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 in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. Contents. List of Illustrations ... Alchemy 5 “Abstract riddles of our stone”: Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy 6 “a true religious Alchimy”: The Poetry of ...
... 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 possibility of transmutation if reforms are brought about in alchemical ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. of Samuel Butler reflects the antagonism of scientific and religious rationalists and the Royal Society to philosophical enthusiasm and the entire occultist ...
... alchemical implications in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; with the recent publication of Lyndy Abraham's Marvell and Alchemy, this topic has received thorough and incisive criticism. I have no pretensions that my search for alchemical ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. alchemical materials are put once ... alchemy possess? What kinds of literary situations cause an author to have recourse to alchemy? And having done so ...
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 |