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. |
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... Scot and Chaucer, we find later writers drawing on earlier works to reinforce their own attitudes toward alchemy. Generally, I have not been greatly concerned with making distinctions between writers who are regarded as “major" and ...
... Scot's Tillage of Light (1623), one of the most interesting treatises belonging to the tradition of spiritual and philosophical alchemy in the seventeenth century, and a work to which I will return in chapter 7. Although Scot ...
... Scot, in asserting the primacy of spiritual alchemy and philosophical stoicism in The Tillage of Light, concludes with ... Scot's “Mountebanckes,” drew upon the art's mysterious processes and substances, its associations with magic, who ...
... Scot's Tillage of Light, where, in discussing the manner in which writers have attempted to communicate and accommodate the idea of Divine Wisdom to the human understanding, Scot notes that “least [sic] Wisdome might Prophesie to the ...
... Scot—that is sometimes portrayed “in darke hierogliphicks, and sometimes in fabulous attire.” For these reasons, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to pursue a single line of development or argument in the following chapters. At one ...
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 |