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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... alchemy represents the medieval “science” par excellence. Along with astrology, natural magic, and witchcraft, it stands as a prime example of the superstitiousness, credulity, and irrationality of the medieval mind, a mirror Introduction.
... science” to “science,” is but a minor symptom. These greater changes touched every aspect of life directly or indirectly and involved a complex of rejections, revisions, and compromises in cosmology and astronomy, philosophy and ...
... scientists as occult charlatans. For this reason, his treatment of the practitioners of alchemy and experimental science in Hudibras and “An Hermetic Philosopher” anticipates Swift's satire in Lemuel Gulliver's third voyage. This is an ...
... Science: Alchimy is a Corporal Science simply composed of one and by one, naturally conjoyning things more precious, by knowledge and effect, and converting them by a naturall commixtion into a better kind. A certain other saith ...
... Science” concerned with changing inferior or “imperfect” bodies, especially metals, into superior ones by means of a “proper medicine” or “Elixir.” Although the Mirror's definition was not formulated until several hundred years after ...
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 | |
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Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden No preview available - 1996 |