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).]

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.

'On chiromancy'
© British Library
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'On chiromancy'
© British Library
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*'Ars notoria cum tabulis*'
© British Library
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