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

Katherine Eggert’s book is a contribution to the study of how at particular times and under certain conditions humans have consciously chosen to not know what they know, or to avow that which they know is not so. Her term ‘disknowledge’ refers ‘the conscious and deliberate setting aside of one compelling mode of understanding the world — one discipline, one theory — in favour of another’ (p. 3). Phrased this way, it appears innocuous enough, but the argument of the book is that the promise of Renaissance Humanism rapidly disappeared and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the language, strategies, and imagery of alchemy, a discredited and discreditable ‘occult science’, was increasingly used to signal the failure of Humanism in the absence of a better, subsequent system. Eggert claims the humanistic ideal that classical learning could be integrated into ‘a Christian knowledge base’ (p. 15) is the second of a three-pronged view of Humanism that also espouses mastery of the Ciceronian rhetorical style, and the commitment to self-betterment and the betterment of society. She notes the anti-humanist sentiments of many humanist-trained figures, such as Luther and Macchiavelli. The next intellectual framework, Baconian empirical science, does not emerge immediately, and Eggert argues that the rhetoric of alchemy fills the gap between Humanism and the rise of Enlightenment science.

This is a large claim, and the book is only a partial success. Three case studies and three associated methods of disknowledge are investigated to demonstrate how alchemical rhetoric facilitated the deliberate business of not knowing. First, the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation (which exemplifies forgetting); then Christian readings of Kabbalah (which shows skimming); and last gynaecology (which exemplifies avoiding). The primary method of Eggert’s investigation is literary criticism: in Chapter 2, ‘How to Forget Transubstantiation’, she analyses the poetry of John Donne, concluding that for Donne alchemy is ‘an all-purpose disknowledge system […]. Handy for forgetting about the disputes that were at the heart of the Reformation […] it is also handy for not allowing the new science to challenge cherished humanist presuppositions, however erroneous they may be’ (p. 91). The oeuvre of George Herbert, similarly, wrestles with contemporary matter theory. Whereas Donne is fascinated by ‘exceptional matter’, Herbert’s focus is ‘the ordinary things of this world’ (p. 101).

Chapter 3, ‘How to Skim Kabbalah’, traces how Christian writers used alchemy with ‘other esoteric disciplines to rewrite Kabbalah as having been Christian all along’ (p. 115). Figures including Martin Luther, Pico della Mirandola, John Dee, Johann Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa, and others ‘skimmed’ Kabbalah (taking the useful things and discarding everything else). The literary reflections of this practice that Eggert considers include Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a Jewish figure, more specifically, a golem, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Chapter 4, ‘How to Avoid Gynecology’, examines how sexual reproduction became entangled with alchemy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This led to the notion that the ultimate achievement of alchemy ‘was the creation of the homunculus; a true human, perhaps one that even resembled its maker and was infused with a soul […] grown from heated male semen alone’ (p. 167). Eggert focuses on anatomy books to argue that the reality of female reproductive organs was systematically avoided. This contention is then traced in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Chapter 5, ‘How to Make Fiction’, argues that as alchemy became separated from Humanism and is linked to fiction, ‘both fiction and alchemy garner, quite paradoxically, more legitimacy and more unqualified endorsement, losing their shared reputation for simply being a bad idea’ (p. 208). The proof texts here are Hamlet, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. For humanists, literature could change the world; Eggert asserts that Jonson posits literature as a sort of parallel universe alongside...