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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... spirit, hobgoblin, etc.” Not only are these principles basic to alchemical theory, they are also the ones upon which the worldview of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is predicated. As will be shown in more detail at the beginning of ...
... spirit of fire, and sophic mercury [with] that of fusibility or the mineral spirit of metals.” The production of specific metals depended on the purity of these two interacting and sexually differentiated principles. Impure sulphur and ...
... spirits invoked by occult powers. In each case “art” was decidedly an “improver” of nature. Resting on a common foundation, it was inevitable that the two bodies of knowledge should have many points of contact and that, as a result ...
... spirit of God fills nature: “Therefore I say Nature is but one, true, plain, perfect, and entire in its own being, which God made from the beginning, placing his spirit in it.” A hylozoistic conception of matter is present even in ...
... spirits” desire to escape the torture of the furnace. Such terms and concepts, often reminiscent of primitive myth and folklore, are commonplaces of alchemical animism and anthropomorphism and appear frequently in literary and visual ...
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 |