Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the RestorationThe literary influence of alchemy and hermeticism in the work of most medieval and early modern authors has been overlooked. Stanton Linden now provides the first comprehensive examination of this influence on English literature from the late Middle Ages through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing extensively on alchemical allusions as well as on the practical and theoretical background of the art and its pictorial tradition, Linden demonstrates the pervasiveness of interest in alchemy during this three-hundred-year period. Most writers—including Langland, Gower, Barclay, Eramus, Sidney, Greene, Lyly, and Shakespeare—were familiar with alchemy, and references to it appear in a wide range of genres. Yet the purposes it served in literature from Chaucer through Jonson were narrowly satirical. In literature of the seventeenth century, especially in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton, the functions of alchemy changed. Focusing on Bacon, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton—in addition to Jonson and Butler—Linden demonstrates the emergence of new attitudes and innovative themes, motifs, images, and ideas. The use of alchemy to suggest spiritual growth and change, purification, regeneration, and millenarian ideas reflected important new emphases in alchemical, medical, and occultist writing. This new tradition did not continue, however, and Butler's return to satire was contextualized in the antagonism of the Royal Society and religious Latitudinarians to philosophical enthusiasm and the occult. Butler, like Shadwell and Swift, expanded the range of satirical victims to include experimental scientists as well as occult charlatans. The literary uses of alchemy thus reveal the changing intellectual milieus of three centuries. |
From inside the book
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... Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) 9. Outdoor Scene, Hieronymus Braunschweig, Liber de arte Distillandi de Compositis (1512) 10. Ellesmere MS Canon's Yeoman 11. Satan, Alchemist and Antichrist, Antichristus (1480?) 12 ...
... Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) 258 Acknowledgments During the long labor of writing this book, I viii Illustrations.
... Elias Ashmole, the seventeenth-century antiquarian, collector of alchemical poetry, and student of the occult noted, “Iudiciall Astrologie is the Key of Naturall Magick, and Naturall Magick the Doore that leads to this Blessed Stone ...
... Elias Ashmole, for example, states that “As Nature in her work below used two hot Workmen so will I; and because we cannot tarry her leisure, and long time she taketh to that purpose, we will match and countervail her little Heats with ...
... Universal Correspondence Theory. Utriusque cosmi ... historia (1617, 1619). Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. Figure 8. Alchemical Master and Disciple. Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum. Darke Hierogliphicks.
Contents
1 | |
6 | |
37 | |
62 | |
Francis Bacon and Alchemy | 104 |
Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy | 118 |
The Poetry of Donne and Herbert | 154 |
Alchemy Allegory and Eschatology in the Seventeenth Century | 193 |
Alchemy in the Poetry of Vaughan and Milton | 224 |
Alchemy Poetry and the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm | 260 |
10 Cauda Pavonis | 294 |
Notes | 298 |
Bibliography | 344 |
Index | 361 |
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Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden No preview available - 1996 |