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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... things that alchemy “does” in a literary context? How does alchemy, a highly visual art, impart this quality to a literary medium? Do the distinctive visual forms and motifs associated with alchemy have counterparts in literary contexts ...
... things more precious, by knowledge and effect, and converting them by a naturall commixtion into a better kind. A certain other saith: Alchimy is a Science, teaching how to transforme any kind of mettall into another: and that by a ...
... things for the public good, but it also teaches how to discover such things as are capable of prolonging human life for much longer periods than can be accomplished by nature.”5 In the art-nature debate, Bacon affirms the superiority of ...
... things from the elements and of all inanimate things and of simple and composite humours, of common stones, gems, marbles, of gold and other metals, of sulphurs and salts and pigments, ... and other things without limit, concerning ...
... special emphasis on the unity of all things as created by God and the harmonious relationship between the greater world and the lesser world of man. For mystically minded adepts, the purely chemical operations and reactions.
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 |