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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... poems of Donne and Herbert represent a marked shift away from the satirical use of alchemy that had so dominated its literary expression for more than two centuries. Although both poets occasionally invoke alchemy for purposes of satire ...
... poem.31 Except for this apparent inconsistency in its conclusion, the overall structure of the Prologue and Tale is carefully designed to promote and reinforce the satirical attack. In the Prologue Chaucer's use of the complementary ...
... poem entitled, “Schir, ye have mony servitouris” (or “Dunbar's Remonstrance to the King”), the first part of which lists retainers who serve the King well, bringing honor and riches to his court. Included are doctors of law and medicine ...
... poem on any one of a variety of topics. The Prologue to book 8 takes the form of a dream vision in which the speaker decries the falseness of the world and how all things have turned from virtue to vice. The introductory lines convey a ...
... poets appear to have known relatively little about the art. Detailed references to arcane processes of transmutation, the complex materials and laboratory apparatus, and even the exotic jargon are missing. There are few mentions of ...
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 |