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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... possible, one guided by the principle of allowing the many examples of literary alchemy to speak for themselves: to reveal what they might about their creators' knowledge of alchemy, what was thought about it, and how this knowledge and ...
... possible influences of earlier writers on those who followed and thereby the development of literary patterns and traditions. This book is not primarily a study of direct alchemical borrowings and questions of indebtedness, yet such ...
... possible links between these shifts and those occurring within the occult fields themselves; and the influence that certain writers and dominant intellectual currents may have had on alchemy's literary reflections. To conclude, my ...
... possible sources of alchemical references in literature. Rather, my intentions are to examine literary reflections of alchemy in an attempt to discover their meanings, explore their contributions to literary art, and investigate the ...
... possible that knowledge of alchemy passed between East and West, by way of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India, but if it did we can only speculate as to the nature of that knowledge or when transmission first occurred.22 Much more significant ...
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 |