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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 48
... concerning which we have nothing in the books of Aristotle.”7 More important than knowledge of the natural world is esoteric alchemy's concentration on spiritual and philosophical values and ideals, especially as they impinge on the ...
... concerning the origin of alchemy, but it should not be assumed that its rise in the West and the East occurred in a state of total independence and isolation from the other. It is possible that knowledge of alchemy passed between East ...
... concerning the universe, God, and man, also constituted the supportive framework upon which alchemical theory and practice depended. Commanding the authoritative weight ascribed to “traditional” thought ascending from antiquity, the ...
... concerning authorial intention in literature, such questions almost inevitably arise when considering the problem of unity in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. On the one hand, it has most often been interpreted as Chaucer's wholesale ...
... concerning who and what is to blame (it is not the first time that the “pot” has shattered and all been lost), the group literally “picks up the pieces” of the failed experiment and, under the direction of the Yeoman's Canon, prepares ...
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 |