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4
e Medical Culture of Friars
his chapter seeks to answer the question, ‘Was there a distinctive medical
T
culture of friars in England?’ It will consider the kinds of medical
interest shown by friars, as evidenced by their writings – what they read and
studied, and what they communicated to others. e evidence available to
us comes in the form of manuscripts, written, compiled, owned and used by
friars. is means that our evidence is aected by gaps caused by the eects
of catastrophic scattering of the friars’ persons, convents and their books in
the 1530s. Even when the books survived, there are sometimes diculties
involved in identifying friars’ books, given the fragmentary evidence of identity
and ownership. But there is still sucient evidence to allow us to estimate the
distinctiveness of the medical culture of the friars.
Distinct from what? Our idea of medicine in the central and late Middle
Ages in England has been shaped overwhelmingly by the rise of the universities.
Oxford and Cambridge were comparatively late on the scene, but faculties of
medicine were in existence from the early fourteenth century.1 e English
universities were following the examples of Paris and Montpellier, where the
faculty of medicine was for teaching medicine to students who had already
qualied as masters of arts. In Italy, there were doctoral colleges associating
professors of medicine with physicians practising in the towns, while the student
university conjoined the study of arts and medicine (although courses in arts
and medicine were taught separately). In both forms of university, the teaching
of medicine in the classroom, as in the arts curriculum, called for the provision
of authoritative texts of Greek and Islamicate sources in Latin translation;
the writing of commentaries, compendia and glossaries on them by teachers
or masters; note-taking by students; and records of questions disputed and
resolved. University-trained physicians (and later, surgeons) wrote expository
texts on the practice of medicine as well as on the theory of medicine. ese
last ran through causes of disease, through diagnosis of signs, prognosis and
treatment, and were written to establish norms of medical practice, since
1
See Chapter 3, and Getz, ‘Faculty’, p. 381: Both the rst recorded medical gradu-
ates of Oxford and the earliest surviving statutes regularizing medical study date
from the early years of the fourteenth century.
124 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
students of medicine were expected eventually to become practitioners. e
masters who taught medicine were also themselves practitioners. ey claimed
they were equipped by their studies to practise medicine on a rational basis and
thus to meet a standard of rationality unavailable to the illiterati. Such claims
came to be accepted by elites ranging from the royal and noble households to
those of city burghers and the higher clergy. ese people were increasingly
happy to put themselves in the hands of university-trained physicians and
surgeons rather than healers of other kinds.
2
e emergence of the orders of friars in the thirteenth century coincided
with these developments in university medicine and its increase in status
and authority. ere is evidence that in Bologna, Taddeo Alderotti, the most
celebrated professor of medicine, owed some of his intellectual formation
to the Franciscans there. In his will dated 1293, he reciprocated by leaving
Avicenna’s Canon in four volumes and his books of Galen to the Franciscans
of Bologna.3 In the same year, he lay ill in the Franciscan house in Bologna and
may have experienced nursing care there. His will provided that a huge sum
totalling some £200 should be left to the friars of S. Francesco, and that some
should go to the sick, the old and weak friars who had no other secular help
or means of living.4 Taddeo also wrote a consilium, a formal letter of medical
advice, for the Dominican surgeon and bishop Teodorico Borgognoni.5 is
all goes to suggest an interplay of intellectual and practical medical obligation
between university teachers and friars.6 As Angela Montford has established
for the Dominicans and Franciscans in Bologna, the mendicant houses were
increasingly happy to employ university-trained practitioners to heal the sick
in their convents in the fourteenth century.7 But professed friars were not
meant to study medicine at a university. Indeed, the study of medicine was
not suitable for clerics at all. e visitation of Merton College Oxford in 1284
2
For medical education at the universities, see N. G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Re-
naissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990), pp.
48–77; for elites ‘buying in’ to medical rationality, see M. R. McVaugh, Medicine
before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon 1285–1345
(Cambridge, 1993).
3
N. G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical
Learning (Princeton, 1981), pp. 33–4.
4
Montford, Health, Sickness, pp. 91, 95.
5
Siraisi, Taddeo, p. 38.
6
See now J. Chandelier and A. Tabarroni, ‘Philosophie, médecine et la science et
frères mendicants à Bologne dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle’, in Savoirs
profanes dans les ordres mendiants en Italie (XIIIe-XVe siècle), ed. J. Chandelier and A.
Robert (Rome, 2023), pp. 199–231.
7
Montford, Health, Sickness, ch. 6.
The Medical Culture of Friars 125
by John Pecham, Franciscan friar and archbishop of Canterbury, resulted in a
letter from Pecham to the warden and fellows of Merton, whose rst article
pronounced a ban on admitting students of medicine. Current students were
threatened with exclusion if they attended lectures on medicine. is seems
to have been an eort to prevent students of the new college from pursuing
studies motivated by personal prot. It did not prevent Simon Bredon, a
fellow of the college, graduating in theology and medicine in the 1330s, and
many other later fellows also practised medicine like Bredon.8 Pecham’s ban
would, however, most likely have met with Roger Bacon’s approval, as Bacon’s
condemnation of the uselessness of scholastic medical study was accompanied
by scorn for mercenary medical practice by physicians.
As we might expect given this evidence of entanglement, the distinctiveness
of friars’ medicine did not entail a wholesale rejection of the scholastic way of
doing medicine, or of its intellectual basis in the humoural medicine attributed
to Hippocrates, Galen and the great Islamicate authorities, Avicenna and
Rhazes. Roger Bacon’s assault on the errors of the physicians might seem at
rst sight to have fallen on deaf ears. But this chapter will argue that much
of the Baconian programme urged on Pope Clement IV did resonate with
the friars. is explicit attack by a friar on university medicine in De erroribus
medicorum also went on to set out an agenda for the kinds of medicine
favoured by Roger Bacon in contrast to scholasticism. ere is a positive
programme in this work which, if fullled, would enable philosophers (rather
than scholastic physicians) to prolong human life and counteract sickness.
What is required is the cultivation of seven special sciences known at the
time of the prophets but more recently neglected, from which benets may be
expected to individuals, most notably to the papal body, but also to Christian
society as a corporate body. at society is perceived by Bacon to be under
threat from Antichrist, external enemies like the Tartars and Saracens, and
the corruption of the church (including the orders of friars themselves). e
cultivation of these sciences will not only promote health but help to deliver
Christian society from the terrible threats to which Bacon thought it was
exposed in his own time.
Among the special sciences which must be cultivated are optics (perspectiva),
astrology, alchemy, experimental science and medicine.9 Perspectiva explains
how individuals are at the point of a cone of inuence from the celestial
8
I owe this point about Pecham’s ban to Laure Miolo.
9
e sciences of agriculture and weights are also listed by Bacon as neglected scienc-
es, but they are not so relevant here in respect of health and disease. See J. Hackett,
‘Roger Bacon on the Classication of the Sciences’, in Roger Bacon, ed. Hackett, pp.
49–65.
126 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
bodies, and, as a result of this inuence, the complexions of their bodies will
uniquely incline them in matters of health and disease. Regional groupings of
people will share aspects of complexion inuenced by more diuse rays from
celestial bodies. Practically, optical instruments may be used to gather and
project these rays of inuence from the stars and planets. Astrology accounts
for the changing patterns caused by the motions of the constellations of
the zodiac and the planets, and allows prognostications of health outcomes
and tells when best to undertake medical procedures and give medications.
Alchemy provides means of extending human life with the help of elixirs
and by purifying medicines. Experimental science (scientia experimentalis) is
less a new science in a disciplinary sense than an endorsement of the value
of observation and experience in establishing new truths – which syllogistic
argument cannot do. Its use is to reveal secrets of nature not known to
speculative science, and its fruits include new instruments and techniques,
and new cures in medicine. Bacon was adamant that no magic, even natural
magic, was involved in this. Medicine as a special science concerns itself
with prescribing a regimen of health (as in Bacon’s edition of the pseudoAristotelian Secretum secretorum) and the application of other sciences
described above to the provision of remedies.
Bacon’s enthusiasm for the sciences, which he claimed had been neglected
by scholastic medicine, and whose revival was urgently needed if dangers to
the Church, internal and external, let alone the imminent arrival of Antichrist
on earth, were to be countered, was echoed by English friars in particular.
Alchemy, scientia experimentalis and astrology proved to be very attractive to
English mendicants after Bacon urged their study in the 1260s. ese special
sciences, as applied to medicine, will provide structure to this chapter. is is
not to claim that these sciences were only popular amongst the friars. Other
English authors who wrote on medicine and related subjects – scholastics or
not – were also receptive to the Baconian programme, with varying degrees of
enthusiasm. But I will argue, admittedly grounding my evidence on what can
only be a surviving part of what friars wrote on medicine in England, that the
friars were most receptive to Bacon’s urging on the need for study of alchemy,
scientia experimentalis and astrology.
is chapter will consider these areas of particular medical interest to friars,
together with one other area denitely not championed by Roger Bacon.
Women’s medicine and human procreation were taken up with surprising
enthusiasm by English friars writing on medicine. No doubt, this particular
focus had a lot to do with the role of friars in practising healing in the lay
household (see Chapters 1 and 2).
The Medical Culture of Friars 127
Alchemy
For Bacon, there were two kinds of alchemy, speculative and operative or
practical. Speculative alchemy teaches how all things, living or not, are made
from a combination of the four canonical elements (re, air, water and earth).
Each element is characterised by two of the four elementary properties: re
is hot and dry, air is hot and moist, water is cold and moist, earth is cold and
dry. e combination of these elements gives birth to humours, so that in each
individual thing there will be varying proportions of four simple humours,
blood, phlegm, bile and melancholy. One element will predominate in each
simple humour. ere is more air than other elements in blood, more water
in phlegm, more re in bile, more earth in melancholy. Similarly, the four
simple humours are combined into a compound humour, in which one simple
humour will predominate, not in quantity but in strength. ese compound
humours are the ones presupposed in Galenic or humoural medicine and
may be evacuated from the human body by physicians. It follows that the
speculative alchemist operates on the body at a more profound level than the
scholastic physician in Bacon’s account.
Speculative alchemy considers the relations of elements, simple and
compound humours, but also corruptibility and incorruptibility of substances.
Bacon’s reading of Aristotle on generation and corruption, and on substance
and form, was overlaid by his profound religious commitment to the biblical
account of the Fall of man and of the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrice.
Incorruptibility comes from a corpus equale, a body of equal complexion, in
which elements and humours are in equilibrium because the properties of the
10
10
On the texts of Bacon’s speculative alchemy see A. Paravicini Bagliani, ‘Ruggero
Bacone e l’alchimia di lunga vita: Riessioni sui testi’, in Alchimia e medicina nel
Medioevo, ed. C. Crisciani and A. Paravicini Bagliani (Florence, 2003), pp. 33–54;
editions of the three works addressed to Pope Clement IV are listed at https://ro-
gerbaconresearchsociety.com/works/, accessed 17 April 2023. Bacon’s theories are
expounded in W. R. Newman, ‘e Alchemy of Roger Bacon and the Tres Epistolae
Attributed to Him’, in Comprendre e maîtriser la nature au Moyen Âge, mélanges
d’histoire des sciences oerts à Guy Beaujouan (Geneva, 1994), pp. 461–79; W. R.
Newman, ‘e Philosophers’ Egg: eory and Practice in the Alchemy of Rog-
er Bacon’, in Le Crisi dell’alchimia/e Crisis of Alchemy, Micrologus 3 (Turnhout,
1995), pp. 75–101; W. R. Newman, ‘An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy’, in
Roger Bacon, ed. Hackett, pp. 317–36; S. Moreau, ‘Elixir atque fermentum: New In-
vestigations about the Link Between Pseudo-Avicenna’s Alchemical De anima and
Roger Bacon: Alchemical and Medical Doctrines’, Traditio 68 (2013), 277–325;
M. S. Allen, ‘Roger Bacon’s Medical Alchemy and the Multiplication of Species’,
in e Philosophy and Science of Roger Bacon: Studies in Honour of Jeremiah Hackett,
ed. N. Polloni and Y. Kedar (London, 2021), pp. 159–74.
128 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
elements cancel each other out. It is stable and eternal. ere are three ways
of getting this equal complexion. e rst is through the use of gold. Gold is
the only substance in nature which has an equal complexion, but this must be
prepared alchemical gold, not gold as mined from the ground. e resurrection
body, promised to saved humanity after the Last Judgement, is also the corpus
equale, but with an equality of quantities of elements, rather than of their
strengths as with the third kind of corpus equale. is resurrection body, of
course, is not available to humanity until the end of things. e third corpus
equale is the goal of speculative alchemy. It achieves its end by ‘separating the
elements’ of substances by means of stratication and fractional distillation
and reducing the dominating element in each substance so that the strengths
of all four are equal.11 e substances thus analysed and recombined were the
means by which human artice could achieve the corpus equale. A further stage
was required to make this medically eective. Optical instruments, specically
a burning mirror, must be used to concentrate the light rays coming from
benecent celestial bodies on the corpus equale. In this way, it can be enabled
to propagate or multiply its own species, so as to activate the potential of
recipient bodies like food, materia medica or human subjects and imbue them
with the virtues of the stars, counteracting inrmity, pestilence and famine.
12
In his commentary on the Secretum secretorum, Bacon gave a recipe for the
making of the philosophers’ stone or elixir. e alchemist begins with human
blood, in which the four simple humours (phlegm, bile, blood and melancholy)
can be distinguished by the eye. e simple humours within blood must then
be separated, and each one purged from the others. ey must be remixed in
a secret proportion, mixed with puried quicksilver, and then with the calx of
a base metal and with that of a noble metal. is would work not only as a
means of metallic transformation but would work on the human body in order
to prolong life.13 It is a general medicine rather than a specic medicine for
particular ills. Because body and mind are both inuenced by the complexion
the elixir will alleviate defects of character caused by imbalance. In the Liber
sex scientiarum Bacon claims that man might with the elixir reach perfect
11
Newman, ‘Overview’, p. 326.
12
Newman, ‘Overview’, p. 327; M. T. Tavormina, ‘Roger Bacon: Two Extracts on the
Prolongation of Life’, in Sex, Aging & Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium:
Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. T.
Tavormina (Tempe, 2006), pp. 327–72 (pp. 331–2); Allen, ‘Roger Bacon’s’, p. 169.
Allen argues that the multiplication of species is the mechanism by which Bacon’s
alchemical elixir works on the recipient body: see Allen, Roger Bacon, pp. 87–98.
13
Newman, ‘An Overview’, p. 331.
The Medical Culture of Friars 129
wisdom and great foresight with the help of the grace of God.14 is recipe
for the philosophers’ stone using human blood and targeted at prolonging life,
a nobler goal than transmutation of metals, was destined for a long career in
English medicinal alchemy, as we shall see.
15
Bacon’s ideas about prolongevity, extending human life by means other than
adherence to the diet and regimen favoured by scholastic physicians, were just
as signicant in their impact on English medicine and alchemy. ese ideas
derived from a variety of sources, notably the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum
secretorum, and the De retardatione accidentium senectutis, both channelled
through Roger Bacon. e latter treatise was usually thought in England to
be Bacon’s own work but has since been shown to be that of a ‘domini castri
Goet’, writing in the 1230s.16 Bacon took over these ideas in the Opus maius
and in his own additions to his edition of the Secretum secretorum.17 e core
idea was that the natural span of human life, even after the eects of the
Fall of Man, is much longer than contemporary experience would suggest. In
the Old Testament and in anecdotes from other classical authors, there are
accounts of individuals who lived hundreds of years. Immoderate habits and
14
Z. Matus, ‘Resurrected Bodies and Roger Bacon’s Elixir’, Ambix 60 (2013), 323–40
(p. 329).
15
F. M. Getz, ‘“To Prolong Life and Promote Health”: Baconian Alchemy and Phar-
macy in the English Learned Tradition’, in Health, Disease and Healing in Medi-
eval Culture, ed. S. Campbell, B. Hall and D. Klausner (Basingstoke, 1992), pp.
141–51; Getz, ‘Roger Bacon’, pp. 337–64; Tavormina, ‘Roger Bacon’, pp. 327–72;
Yoeli-Tlalim, ReOrienting, pp. 117–20.
16
A. Paravicini Bagliani, ‘Ruggero Bacone autore del “De retardatione accidentium
senectutis”? With Addendum by Paravicini Bagliani and Steven J. Williams’, Stu-
di Medievali 3rd s. 28 (1987), 707–28; A. Paravicini Bagliani, ‘Il mito della ‘pro-
longatio vitae’ e la corte ponticia del Duecento: il ‘De retardatione accidentium
senectutis’’, in Medicina e scienze della natura alla corte dei papi nel Duecento (Spoleto,
1991), pp. 281–326 (pp. 318–21); C. Everest and M. T. Tavormina, ‘On Tarrying
the Accidents of Age’, in Sex, Aging & Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium:
Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. T.
Tavormina (Tempe, 2006), pp. 133–247 (pp. 133–4). e text was edited by A. G.
Little and E. Withington as Roger Bacon, De retardatione accidentium senectutis cum
aliis opusculis de rebus medicinalibus (Oxford, 1928).
17
Bacon’s edition is Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, ed. R. Steele, in Opera
hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi (Oxford, 1920), V; S. J. Williams, ‘Roger Bacon and
His Edition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum’, Speculum 69 (1994),
57–73; S. J. Williams, e Secret of Secrets: e Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian
Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 2003). For transmission and inuence in
various European literatures, see Trajectoires européennes du ‘Secretum secretorum’ du
Pseudo-Aristote (XIIIe–XVIe siècle), ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas, M. Bridges and J.-Y.
Tilliette (Turnhout, 2015).
130 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
the transmission of corruption of the body from fathers to sons put an end to
such long-lived individuals. But there are secret remedies known only to a few
adepts in natural philosophy and experimental science (and crucially not to
physicians) which will restore the natural complexion or temperament lost by
bodily corruption and inability to pursue a proper regimen. Bacon advocated
the use of what he calls in the Opus maius the gloria ineabilis and, in his
edition of the Secretum secretorum, the gloria inestimabilis. It was rst revealed
to Adam and his sons. is is a compound medicine which combines eight
other medicines targeting specic parts of the body. It must be fermented with
honey and then exposed to stellar rays. It will strengthen the mind and morals
as well as prolong life. It should be possible by these secret means to restore
the natural span of human life, rather than submit to that imposed on man
in contemporary Europe (‘For instance through this medicine life is extended
to the ultimate limits of nature which God established, because it removes all
inrmities, and reduces bad complexions to a good condition, and cures all
sicknesses’).18 In general, Bacon used his medical writings to extol the virtues
of certain special medical preparations, whose secrets could be discovered in
the writings of the ancients. ese included rhubarb, precious stones, gold
and silver, and viper’s esh, but all these needed to be treated alchemically to
take away their ‘earthly’ or harmful components. As we shall see below, such
medicines could be discovered using the scientia experimentalis.
19
e business of practical alchemy, by contrast to speculative alchemy, is to
use a range of processes (distillation, fermentation and congelation or freezing,
for example)20 to remove harmful materials in medicines to make them safer
and more eective and to devise ways of making it possible to ingest powerful
mineral medicines made from gold and precious stones. A dangerous medicine
like quicksilver or mercury could be prepared by alchemical means, so that in
small quantities it could have very powerful benecial eects on the human
body. Similarly, the poisonous character of viper’s esh, a central ingredient
in most theriac preparations, could be rendered harmless if it was prepared
alchemically.21 While Bacon did not go into a lot of detail in describing the
processes of practical alchemy, his programme was very much in line with the
interest in distillation and fermentation to produce new kinds of medicines
characteristic of the surgeons of his time. e Dominican surgeon Teodorico
18
On gloria inestimabilis, see Allen, Roger Bacon, pp. 119–24.
19
Allen, Roger Bacon, chap. 3, ‘Learning to Prolong Life’.
20
e full range of processes is described in Bacon, Opus tertium, cap. 114. See Allen,
Roger Bacon, pp. 57–9.
21
De erroribus medicorum, in Roger Bacon, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, ed
Little and Withington (Oxford, 1928), IX, pp. 151–2.
The Medical Culture of Friars 131
Borgognoni (1205–96/8) was one of the rst European advocates of the use
of distilled medicines and works on this subject by himself and others were to
enjoy a spectacularly successful career in England.
22
In these ways, through alchemy and related sciences, notably perspectiva
and the scientia experimentalis, Bacon could oer human beings far more than
the dicult rebalancing of the compound humours through regimen and
treatment oered by the scholastic physician. Enthusiasm for these Baconian
and pseudo-Baconian writings on the alchemy of prolongevity continued in
England long after Bacon’s death, and indeed until the seventeenth century.
One of the most widespread of the pseudo-Baconian writings was the De
retardatione accidentium senectutis, mentioned above. Versions of this and
others of the prolongevity texts were translated into Middle English.23 It is
not possible to separate out the part played by friars in copying or collecting
texts on prolongevity, as so few of these writings can be identied with named
individuals or religious houses. In the words of Faye Getz, ‘Bacon …was
dear to the hearts of the English, who magnied his work almost beyond
reason, and followed his interest in medical restoration into the fteenth
century and beyond.’24 e measure of his inuence is best identied through
the extraordinary number of texts attributed to Bacon to be found in the
catalogue of English alchemical writings by Singer and Anderson, and the
wide scattering of manuscripts in English libraries containing these writings.
Further conrmatory evidence can be found in the Corpus of British Medieval
Library Catalogues, searching under Bacon as author, and in the alchemical
entries in the Voigts-Kurtz database, eVK2.
25
22
M. R. McVaugh, ‘Alchemy in the Chirurgia of Teodorico Borgognoni’, in Alchim-
ia e medicina nel Medioevo, ed. C. Crisciani and A. Paravicini Bagliani (Florence,
2003), pp. 55–75; McVaugh, Rational Surgery, pp. 189–208.
23
Everest, ‘On Tarrying’.
24
Getz, ‘Roger Bacon’, p. 337.
25
D. W. Singer, assisted by A. Anderson, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical
Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland Dating from Before the XVI century, 3 vols.
(Brussels, 1928–31). Roger Bacon is the second most cited author (after Hermes)
in this catalogue; eVK2, accessed 17 April 2023. Tavormina, ‘Roger Bacon’, p. 338,
points out that the second largest category (after Recipes) in the subject index to
eVK2, is ‘Alchemy’, with over 1400 records. Appearances of Roger Bacon in the
volumes of the CBMLC (still ongoing) may be found in the identications list
at https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/british-medieval-library-catalogues#tab-266421,
accessed 17 April 2023. Bacon also features in the Medieval Libraries of Great
Britain project: see http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/authortitle/browse/, s.v. Roger
Bacon, accessed 17 April 2023.
132 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Bacon’s medical writings prepared the way for the importation to England
and rapid spread of treatises on elixirs of life and quintessential remedies
written by friars from southern France and Catalonia around the middle
of the fourteenth century.26 John of Rupescissa (Jean de Roquetaillade, c.
1310–c. 1366–70) was a Franciscan tertiary27 gaoled for his millenarianism
and prophetic writings, who wrote while imprisoned the Book of consideration
of the quintessence (Liber De consideratione quintae essentiae) which promised
to provide essential remedies for those he called poor and ‘evangelical’ men.
ese remedies he claimed to be a hundred times as powerful as medicines
made in orthodox pharmacological ways, that is, by compounding medicinal
simples like herbs, animal parts or minerals. Rupescissa combined apocalyptic
prophecy with a passionate commitment to promoting quintessential
medicines obtained by multiple distillations from wine and herbs. ese had
the advantage over most alchemical products of being available to the poor,
who could not aord expensive medicines involving the processing of precious
metals. Even more successful in England as an import was the ‘On the secrets
of nature’ (De secretis nature) attributed to the author known as Raymundus or
Lullius who was probably himself another Franciscan friar, but denitely not
the real Raymond Lull from Majorca. Pseudo-Lull’s work built further on the
foundations laid by John of Rupescissa’s medical alchemy. e form of these
writings was evangelical, blending the prophetic excitement of millenarianism
with the promise of extended life and delivery from all kinds of ailment. From
the writings of John of Rupescissa and pseudo-Lull, quintessential remedies
and special medicinal waters spread into the remedy books compiled for
English households, both institutional and personal. De consideratione and De
secretis nature were often thought to be the work of Roger Bacon in England
and so attributed to Bacon in many English manuscripts. ese works on the
elixir were popular in England in both Latin and Middle English versions and
in excerpts as well as complete treatises.
28
26
S. Piron, ‘Les studia franciscains de Provence et d’Aquitaine (1275–1335)’, in
Philosophy and eology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal
Courts, ed. E. Kent et al. (Turnhout, 2012), pp. 303–58 (pp. 352–4).
27
A tertiary is a lay person who follows a religious rule, in John of Rupescissa’s case
that of St Francis.
28
J. R. Guerrero, ‘Desarrollo y Madurez del Concepto de Quintaesencia Alquímica
en la Europa Medieval (s. XII-XIV)’, Azogue 5 (2002–7), 30–56; L. DeVun, Proph-
ecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New
York, 2009); Z. A. Matus, Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science
in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2017); for pseudo-Lull, J. M. Rampling,
e Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy 1300–1700 (Chicago, 2020).