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
Results 1-5 of 66
... Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through detailed study of references and allusions that occur in the literary works produced during this three-hundred-year period. That this historical era, which marked the height of ...
... Ages and the early modern period. My primary concerns are thus with alchemy as a subject of literary treatment and with literary references to alchemy—the results of this treatment—as objects of study that yield insights into aspects of ...
... age many of its magical and occultist aspects but he also takes a somewhat positive view of the possibility of transmutation if reforms are brought about in alchemical method and procedure. Such toleration of occultist thought did not ...
... investigate the insights they provide into important but obscure habits of thought present in English culture from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. I “A CLEW AND A LABYRINTH” Backgrounds, Definitions, and Preliminaries.
... Ages, the Renaissance, and seventeenth century presents. This introduction, accordingly, seeks to provide a brief background to a range of subjects that bear most directly on later discussion and analysis: definitions, varieties, and ...
Contents
Francis Bacon and Alchemy | |
Ben Jonson and the Drama | |
The Poetry of Donne and Herbert | |
Alchemy Allegory | |
Alchemy in | |
the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm | |
Cauda Pavonis | |
Other editions - View all
Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden No preview available - 1996 |