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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... . Linden. DARKE HIEROGLIPHICKS STANTON J. LINDEN Copyright © 1996 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback. Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Manufactured in the United States of America.
... literature, the historical period that is the focus of this study is notable for greater revolutions, of which this transition from alchemy to chemistry, from “pseudo-science” to “science,” is but a minor symptom. These greater changes ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. 1385 as my starting point because the earliest, and possibly finest, example of alchemically inspired literature is included in The Canterbury Tales, and ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. after alchemy was first practiced, it contains the key concepts associated with exoteric alchemy, which is concerned with the physical transmutation of ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. interpretation of alchemical literature so difficult and so uncertain. ... In order to give some show of authority to their nebulous doctrines, alchemists ...
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 |