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Studies in Philology, Volume 107, Number 4, Fall 2010, pp. 429-464 (Article)
"At least one fifteenth-century reader-poet found Lydgate positively mystical and transformed Lydgate’s Churl and Bird into an overtly alchemical poem. This version survives in an important alchemical manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2407, among the smears and stains of surrounding recipes actively pursued. In early modern England the same version appears in one of the major alchemical collections in early print, Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (hereafter TCB).2 To this day some scholars continue to accept the alchemical Churl and Bird as an anonymous work in the tradition of hermetic poetry rather than a transmuted moral fable by England’s Lancastrian laureate."
https://sci-hub.box/10.1353/sip.2010.0005
"At least one fifteenth-century reader-poet found Lydgate positively mystical and transformed Lydgate’s Churl and Bird into an overtly alchemical poem. This version survives in an important alchemical manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2407, among the smears and stains of surrounding recipes actively pursued. In early modern England the same version appears in one of the major alchemical collections in early print, Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (hereafter TCB).2 To this day some scholars continue to accept the alchemical Churl and Bird as an anonymous work in the tradition of hermetic poetry rather than a transmuted moral fable by England’s Lancastrian laureate."
https://sci-hub.box/10.1353/sip.2010.0005