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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... ) 10. Ellesmere MS Canon's Yeoman 11. Satan, Alchemist and Antichrist, Antichristus (1480?) 12. Temptress-Woman, Devil, Alchemist, engraved by A. Matham (c. 1599-1660) 13. The Fall of Icarus; Against Astrologers, Alciati,
... Canon's Yeoman's Tale results not only from Chaucer's genius in adapting the subject of alchemy to the demands of literature but also from the fact that this tale stands at the beginning of a long tradition of alchemical satire that ...
... Canon's Yeoman, in Jonson's Face and Subtle and their victims, or in Butler's Hudibras and Ralph, alchemy may be both a cause and an effect of human corruption, but it is more frequently a means of objectifying the consequences of ...
... Canon's Yeoman's Tale to the alchemical drama of Ben Jonson, it is the pseudo-alchemists who dominate English literature, and the absurd pretentiousness of their claims and the deceptiveness of their methods are repeatedly castigated by ...
... Canon's Yeoman's Tale1 As has been shown, the commonly accepted medieval and Renaissance worldview, those ideas and assumptions that were held concerning the universe, God, and man, also constituted the supportive framework upon which ...
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 |