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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... scientific worldviews—was clarified through invited participation in an interdisciplinary symposium at the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in October 1992. The late Gordon W. O'Brien of the University of Minnesota ...
... scientific mind of the present has evolved. In this respect, the “science” of chemistry represents all that the “art” of alchemy does not. Besides witnessing the flowering of English literature, the historical period that is the focus ...
... scientific and religious rationalists and the Royal Society to philosophical enthusiasm and the entire occultist milieu. It is important to note, however, that Butler's satirical victims are nearly as often experimental scientists as ...
... Greek learning, the Moslems came into possession of the corpus of Greek philosophical and scientific knowledge. In the case of alchemy, Greek writings were to provide the basis for all subsequent advances 14 Darke Hierogliphicks.
... scientific fields. Like Jabir, Avicenna appears to have accepted the sulphur-mercury theory, but surprisingly he expressed total disbelief in the possibility that the essences of metals could be changed through alchemical transmutation ...
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 |