Darke Hierogliphicks : Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration

by Linden, Stanton J.

• ISBN13: 9780813119687
• ISBN10: 0813119685
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-08-08
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Stanton J. Linden is associate professor of English at Washington State University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
"A Clew and a Labyrinth": Backgrounds, Definitions, and Preliminaries	p. 6
"concluden everemoore amys": Chaucer and the Medieval Heritage of Alchemical Satire	p. 37
Posers and Impostors: Sixteenth-Century Alchemical Satire	p. 62
The Reformation of Vulcan: Francis Bacon and Alchemy	p. 104
"Abstract riddles of our stone": Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy	p. 118
"a true religious Alchimy": The Poetry of Donne and Herbert	p. 154
"that great and generall refining day": Alchemy, Allegory, and Eschatology in the Seventeenth Century	p. 193
"Under vailes, and Hieroglyphicall Covertures": Alchemy in the Poetry of Vaughan and Milton	p. 224
"Teutonick Chimericall extravagancies": Alchemy, Poetry, and the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm	p. 260
Cauda Pavonis	p. 294
Notes	p. 294
Bibliography	p. 344
Index	p. 361
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