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.
Abstract When Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in 1773, the collection’s paratextual apparatus—the attestation signed by prominent Bostonians, the copy of John Wheatley’s letter, and the publicity materials promoting the collection’s release—worked in concert to contain Wheatley Peters’s achievement, by framing it as singular and anomalous. This article argues that three late-addition poems, ‘To Maecenas’, ‘Niobe in Distress’, and ‘To S.M.’, can be read as Wheatley Peters’s cumulative poetic response to this framing, and that classicism provides the terrain on which she contests its terms. In ‘To Maecenas’, she scripts the collection’s ideal reader, and claims Terence as her predecessor, disrupting the classical tradition’s presumed whiteness. In ‘Niobe in Distress’, Wheatley Peters synthesizes classical literature and contemporary visual art in an ekphrastic reworking of an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, thereby asserting her interpretive authority across aesthetic traditions. In ‘To S.M.’, she redirects the authority she has established across the sequence towards the recognition and celebration of another enslaved Black artist. In these poems, Wheatley Peters thus refutes her collection’s paratextual framing of her authorship as anomalous by constructing lines of relation—with readers, predecessors, and contemporaries.
Abstract I argue that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is best understood as a proto-pragmatist work, presenting a pragmatist message both in its overall plot and in more local aspects of its content. I situate this account of Aurora Leigh within a broader account of nineteenth-century and post-Romantic epic, contrasting Barrett Browning’s approach to the genre with, among others, William Wordsworth’s. Understood in this way, we can restore to Barrett Browning’s epic some of the salience that it had for nineteenth-century readers, as a text that anticipated the burgeoning stance on metaphysical and practical questions known as pragmatism.
