How to Defeat a Dragon, or Medical Sources of Lapidary and Herbarium Motifs in J. Metham’s Chivalric Romance ‘Amoryus and Cleopes’ (1449)

Abstract

The subject of research in this article is the motifs of medieval descriptive scientific works, primarily in the genres of lapidary and herbarium; the material of the study is the medieval English chivalric romance Amoryus and Cleopes, underestimated by both English-speaking and foreign-language literary scholars. At the beginning and at the end of the 20th century this romance was published in Middle English for a narrow circle of medievalist philologists, but even in England there have been written only a few articles about it to this day, and its text has not been translated into any foreign languages and even into modern English. These circumstances make any research that focuses on this romance relevant. There are also no specialists on the works of its author, John Metham, a writer and scientist of the mid-15th century, although the century in question has a reputation as a ‘barren age’ and the names of English writers of that time are few in number. Meanwhile, Metham is the author of several treatises that were considered scientific during the Middle Ages, and therefore it would be useful to pay attention to how his scientific ideas are reflected in the literary work. The object of study in this article is the motifs borrowed by the poet-scientist from a wide range of scientific works: herbariums, lapidaries, medical treatises, encyclopedias. In the process of research, we focused on the analysis of one structurally important episode, the ‘encyclopedic’ lecture that Cleopes reads to Amoryus, the hero of the romance. Our task was to identify in the description of precious stones and herbs mentioned by the poet the connection with the established traditions of scientific genres, as well as to determine the function of scientific motifs in the literary text.