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
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... Ideas, whose editors I wish to thank for permission to reprint these materials. Chapter 9—indeed, much of my thinking about relationships between the hermetic and scientific worldviews—was clarified through invited participation in an ...
... ideas that were an important part of the intellectual milieu of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. My primary concerns are thus with alchemy as a subject of literary treatment and with literary references to alchemy—the ...
... ideas to accompany the emergence of new literary forms. Occupying the largest place in the book is the literature of the seventeenth century and the changing course of alchemy therein reflected. I have included chapters on Bacon, Jonson ...
... ideas wholly unrelated to this tradition. Their employment of alchemy to suggest spiritual growth, purification, regeneration, and millenarian ideas reflects several important new emphases in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ...
... ideas, themes, and images does he most often borrow? What are some of the things that alchemy “does” in a literary context? How does alchemy, a highly visual art, impart this quality to a literary medium? Do the distinctive visual forms ...
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 |