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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... experience. Thus the alchemist believed he could shorten. Figure 4. Nature and Art. Michael Maier, Symbola aurea. Mensa (1617). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Figure 5. Fludd's Universal Correspondence ...
... experience. Thus the alchemist believed he could shorten the natural process of goldmaking within the bowels of the earth by bringing base metals to perfection through secret formulas and recipes, just as the magus believed it possible ...
... experience of a mans fidelity, vertue, judgment, discretion, faithfulness, secresie, desires, inclinations, and conversations; to sift and try whether he be capable and deserving.” Although Ashmole's statements are conventional, his ...
... experience with the Canon, his final assessment of alchemy. In the end, both the alchemists and their victims are duped by the false prospect of alchemical success, the ignis fatuus that motivates their dreams and desires. More ...
... experiences in the employment of the Canon, the pars secunda should, I think, be regarded as a kind of exemplum, a short narrative tale serving to underscore the folly of pursuing alchemy. The opening lines of the prima pars reveal that ...
Съдържание
1 | |
6 | |
37 | |
62 | |
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 |