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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... gold." Nevertheless, other kinds of alchemy existed. Following Thomas Tymme's statement that comprises my second epigraph, to the effect that alchemy is not solely concerned with metallic transmutation, historians often distinguish ...
... gold” or aurum potabile.” In a more generalized sense, alchemists often referred to themselves as physicians, restoring health to diseased, “leprous” base metals. Thus, the link between alchemy and medicine was close in the writings of ...
... gold and threatening offenders with dire punishment was issued in 144 B.C.” But Chinese alchemy, in contrast to that practiced in the West, was chiefly concerned with discovering the elixir vitae, a miraculous “medicine” that could ...
... gold.” Bolus is set apart from these early craftsmen, however, through his interest in transmutation, his belief that the very nature of metals could be altered, and that Backgrounds, Definitions, and Preliminaries 13.
... gold.” Thus, during the five hundred years separating Bolus and Zosimos, several important changes occurred in the way alchemy was conceived, practiced, and written about. During this time it seems to have been transformed from what was ...
Съдържание
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6 | |
Chaucer and the Medieval Heritage of Alchemical Satire | 37 |
SixteenthCentury Alchemical Satire | 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 |
344 | |
361 | |
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Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden Ограничен достъп - 2021 |