Alchemy and Literature

Introduction

The literary influence of alchemy and hermeticism in the work of most medieval and early modern authors has been overlooked. Drawing extensively on alchemical allusions as well as on the practical and theoretical background of the art and its pictorial tradition, this paper demonstrates the pervasiveness of interest in alchemy during this three-hundred-year period (Marlan, 155).

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 -- this paper 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. (Ossoli: pp. 122) 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 (Basso:pp. 45-61).

The task of defining alchemy, of endearing its major types and varied interests is Formidable, sufficient, certainly, to neither challenge nor only modern scholars of the subject but the early alchemists themselves. (Read: pp. 268) Fortunately, my concern in this book does not require undue attention to questions of historical definition or to those of type and classification: nonetheless, some consideration of these problems is appropriate as the outset if only to prepare the reader for the diverse conceptions of alchemy and the variety of alchemical ideas and images that the literature of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and seventeenth century presents.

Discussion

While secular views were minimal, progress viewed as improvement was limited, earthly life could only improve in relation to eternity—the afterlife. It was therefore not surprising that medieval science should have focused primarily on “a-concepts”—astrology, astronomy, and alchemy; its interaction with English literature was largely limited to these realms, except for medicine, which has always been in a class of itself because it promised cures down through the ages. (Read: pp. 152) But by the time of the European Renaissance, the forms of interaction become more complex, especially through the new importance of medicine within society, as notions of improvement in man's earthy life begin to form themselves apart from his spiritual journey from this life to the next. The drama was the first literary form displaying the new awareness. Hence, Ben Jonson's characters, especially his most greedy protagonists, are explained not only in terms of their “humors” (the basic physiological model ...