Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration by Stanton J. Linden (review)

Book Reviews as suggested by her portraits ofthe independent pioneer SophiaJex-Blake (1840— 1912) in Three Guineas (1938), and the fictional Peggy Pargiter in The Years (1937), reflect her sense ofcontinued gender inequality. Although the individual essays are often fascinating, the relationship between them seems arbitrary; an opening chapter chronicling the events related to women's place in the medical world, and inter-essay connections, might help place them. As the text stands, die essays advance interesting, neglected material, which should be valuable in a women's studies overview course. % Stanton J. Linden. Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration. Lexington: The University ofKentucky Press, 1996. 373p. Elizabeth Holtze The Metropolitan State College of Denver In his introduction to Darke Hierogliphicks, Stanton J. Linden describes his book as a "long labor" (ix), and well it must have been to assemble and analyze all ofthe literary material about alchemy over the three-hundred-year period from 1 385 through the Restoration. The ambitious thesis ofthis fine study is as follows: with The Canons Yeoman's Tale, Chaucer begins "a long tradition ofalchemical satire" (2) that is interrupted by a "new tradition ofspiritual alchemy"(3) in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and others, before a return in the work of Butler to the earlier satirical tradition. This old-fashioned (in the best sense ofthat phrase) scholarly study relies upon close readings of many examples, liberally illustrated by quotations and twentyeight magnificently apt illustrations. The extensive bibliography, index, and more than forty pages of endnotes are executed with care, providing both pertinent ancillary information and helpful cross references. Although Linden modestly disclaims any intention ofproviding a general history and practice ofalchemy in the period (5), his introductory chapter comes as close as any thirty pages might to doing that very thing. In it we learn, among other things, that the title of his book is taken from a 1623 work by Patrick Scot in which the author argues that philosophers sometimes "pourtrey Wisdome'in darke hierogliphicks" (31). Similarly, the chapters on Chaucer, Bacon, Jonson, and others have titles that gloss their subject with an adroit quotation from the works discussed. His knowledge ofhis subject is such that I regret his decision to pass over some texts and audiors, such as The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, and Marvell (4) discussed by other scholars. SPRING 1998 «ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + 79 This book has many strengths. In addition to those already noted above, Linden provides insightful readings of difficult allusions, many of which are obvious because ofthe use ofwords such as "philosopher's stone," "elixir," "alembic," and many ofwhich are more veiled. He discusses not only familiar authors and texts (e.g., Donne's "Loves Alchymie") but also less familiar ones (Reginald Scot's Discoverie ofWitchcraft or Henry More's Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, and many, many others). Throughout, in every chapter the reader finds a wealth of information on the literary uses ofalchemical imagery. However, I am not quite persuaded by Linden's thesis in its most narrowly stated version: that "the purposes it [alchemy] served in literature from Chaucer throughJonson were narrowly satirical" (dustjacket), that this "nearly monolithic tradition" (155) with its "nearly formulaic use of alchemy" (158) is replaced by new, innovative—often spiritual—uses ofalchemical imagery in the seventeenth century, that at the end ofthe century, "Butler ... represents a return to the long tradition of alchemical satire" (280). My first reason for hesitation is that satire, for which Linden never provides his own definition [one taken fromJohn Wilders appears late in the book (282)], encompasses a range of attitudes so wide as to decrease the helpfulness of the term satire, the comic (44, 90, 100, 120, 139), ridicule (47), criticism (68), simplification (71, 76), satiric social criticism (74, 85), irony (79), burlesque (81), skepticism (82, 84), and mock heroic (282). My second reason lies in the fact that the statement "the tradition ofalchemical satire, begun by Chaucer and continued by Langland, Gower, and Lydgate" (63) rests on only one clear fourteenth-century example, the Canons Yeoman's Tale, and is itself contradicted by earlier statements (57, 61). Similarly, at the end of this tradition, Butler's connection to alchemy narrowly...