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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... renaissance) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-8131-1968-5 (alk. paper) 1. English Literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and Criticism. 2. Alchemy in literature. 3. English literature—Middle English, 1100 ...
... 1992. The late Gordon W. O'Brien of the University of Minnesota first kindled my interest in Renaissance hermeticism, and Allen G. Debus, Michael J.B. Allen, Thomas S. Willard, and many others, List of Illustrations Acknowledgments.
... Renaissance literature rewards us in other ways. To a considerable extent, for the modern, post-Enlightenment reader, alchemy represents the medieval “science” par excellence. Along with astrology, natural magic, and witchcraft, it ...
... Renaissance thought. The specific period of investigation extends from roughly 1385 to the time of the Restoration, the three-hundred-year period in which literary references to alchemy are most abundant. I have chosen 1385 as my ...
... Renaissance than they are today, and as Elias Ashmole, the seventeenthcentury antiquarian, collector of alchemical poetry, and student of the occult noted, “Iudiciall Astrologie is the Key of Naturall Magick, and Naturall Magick the ...
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 |