Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the RestorationUniversity Press of Kentucky, 11. 7. 2014 - Počet stran: 384 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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... reveal what they might about their creators' knowledge of alchemy, what was thought about it, and how this knowledge and these attitudes could be given artistic form and meaning. For this reason, I quote generously from primary sources ...
... revealed in the famous Formula of the Crab, which “was reported to embody the secret of transmutation, [but] was probably a cipher used by Egyptian craftsmen engaged in making imitative gold.” Thus, during the five hundred years ...
... to a more familiar topos: alchemical adepts boast that through requisite knowledge, hard work, and the grace of God, they will reveal the secret of transmutation to the worthy and endeavor to restore the debased art 26 Darke Hierogliphicks.
... revealed by any Master, but under the most weighty Ties and Obligations of an Oath; and that by long tryal and experience of a mans fidelity, vertue, judgment, discretion, faithfulness, secresie, desires, inclinations, and conversations ...
... reveal their mastery and not to teach others. Third are those “who out of Ignorance or Mistake, have delivered blinde and unbottomed Fictions, which have too much deluded and abused the credulous World.” And, finally, “the last and ...
Obsah
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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 Náhled není k dispozici. - 1996 |