Parochial alchemy: ordinals and their effects in Thomas Norton’s Bristol

Abstract Why did Thomas Norton call his Middle English alchemical poem an ‘ordinal’? This essay reframes Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy (c.1477) as an artefact of parish book culture in his native city of Bristol. Every medieval English parish needed a good ordinal, the liturgical book-genre which pointed readers to the right readings (in other books) at the right times. A new ordinal had appeared in fifteenth-century England to correct widespread error: Clement Maidstone’s Directorium sacerdotum (often accompanied by a companion text, called Crede Mihi or ‘Believe Me’). When Norton names his poem ‘the Ordinal, the Crede Michi’, then, he mobilizes a familiar, parochial genre concept: a kind of book his readers could place. Norton invokes Maidstone’s project of textual emendation, and its meticulousness, to animate his vernacular poem with a plainspoken assertiveness as he imposes a proper form upon alchemy’s disordered textual tradition.