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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... Theory, Utriusque cosmi historia (1617, 1619) 6. The Earth as Nurse, Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (1617) 7. Itinerant Seller of Medicines, engraving by T. Kitchin (fl. 1750) after David Teniers 8. Alchemical Master and Disciple ...
... theory and practice. Yet, expectations of his hostility to alchemy are only partially realized: not only does Bacon share with his age many of its magical and occultist aspects but he also takes a somewhat positive view of the ...
... theory and practice during the period of focus. (In the first chapter, I supply only enough history and background to make the following discussions of literary alchemy and its context easier to follow.) Nor, except in my discussion of ...
... theories as such." Complicating problems of definition is the fact that alchemical processes and techniques were ... theory and practice of alchemy go back thousands of years, and its place of origin, its initial nature and aims, and ...
... theory it was initially an outgrowth of experimentation in metalworking, which is known to have been practiced as early as 3500 B.C.” The name “alchemy" itself suggests that the art may have had Egyptian origins: according to John Read ...
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 |