early modern England and on reading practices in the period more generally.