The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441181830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Author: Jonathan Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441147772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The first book to explore the importance of alchemy and its links to the occult in the period between 1320 and 1400. Alchemists didn't just try to turn metals into gold: they studied planetary influences on metals and people, refined plants and minerals in the search for medicines. This book illustrates how this branch of thought became more popular as the practical and theoretical knowledge of alchemists spread throughout England.

Author: Stanton J. Linden
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813150175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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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.

Author: J. Allan Mitchell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452941572
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Becoming Human argues that human identity was articulated and extended across a wide range of textual, visual, and artifactual assemblages from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. J. Allan Mitchell shows how the formation of the child expresses a manifold and mutable style of being. To be human is to learn to dwell among a welter of things. A searching and provocative historical inquiry into human becoming, the book presents a set of idiosyncratic essays on embryology and infancy, play and games, and manners, meals, and other messes. While it makes significant contributions to medieval scholarship on the body, family, and material culture, Becoming Human theorizes anew what might be called a medieval ecological imaginary. Mitchell examines a broad array of phenomenal objects—including medical diagrams, toy knights, tableware, conduct texts, dream visions, and scientific instruments—and in the process reanimates distinctly medieval ontologies. In addressing the emergence of the human in the later Middle Ages, Mitchell identifies areas where humanity remains at risk. In illuminating the past, he shines fresh light on our present.

Author: Stephen Henry Rigby
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199689547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Historians on Chaucer brings together 25 experts in the history of fourteenth-century England to discuss one of the most famous works of Middle English literature--Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales--in relation to the economic change, social issues, and religious controversies of the period.

Author: Steven W. May
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198878028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution traces the development of a new type of scribal culture in England that emerged early in the fourteenth century. The main medieval writing surfaces of parchment and wax tablets were augmented by a writing medium that was both lasting and cheap enough to be expendable. Writing was transformed from a near monopoly of professional scribes employed by the upper class to a practice ordinary citizens could afford. Personal correspondence, business records, notebooks on all sorts of subjects, creative writing, and much more flourished at social levels where they had previously been excluded by the high cost of parchment. Steven W. May places literary manuscripts and in particular poetic anthologies in this larger scribal context, showing how its innovative features affected both authorship and readership. As this amateur scribal culture developed, the medieval professional culture expanded as well. Classes of documents formerly restricted to parchment often shifted over to paper, while entirely new classes of documents were added to the records of church and state as these institutions took advantage of relatively inexpensive paper. Paper stimulated original composition by making it possible to draft, revise, and rewrite works in this new, affordable medium. Amateur scribes were soon producing an enormous volume of manuscript works of all kinds—works they could afford to circulate in multiple copies. England's ever-increasing literate population developed an informal network that transmitted all kinds of texts from single sheets to book-length documents efficiently throughout the kingdom. The operation of restrictive coteries had little if any role in the mass circulation of manuscripts through this network. However, paper was cheap enough that manuscripts could also be readily disposed of (unlike expensive parchment). More than 90% of the output from this scribal tradition has been lost, a fact that tends to distort our understanding and interpretation of what has survived. May illustrates these conclusions with close analysis of representative manuscripts.

Author: Francis Young
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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What buried secret lies beneath the stones of one of England's greatest former churches and shrines? The ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds are a memorial to the largest Romanesque church ever built. This Suffolk market town is now a quiet place, out of the way, eclipsed by its more famous neighbour Cambridge. But present obscurity may conceal a find as significant as the emergence from beneath a Leicester car-park of the remains of Richard III. For Bury, as Francis Young now reveals, is the probable site of the body - placed in an `iron chest' but lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries - of Edmund: martyred monarch of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia and, well before St George, England's first patron saint. After the king was slain by marauding Vikings in the ninth century, the legend which grew up around his murder led to the foundation in Bury of one of the pre-eminent shrines of Christendom. In showing how Edmund became the pivotal figure around whom Saxons, Danes and Normans all rallied, the author points to the imminent rediscovery of the ruler who created England.

Author: Gabrielle Storey
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030841308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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This book examines the legacies and depictions of monarchs in an international context, focusing on both self-representation and commemoration by others. Spanning ancient India through to eighteenth-century Russia, this volume offers several case studies to demonstrate trends and patterns in how different societies chose to commemorate and remember their rulers in a variety of mediums. Contributions highlight several lesser known rulers, alongside more famous ones such as Henry VIII of England, to develop a deeper understanding of how memory and monarchy functioned when drawn together. Memorialising Premodern Monarchs brings to the fore the importance of memory and memorialisation when considering the legacies and records of past rulers and their societies, and allows a deeper reflection on how these rulers live on through the historical record and popular culture.

Author: Francis Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009079603
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Belief in magic was, until relatively recent times, widespread in Britain; yet the impact of such belief on determinative political events has frequently been overlooked. In his wide-ranging new book, Francis Young explores the role of occult traditions in the history of the island of Great Britain: Merlin's realm. He argues that while the great magus and artificer invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth was a powerful model for a succession of actual royal magical advisers (including Roger Bacon and John Dee), monarchs nevertheless often lived in fear of hostile sorcery while at other times they even attempted magic themselves. Successive governments were simultaneously fascinated by astrology and alchemy, yet also deeply wary of the possibility of treasonous spellcraft. Whether deployed in warfare, rebellion or propaganda, occult traditions were of central importance to British history and, as the author reveals, these dark arts of magic and politics remain entangled to this day.

Author: Kristen L. Geaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000579581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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This volume examines the life of Anne of Bohemia, the first queen of Richard II (1377–1399), and situates her within the context of medieval queenship by arguing that Anne ably fulfilled the political role of the queen consort through her intercession, patronage, and piety. Much previous scholarship on Anne has focused on her relationship with famous poets, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, but from analyzing government documents it becomes clear that Anne used her wealth and status to enact power. Through financial, religious, and cultural patronage, Anne rewarded supporters and servants and influenced court life. The examination of sources such as a letter from Anne to her half brother, and an apothecary bill that contains some fertility medicines suggests that the queen both desired and tried to have children. As such, the volume questions the public imagination of Anne and shows that, in this example, although she died childless, Anne and Richard attempted to have children throughout their marriage. With the inclusion of tables listing Anne’s acts of intercession and her land holdings and land grants, Anne of Bohemia is a useful tool for students and scholars interested in queenship studies, medieval women’s history, and the history of the English monarchy.