" 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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