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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... included in The Canterbury Tales, and 1385 is usually regarded as the approximate year Chaucer began writing his major work. As I will argue in chapter 2, the importance of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale results not only from Chaucer's ...
... included alchemical references found in a wide range of genres and modes: epic and mock epic, comedy and tragedy, pastoral and masque, sacred and secular poetry, didactic and moralistic prose as well as satire and the literature of ...
... included Roger Bacon, Thomas Norton, and George Ripley. But more critical to alchemy's continuing vitality was the fact that the “old” philosophy still held sway and had not yet been “called in doubt” by the new, for it was the ...
... included in Pyrotechny, for while my major concern is alchemical influences in literature, it is also important to note those few instances in which distinctly “literary” influences are present in alchemical writing. Obviously aware.
... which this transmission of arcane wisdom was regarded is reflected in Robert Vaughan's engraving of an alchemical initiation that Ashmole included in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (fig. 8), in which, beneath the Holy Spirit.
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 |