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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Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. century A.D. Like Khalid, Jabir was inspired by the wealth of Greek learning that came to Islam with the conquest of Alexandria, and he, in turn, produced ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. Figure 3. The Four Elements Symbolized. Petrus Bonus, Pretiosa margarita novella (1546). By permission of the University of Delaware Library, Newark ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. critical redefinition of an element, has been called “the deathwarrant of alchemy.”44 In view of its devastating effect on alchemical theory it is curious ...
... literature. As previously mentioned, the possibility of transmutation was predicated on the idea that underlying all “forms” in which substances appear there is only one prima materia. The macrocosm-microcosm idea is an extension of ...
Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration Stanton J. Linden. powers. In each case “art” was decidedly an “improver” of nature. Resting on a common foundation, it was inevitable that the two bodies of knowledge should ...
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 |