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Richard Dove of Buckfast, a fifteenth-century
scholar
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Cistercian wizards
In 1470 an Irish Cistercian from Baltinglass,
Co Wicklow, Richard Archebold, wrote to tell the abbot of Woburn of
his recent achievement at Oxford. Richard claimed that he had successfully
turned the moon into the sun, namely, that
he
had managed
to convert an amalgam of metals into gold. Needless to say an operation
of this kind required financing, and Richard requested a
loan
from the abbot, just to
tie him
over until
he reaped
the rewards of his experiments. Soon, he promised, he would be able
to repay the abbot many times over. By 1479 Richard had accumulated
debts of £50 and his fellow scholars hoped
he would soon return to Ireland.
[Knowles, Religious Orders III, p. 32; his letters are printed in Letters
from the English Abbots, nos. 6 (pp. 44-46), 16 (pp. 65-66).]
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Nothing is now known of Richard Dove, for neither the
records of the Cistercian studium nor those of Buckfast have
left any clues to his existence. However, his notebook, which is
now preserved in the British
Library (Sloane 513), has left us with a fascinating and, in many
ways intriguing, insight to Cistercian scholarship in the later
Middle Ages.(38) The notebook
was compiled c. 1407-1470, probably earlier rather than later in
the century.(39) Visually, it is rather
disappointing and looks very much like a modern-day
jotter, with scribblings, doodles, crossings out and rather untidy
pages. However, the contents of the book are interesting and include
several rather
unusual and somewhat surprising topics that fall outside the scope
of the traditional university course, which centred on the Trivium [grammar,
rhetoric and logic] and the Quadrivium [arithmetic, geometry, astronomy
and music].(40) As David Bell has noted,
Dove’s notebook ‘reveals
interests far from the core of the Oxford curriculum.’(41) The
emphasis on prediction - astrology, astronomy, chiromancy and physiognomy – and
alchemy is striking. However, as the case of Richard Archebold
suggests (above), Dove's
interests were not exceptional.
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