Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England by Katherine Eggert (review)

This monograph is an ambitious work of literary criticism focused on Renaissance England that draws from the history of humanism, the history of science and medicine, and the history of esotericism. Eggert suggests a new interpretation of early modern history wherein authors responded to intellectual shortcomings within humanist learning by employing alchemy to explore and test the boundaries of knowledge. The text includes discussions of literary authors, playwrights, and poets— including John Donne, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, and Ben Jonson (among many others)—alongside John Dee, Francis Bacon, Thomas Norton, William Harvey, and a plenitude of other physicians, alchemists, and natural philosophers. Eggert argues that these many authors were united by a knowledge practice gained from their common humanist education, which she dubs “disknowledge” (2–3). This neologism has various meanings and inflections that she expounds throughout the text, but the general signification is “a conscious and deliberate setting aside of one compelling mode of understanding the world—one discipline or theory—in favor of another” (3).

The first chapters propose that this use of disknowledge arose out of an epistemological crisis in late humanism, that alchemy and humanism were wed by similar goals and practices, and thus that tropes from alchemy could be used in the act of disknowing in literature. The remaining chapters focus on three domains in which such intellectual and literary acrobatics were at play—transubstantiation, Kabbalah, and human reproduction and generation. Eggert’s historical epistemology extracts from ignorance studies (agnotology) and the sociology of knowledge to yield potentially helpful insights about alchemy in English literature. This strategy is most successful in Eggert’s examination of works that openly satirize alchemy as the domain of charlatans and frauds, such as Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610).

Nevertheless, problems arise when the discussion turns to the history of science and medicine. The discussion of Harvey and generation is illustrative. Eggert claims that Harvey displayed a “determined and contingent misogyny” in De Generatione (1651) by intentionally ignoring theories of reproduction—namely, Helkiah Crooke’s in his Microcomographia (1615)—that maintained, contra Aristotle and Galen, a major role for females. Harvey’s “willed ignorance,” she writes, is “disknowledge in its worst possible form” (161). Her only evidence that Harvey was in dialogue with Crooke regarding generation, however, is that they use similar language to describe how the cervix closes so tightly in pregnancy that it will not admit even the point of a needle (305–306, fn. 50). Eggert avers that Harvey was more likely to have read this statement in Crooke than to have shared a common source with him, but this conclusion is almost surely wrong since the original claim occurs in Galen’s De usu partium, one of the most widely read and quoted texts in the history of medicine.¹ Moreover, the argument simply assumes that Crooke’s view was obvious in light of empirical evidence, when no such thing could have been known at the time. Indeed, Harvey made clear in his discussion of conception that it was a “dark and obscure business” and that his word ought not be taken as if “pronounced by an Oracle.”²

The critique of Harvey shares the same fundamental problems with Eggert’s concluding analysis of alchemy. In answering the question of why “groundbreaking geniuses” such as Newton and Boyle remained “enamored of alchemy,” Eggert implicitly takes a position similar to earlier positivist historians: In short, alchemists and physicians should have known (or actually knew) better (243). This hermeneutic relies on a sometimes uncharitable psychoanalysis and dismisses—or rather, disknows—the complexities of underdetermined evidence, as well as one of the major conclusions of historians of alchemy in the last three decades—that alchemy and its various theories not only provided rational explanations of phenomena but that such explanations were often perfectly sensible in the context of early modern intellectual culture.