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

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

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 -- Knowledge -- Alchemy
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
Alchemy in literature
English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism
Renaissance -- England

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.

Stanton J. Linden

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky

Series: Studies in the English Renaissance.

1. "A Clew and a Labyrinth": Backgrounds, Definitions, and Preliminaries -- 2. "concluden everemoore amys": Chaucer and the Medieval Heritage of Alchemical Satire -- 3. Posers and Impostors: Sixteenth-Century Alchemical Satire -- 4. The Reformation of Vulcan: Francis Bacon and Alchemy -- 5. "Abstract riddles of our stone": Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy -- 6. "a true religious Alchimy": The Poetry of Donne and Herbert -- 7. "that great & generall refining day": Alchemy, Allegory, and Eschatology in the Seventeenth Century -- 8. "Under vailes, and Hieroglyphicall Covertures": Alchemy in the Poetry of Vaughan and Milton -- 9. "Teutonick Chimericall extravagancies": Alchemy, Poetry, and the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm -- 10. Cauda Pavonis.

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