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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... transmutation if reforms are brought about in alchemical method and procedure. Such toleration of occultist thought did not characterize Bacon's devoted followers at the time of the Restoration because, as I will show in chapter 9, most ...
... transmutation of metals (as ignorant vulgars thinke: which error hath made them distaste that noble Science) but shee hath also a chyrurgical hand in the anatomizing of every mesenteriall veine of whole nature: Gods created handmaid, to ...
... transmutation, historians often distinguish between practical or exoteric alchemy and a second type of esoteric, spiritual, or philosophical alchemy. Although these two traditions are often intermingled in the writings of the alchemists ...
... transmutation of metals, he nonetheless adapts the principles of exoteric alchemy to a moral, salvationist context. His moral and philosophical analysis is unusual in its detail, but his method is entirely representative of a large ...
... transmutation, although Taylor notes that even though gold was not used for monetary exchange in China, its imperishability was associated with the possibility of human longevity and immortality.19 A second major difference in ancient ...
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 |