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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... attack on the foundations of alchemy had been foreshadowed, as I will show in chapter 4, by Francis Bacon, who appears to have believed in transmutation but who attempted to dissociate it from the superstition-ridden ways of the ...
... doctrine rapidly declined in the face of assaults by increasingly rationalistic and mechanistic forces, as seen in Marin Mersenne's attacks on the hermeticism of Robert Fludd.56 Alchemy also relied on animistic ideas, often combined with.
... attack up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pseudonymous Cleidophorus Mystagogus, author of Mercury's Caducean Rod, uses a treatise by Sendivogius, to be discussed in chapter 5, to attack charlatans and false commentators ...
... attacks on the Swiss reformer and his followers as well as occasional tributes to them. The latter, usually written by those who were of the Paracelsian persuasion, take pains to represent iatrochemists as ones who emphasize painstaking ...
... , San Marino, California. observe these stylistic categories, because commentaries and attacks upon the. The following chapters will provide ample opportunity to Chaucer and the Medieval Heritage of Alchemical Satire.
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 |