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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... suggest spiritual growth, purification, regeneration, and millenarian ideas reflects several important new emphases in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemical, medical, and occultist writing, what Allen Debus has called the ...
... suggest 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 ...
... , which is known to have been practiced as early as 3500 B.C.15 The name “alchemy” itself suggests that the art may have had Egyptian origins: according to John Read, “Khem was the ancient name of Egypt and al is the Arabic definite.
... suggests that the origin of alchemy might be traceable to China. That it was practiced there at an early date—perhaps the fourth century B.C.—is evidenced by the fact that an injunction prohibiting counterfeiting gold and threatening ...
... suggest that Dee, Ashmole, as well as other hermetic disciples, saw themselves as under a cloud of suspicion and mistrust. But at the same time, Dee's observation about charlatanism must be recognized as part of a very long tradition 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 |