Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the RestorationUniversity Press of Kentucky, 11.07.2014 г. - 384 страници The 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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... doth fully perfect them in the verie projection. —The Mirror of Alchimy [trans. 1597]" For Halchymie tradeth not alone with transmutation of metals (as ignorant vulgars thinke: which error hath made them distaste that noble Science) but ...
... doth in as many years.” For this reason, as noted earlier, H.J. Sheppard sees alchemy as effecting “alterations of duration in some linear time scale.” Thus, alchemy was an important manifestation of the Renaissance debate on the ...
... doth compasse it round, . . . thou hast a Heart in stead of the Earth; where the Central Fire continually works; and preserves the Fabrick of this Microcosm in its Being; . . . and all thy Members answer to some Celestials.” What gives ...
... doth not (as many do) for company sake, rail at, & crie down the old way, received in the Schools; but makes trial of it according to the Scholastick promises, to bring about (with sincere intentions) his patients expectations” (65) ...
... doth Affraye; Yit be wryting / this book doth declare, And be Resouns / lyst nat for to spare, With goldeyn Resouns / in taast moost lykerous, Thyng per ignotum. / prevyd per ignocius. [ll. 582-88] The selections that I have dealt with ...
Съдържание
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Francis Bacon and Alchemy | 104 |
Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy | 118 |
The Poetry of Donne and Herbert | 154 |
Alchemy Allegory and Eschatology in the Seventeenth Century | 193 |
Alchemy in the Poetry of Vaughan and Milton | 224 |
Alchemy Poetry and the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm | 260 |
10 Cauda Pavonis | 294 |
Notes | 298 |
Bibliography | 344 |
Index | 361 |
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Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden Ограничен достъп - 2021 |