1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 1.5.174–75. All subsequent references to this play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers.
2. William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
3. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
4. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976), 280–81.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Inner Experience,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 37–41.
6. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5.
7. Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 122.
8. See Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Marcos Martinón-Torres and Thilo Rehren, “Alchemy, Chemistry and Metallurgy in Renaissance Europe: A Wider Context for Fire-Assay Remains,” Historical Metallurgy 39 (2005): 14–28; Warren Alexander Dym, “Alchemy and Mining: Metallogenesis and Prospecting in Early Mining Books,” Ambix 55 (2008): 232–54; and Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 129–51.
9. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Brian Vickers has taken Newman and Principe to task for overemphasizing alchemy’s technological and protoscientific aspects and de-emphasizing its other dimensions, including its lack of success and its reputation for falsehood; see “The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy,” Annals of Science 65 (2008): 127–56; and William R. Newman, “Brian Vickers on Alchemy and the Occult: A Response,” Perspectives on Science 17 (2009): 482–506.
10. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (1971; repr., London: Penguin, 1991).
11. Although we may speak of practical and theoretical alchemy as distinct enterprises, the same people often practiced both. Stanton J. Linden points to engravings that show the alchemist’s laboratory divided into two halves—one filled with equipment, the other with alchemical books; see Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 8–10. For one alchemist who was both theorist and practitioner, see Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
12. For often sympathetic rebuttals to the “Yates thesis” of Hermetic tradition see, e.g., Brian Vickers, “Introduction,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–56; Brian P. Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermeticism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261–302; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 169–83; and Stephen Clucas, “ ‘Wondrous Force and Operation’: Magic, Science and Religion in the Renaissance,” in Textures of Renaissance Knowledge, ed. Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 35–57. For a smart discussion of how it is and is not useful to speak of “Western esoteric thought,” see Kocku von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 43–64. For the popularity of alchemical symbology in the works of artists and artisans, see, e.g., Smith’s discussion of Bernard Palissy in Body of the Artisan, 100–106; and Jacob Wamberg, “A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Themes in North Italian Quattrocentro Landscape Imagery,” in Art and Alchemy, ed. Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 41–82.
13. Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 65.
14. Nummedal asserts that the frequent charges of fraud leveled against alchemists do not indicate that all alchemists were viewed as frauds. I see her point, but I also agree with her contention in Alchemy and Authority, 6, that the charge of fraud that so often accompanied alchemy became “a focal point for a much broader discussion about alchemy’s cultural meaning.”
15. John Lyly, Gallathea, in Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 2.3.32–34.
16. Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks.
17. Peggy Ann Knapp, “The Work of Alchemy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 575–99; William H. Sherman, “ ‘Gold is the strength, the sinnewes of the world’: Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus and England’s Golden Age,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 85–102; David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 143–67.
18. Robert N. Proctor, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1–36; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8.
19. Lorraine Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282–88, quotations on 282–83; Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
20. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 380.
21. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 66–91.
22. David Glimp, “Utopia and Global Risk Management,” ELH 75 (2008): 263–90, quotation on 263.
23. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 226–41.
24. For a subtle account of early modern authors as agents of their own censorship, see Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
25. Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
26. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
27. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
28. See, e.g., Andrew Martin, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Smithson, Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989); Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Andrew Bennett, Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).
29. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.
30. Roger Ariew, “G. W. Leibniz, Life and Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18–42, quotation on 21.
31. For Leibniz’s use and eventual repudiation of alchemy, see Stuart Brown, “Some Occult Influences on Leibniz’s Monadology,” in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion, ed. Allison P. Coudert, Richard H. Popkin, and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 1–21.
1. Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 446.
2. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), 4.
3. For the persistence of the humanist curriculum in grammar schools, see Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 83–84, 131–45. For the same phenomenon at Oxford, see Mordechai Feingold, “The Humanities,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 211–358. For humanism’s continuing influence on science, see Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); and Grafton, Defenders. On Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Locke, see Feingold, “The Humanities,” 238–39; and Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 231–36. Kent Cartwright, while arguing that English humanism in its university-drama form enabled the growth of the public theater, also notes that part of what made humanism interesting for the public stage was its shortcomings—that is, the gap between book learning and experience; see Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15–16. To challenge Kinney on the early robustness of English humanism, we might look to Alan Stewart, who describes how humanism was derided as early as William Tyndale; see Stewart, “The Trouble with English Humanism: Tyndale, More and Darling Erasmus,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 78–98.
4. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
5. For the humanistic disciplines—especially rhetoric—as the foundation of the Tudor education of the vir civilis, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 19–110.
6. Feingold, “Humanities,” 235–42; Mordechai Feingold, “Reversal of Fortunes: The Displacement of Cultural Hegemony from the Netherlands to England in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Hook and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 234–61.
7. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 441. See Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For the history of pre-Cartesian skepticism in nominalism and other late medieval strands of thought, see Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–35; for its history in demonology and theories of vision and art, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
8. Philip Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices, in Corpus reformatorum, vol. 13: Philippi Melanthonis opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Carl Bretschneider (Heidelberg: Schwetschke, 1846), column 646, quoted and trans. in Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 116. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine lay humanism’s abandonment of moral truths at the feet of Peter Ramus, who “separat[ed] oratorical practice from any moral underpinning”; see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 189. For the efforts of rhetoricians to reconcile humanism with skepticism, see Altman, Improbability, 93–117.
9. William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 36.
10. Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
11. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 447.
12. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, 79–129.
13. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 4.318–20. For Protestant disapprobation of humanist reading, see Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30–49; Grafton, Defenders, 17; and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 78–93.
14. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 206–38; Markku Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics, and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
15. See Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 2–3.
16. Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Grove, 1950), xiii.
17. William Gilbert, On the Magnet, trans. Sylvanus Thompson (London: Chiswick, 1900), 11.
18. James I of England, Basilikon doron (Edinburgh, 1599), 113 (Q1r).
19. Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 11.
20. For the temporal demarcations of late humanism as opposed to early empiricism see, e.g., Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5–87; and Bouwsma, Waning, 35–51, 179–97. Scholars have recently emphasized how much empiricism in its early stages depended on late-humanistic method; see Grafton, Defenders; and Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
21. The timing of England’s increasing interest in alchemy in the 1590s had to do in part with issues of textual transmission like the relatively late access in England to the works of Paracelsus; see my discussion of Paracelsianism in the work of John Donne in Chapter 2. It also, however, had to do with the unstable state of learning. Mary Thomas Crane argues that interest in alchemy and other esoteric discourses surged in the sixteenth century in response to Aristotelian natural philosophy’s demotion; see Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 15–16. Crane’s study was published as this book went into press, and I regret that I could not incorporate her insights more fully into my argument.
22. The foundational work on humanism’s interest in Hermeticism is Yates, Giordano Bruno. While Yates’s case is overstated and has been challenged on that basis, much of her analysis of Hermeticism’s structures and rhetoric remains useful. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 12–17, argues that early humanists like Ficino were interested in a constellation of ancient sages, not just the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus; he calls this constellation “Platonic Orientalism.” See also Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 59–70; and Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination: The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 24–32.
23. Bruce Janacek, Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
24. Comenius visited England twice in the 1640s on the invitation of Samuel Hartlib, who sought his advice on reforming schools along Baconian lines. However, “Baconian” did not mean “posthumanist” or “scientific” in modern terms. Comenius and Hartlib both rejected Baconian induction in favor of presuming that all knowledge and all creation proceed from an inclusive, divinely created universal frame. See William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 55–58; J. T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 101–12; and Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. Stephen Clucas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 133–38. Comenius’s inclusion of alchemy in the scheme of universal knowledge followed his mentor, Johann Heinrich Alsted, who addresses alchemy quite seriously despite including it among the “Farragines disciplinarum” in his Encyclopedia (1630); see Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 153–63.
25. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 204–5. I generally use the terms theoretical alchemy and either practical alchemy or experimental alchemy to distinguish between text-based and hands-on alchemy. William Newman and Lawrence Principe advocate for the term chymistry to describe practical or experimental alchemy, but so far this term has not caught on beyond a small coterie of historians of science.
26. Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 181; see also Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 191–94.
27. Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 10.
28. Lawrence M. Principe, “The Alchemies of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton: Alternate Approaches and Divergent Employments,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201–20.
29. Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
30. Then as now, of course, sloppy scholarly habits and brilliant scholarly accomplishment are not mutually exclusive, as Anthony Grafton points out in a review of recent books on the Italian polymath Athanasius Kircher; see Grafton, “He Had Fun,” London Review of Books 35, no. 21 (2013): 25–27.
31. Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 194–95, 214–15.
32. For an analysis of copia as encouraging a literary culture of detachable components that may be disassembled and reassembled, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 45–49.
33. Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 51–68.
34. Blair, Too Much to Know. Work on the early modern perception of excess information—not only the proliferation of books but also the proliferation of newly observed natural phenomena—has itself proliferated in the last decade. For some of the foundational questions involved, see Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 1–9. Haydn, in Counter-Renaissance, 76–130, was perhaps the first modern scholar to discuss a Renaissance backlash against the proliferation of books.
35. Martin, Knowledge of Ignorance, 26–27.
36. Blair, Too Much to Know, 59.
37. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority, 27.
38. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 97.
39. For the reformation of curiosity from a vice to a virtue, see Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” Isis 92 (2001): 265–90; and Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
40. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 197.
41. John Locke, John Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” ed. Francis W. Garforth (New York: Teacher’s College Press of Columbia University, 1966), 72.
42. Robert Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy (London, 1659), 42 (G1v).
43. Poovey, Modern Fact, 8–11.
44. Michael Sendivogius [Michal Sedziwój], A New Light of Alchymie (London, 1650), 1–2 (B1r–v).
45. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 9. For early modern quarrels over how to interpret one fundamental alchemical text, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, see Peter Forshaw, “Alchemical Exegesis: Fractious Distillations of the Essence of Hermes,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2007), 25–38.
46. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Allison Kavey, Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). See also Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
47. Isaac Casaubon, De rebis sacris et ecclesiasticis XVI exercitationes ad Cardinalis Baronii (London, 1614). See Grafton, Defenders, 145–61; and Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 30–42. Casaubon’s work built upon the work of other scholars that began in the 1560s; see Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 75. For the continued credence granted to the Corpus Hermeticum in the seventeenth century, see Yates, Giordano Bruno, 398–431; and Ebeling, Secret History, 91–114.
48. Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 25.
49. Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 61–62.
50. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 427.
51. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 112–13.
52. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 201.
53. Brian Vickers, “The Myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘Anti-Humanism,’ ” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), 135–58.
54. See Warren Boutcher, “Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Woolfson, 242–68.
55. Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 45, 59–60.
56. Mordechai Feingold, “English Ramism: A Reinterpretation,” in The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences, ed. Mordechai Feingold, Joseph S. Freedman, and Wolfgang Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 127–76. For analyses of Ramus as against rhetoric and against humanism see, e.g., Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Delay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); and Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities, 161–200. Peter Mack argues that Ramus’s separation of rhetoric from logic does not mean he disparaged or ignored rhetoric in his educational method; see Mack, “Ramus and Ramism: Rhetoric and Dialectic,” in Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World, ed. Emma Wilson and Steven Reid (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 7–24.
57. See Robert Goulding, “Method and Mathematics: Peter Ramus’s Histories of the Sciences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 63–85.
58. Ryan Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 19, 13. Stark points out that the mythical origin story of the orator as magical founder of civilization is found in Cicero’s De inventione, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, and Horace’s Ars poetica, and that versions of the story made their way into, for example, Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric (1560) and George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589); see Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic, 19.
59. John French, “To the Reader,” in The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, trans. John Everard (London, 1649), A6r.
60. Principe, Secrets, 179–80.
61. Ibid.
62. Daniel Sennert, De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu (1619), translated by Nicholas Culpeper and Abdiah Cole as Chymistry Made Easie and Useful, Or, The Agreement and Disagreement of the Chymists and Galenists (London, 1662), 134–35. Noting Sennert’s efforts to distinguish practical alchemy from a belief in the power of language that is equally occultist and humanist, Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic, 11–23, proposes that the seventeenth-century advocacy of a Baconian “plain style” in prose represents both a repudiation of humanism’s beloved Ciceronian rhetoric and a repudiation of the idea that language itself may be charmed.
63. Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 40-42; Vannoccio Biringuccio, The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (1959; repr., New York: Dover, 1990), 337.
64. For example, alchemist George Starkey designed unique symbols to guard his proprietary information about how to make the philosopher’s stone; see Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, ed. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 305.
65. Basilius Valentinus, The Last Will and Testament of Basil Valentine (London, 1671), illustration facing 1 (B1r).
66. Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988), 96.
67. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Brinsley Nicholson (London: Elliot Stock, 1886), 294.
68. Ben Jonson, Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), lines 45–48. All subsequent references to Ben Jonson’s masques are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.
69. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Elizabeth Cook (London: A & C Black, 1991), 1.1.64–72.
70. Desiderius Erasmus, “Alchemy/Alcumistica 1524,” in Colloquies, trans. and ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 1:546–47.
71. As the editor of Erasmus’s Colloquies, Craig R. Thompson, explains, longatio and curtatio are not available in contemporaneous alchemical vocabularies, “nor were they ever alchemical terms, so far as can be determined, until Erasmus made them so” (Erasmus, “Alchemy/Alcumistica,” in Colloquies, 1:554n6).
72. George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, in Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, ed. Elias Ashmole (London, 1652), illustration facing 117. This diagram was specially engraved for Ripley’s treatise in this volume, as evidenced by the fact that the number of the facing page in the volume appears in the engraving itself.
73. Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 142.
74. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 20. I have borrowed the connection between the alchemical emblem and Greene’s mundus significans from Bernhard F. Scholz, “Alchemy, Metallurgy and Emblematics in the Works of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch ‘Bergmeester’ Goossen van Vreeswijck (1626–after 1689),” in Emblems and Alchemy, ed. Alison Adams and Stanton J. Linden (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1998), 3–24.
75. Hacking, Historical Ontology, 170–71; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions; Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left, 1975). Hacking advises that we must avoid thinking of the contest between old and new—in this case, the contest between alchemy and what was to become chemistry—in terms from modern science anachronistically applied to the past. Reviewing the influence of Foucault’s The Order of Things, Hacking, in Historical Ontology, 89, cautions that Foucault has been misread as assigning a scientific “system” to premodern science, a system whose founding principles are as provable, in that system’s own terms, as those of modern science. Recent historians of alchemy like Newman and Principe, even while they have established alchemy’s status as a sort of evolutionary contributor to modern chemistry, have also expressed this caution. It is not as if alchemy has a coherent set of tenets that is replaced by the equally coherent (if more sensible) set of tenets of the scientific method.
76. Marco Beretta, “The Role of Symbolism from Alchemy to Chemistry,” in Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900, ed. Renato G. Mazzolini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki/Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, 1993), 285.
77. Beretta, “Symbolism,” 303. Györgi E. Szőnyi has argued, in fact, that the alchemical illustration lends itself to allegory and thus to narrative: “Since a narrative always unfolds in time, the reader has to decipher the meaning step by step, thus, necessarily engaging in a consecutive translation as well as in a discursive cognitive process”; see Szőnyi, “Architectural Symbolism and Fantasy Landscapes in Alchemical and Occult Discourse: Revelatory Images,” in Emblems and Alchemy, ed. Adams and Linden, 49–72, quotation on 57. For the emblem and especially the impresa as participating in inventio, and particularly in a kind of theatrical staging of moral dilemma, see Karen Pinkus, Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter-Reformation Materiality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 129–82.
78. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
79. Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 33.
80. Eco, Perfect Language, 185–90. As Clulee, Dee’s Natural Philosophy, 86, details, “What distinguishes Dee’s ‘holy language’ of the ‘real’ kabbalah from that of the Hebrews is that Dee’s is a kabbalah of ‘that which is’ while Hebraic kabbalah is merely a grammar of ‘that which is said’ and ‘rests on well-known letters that can be written by man.’ ” Clulee cites C. H. Josten, “A Translation of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564), with an Introduction and Annotations,” Ambix 12 (1964): 134–35. For seventeenth-century English attempts to produce a universal and/or purely symbolic language, see Rossi, Logic, 145–75.
81. For the generative powers of the monad see Josten, “Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica,” 99–111; Clulee, Dee’s Natural Philosophy, 105–115; and Györgi E. Szőnyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 161–73. Szőnyi, Dee’s Occultism, 166–67, identifies one of the Monas’s main sources as Ficino’s Index eorum, which is similarly interested in magically generative language.
82. Lee Patterson, “The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996), 58–59.
83. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (London: Dent/Everyman, 1911), 113; Pierre Joseph Macquer, Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry, trans. Andrew Reid (London, 1758), 1:viii–ix.
84. Hacking, Historical Ontology, 170.
85. OED Online, s.v. “metaphor, n. 1a,” last modified 2001, accessed 18 August 2014, http://0-www.oed.com.libraries.colorado.edu/view/Entry/117328; Thomas Norton, Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy, ed. John Reidy (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1975), 6, lines 62–64. Reidy’s edition is based on the two earliest known manuscripts, British Library Add. 10302 (late fifteenth century) and, where that is defective, British Library Sloane 1198 (mid-sixteenth century?), which uses a Middle English style of spelling. Despite its claim to clarity, the Ordinal’s explanation of alchemical processes is hardly straightforward.
86. My hunch that metaphor as a specific word enters English on the wings of alchemy is hardly definitive, of course; an earlier instance may be lurking out there. Previous to metaphor, the English language used the word figure, even though the word metaphora was available in Britain in medieval Latin. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham et al. (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1975–2013), fasc. 6, 1781, cites as the first use of metaphora the seventh-century Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian and quotes from Bede’s lengthy definition in his late seventh-century De schematibus et tropis. Early uses of metaphor, trope, and the rhetorical sense of figure in English seem, on the evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary and Early English Books Online, to cluster around questions of biblical interpretation such as how to read Christ’s statement “this is my body.” (William Tyndale calls this an instance of “trope” in The Souper of the Lorde, 1532). Other European vernaculars, in contrast, appear to have adopted metaphor considerably earlier than English, and not in contexts having to do with either alchemy or biblical interpretation. The Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue Française, ed. Frédéric Godefroy (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881–1902), 10:148, cites Jean de Meun’s late thirteenth-century portion of the Roman de la Rose (line 7229); and the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, and Edoardo Sanguineti (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1961–2009), 10:248, cites Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1370s commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
87. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 13–30; see especially de Man’s treatment of the metaphors in Locke’s discussion of the properties of substances in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (17–22).
88. Nicolas Flamel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures (1624), ed. Laurinda Dixon (New York: Garland, 1994), 29–30. This popular text was first published in France in 1612 and appeared in English in 1624. In 1761, the Abbé Villain established that “Flamel”—supposedly a fourteenth-century Parisian scrivener—was not the author of this text, which was likely written in the seventeenth century by P. Arnauld de la Chevalerie; see Laurinda Dixon, “Introduction,” in Flamel, Hieroglyphicall Figures, xiii.
89. For the tendency of the occult sciences—including alchemy—to reify language into materiality, see Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities, ed. Vickers, 95–164.
90. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
91. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
92. Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
93. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 271.
94. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 329.
95. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 271; emphasis added.
96. Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit,” originally published in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 117–33, was reprinted as an enormously popular trade volume, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Frankfurt’s terms are often playful, but his argument has struck a nerve not only in the popular imagination but also in philosophy, the philosophy of science, psychology, and other fields. For scholarly responses see, e.g., G. A. Cohen, “Deeper into Bullshit,” and Harry Frankfurt, “Reply to G. A. Cohen,” in The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, ed. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 321–39 and 340–44, respectively.
97. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 56.
98. Anderson, Allegorical Intertext, 6–8.
99. Even where it was avidly received, alchemy was never accepted in the university curriculum; it was tainted by its associations with techne and manual labor. See William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 26; and William R. Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80 (1989): 423–45. Patterson, “Place of the Modern,” 60, notes that many authors of medieval alchemy texts “were lower clerics or friars who did their intellectual work outside the university.”
100. William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34–114.
101. Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate,” 440.
102. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanity and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, ed. Catherine M. Dunn (Northridge: California State University Press, 1974), 328. First printed in Latin in 1530, Agrippa’s text went through twenty-four more Latin editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as numerous translations into Italian, English, French, Dutch, and German; see Catherine M. Dunn, “Introduction,” in Agrippa, Vanity of Artes and Sciences, xxiv. Dunn’s edition is of the 1569 English translation by James Sanford. For Agrippa’s involvement with alchemy, see Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 17–25.
103. Agrippa, Vanity of Artes and Sciences, 380.
104. See Nauert, Agrippa; Yates, Giordano Bruno, 131; and Barbara C. Bowen, “Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?,” Bibliotheque d’humanisme et Renaissance 34 (1972): 249–56.
105. Michael H. Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma: Hermetic ‘Rebirth’ and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia,” Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 614–53, quotation on 622.
106. The author who exposes other forms of alchemy as misguided and his own form as correct is a common stance of alchemical texts. George Starkey, for example, contrasts a careless, vainglorious, and foolish alchemist to a careful, modest, and effective one in Pyrotechny Asserted and Illustrated to Be the Surest and Fastest Means for Art’s Triumph over Nature’s Infirmities (London, 1658). Similarly, Gabriel Platte, a respectable mid-seventeenth-century writer on such useful topics as animal husbandry and mining, exposes the bulk of the history of alchemy as a cheat—in the service, however, of requesting space and funding from the English commonwealth for his own, true alchemy; see Platte, “Gabriel Plats Caveat for Alchymists,” in Samuel Hartlib, Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses Made to Samuel Hartlib (London, 1655), 51–88 (E2r–G3v).
107. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canon Yeoman’s Prologue, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 678–79.
108. The founding essay in ignorance studies is Wilbert E. Moore and Melvin M. Tumin, “Some Social Functions of Ignorance,” American Sociological Review 14 (1949): 787–95. For “agnotology” see Proctor, “Agnotology: A Missing Term.” The bibliography in ignorance studies is large and growing; for some interesting recent work, see, e.g., Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and Jonathan Mair, eds., The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Joanna Kempner, Jon F. Merz, and Charles L. Bosk, “Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge,” Sociological Forum 26 (2011): 475–500; and Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
109. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25. The essay in which Sedgwick describes this dynamic, “Privilege of Unknowing,” was originally published in Genders 1 (1988): 102–24, and some of its material reappears in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 4–8. Sedgwick relies on the equation of “knowing” with sexual knowledge that Foucault explores in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). I explore this equation further in Chapter 4.
110. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 43.
111. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
112. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 120.
113. See, e.g., Matthias Gross, Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); and Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
114. See, e.g., Linsey McGoey, “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance,” British Journal of Sociology 63 (2012): 553–76.
115. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5; emphasis in the original.
116. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–48.
117. Poovey, Modern Fact, 55. The separation of language from science is detailed by Foucault in The Order of Things.
118. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 5.
119. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 29, 32.
120. Sigmund Freud, “Negation (1925),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 19:235–39.
121. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940 [1938]), in Standard Edition, 23:204.
122. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6–7.
123. For Bourdieu’s unacknowledged dependence upon Lacan’s description of the symbolic order and Althusser’s practice of symptomatic reading, see George Steinmetz, “Bourdieu’s Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of ‘Habitus’ and ‘Symbolic Capital,’ ” Constellations 13 (2006): 445–64. In describing Lacanian psychoanalysis as a model of “traumatic epistemology,” Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn could be speaking for the main current of recent thought when they note that the end point for Lacan is “a practice of non-recognition in which knowledge appears as a foreign substance”; see Nobus and Quinn, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2005), 111.
124. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1992), 89.
125. For Žižek’s further elaboration on the way that the subject who recognizes her disavowal is only caught up in the Lacanian disavowal writ large of the symbolic order, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 107–60.
126. Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, winter 2010 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 18 August 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological.
127. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Response to McDowell,” Inquiry 50 (2007): 371–77. An idea of a consciousness that is not reflective has been advanced by recent work in behavioral economics, cognitive science, and neuroscience on why we act contrary to what we know to be true. Daniel Kahneman, for example, proposes that because the part of the mind that produces automatic, quick judgments will always overrule the part of the mind that engages in sustained, controlled analysis, there is no such thing as a rational economic choice; see Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). V. S. Ramachandran has suggested that self-delusion is the result when the left brain’s tendency to promote continuity of thought overpowers the right brain’s tendency toward skepticism; see Ramachandran, “The Evolutionary Biology of Self-Deception, Laughter, Dreaming and Depression: Some Clues from Anosognosia,” Medical Hypotheses 47 (1996): 347–62. I was led to Ramachandran’s work by Dan McCormack’s suggestion that I read Errol Morris’s remarkable New York Times blog essays on anosognosia—a condition in which a disabled or diseased person vehemently denies the existence of her disability or disease; see, e.g., Morris, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 4),” New York Times, 23 June 2010, accessed 18 August 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/anosognosics-dilemma.
128. For a succinct summary of Jung’s archetypal approach to alchemy, see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or, “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 26–35.
129. Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury.
130. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 117–19.
131. Richard Halpern usefully distinguishes between the kind of recognition that is “the moment of emergence from disavowal into enlightenment” and the “shocked recognition” that “places the seal on disavowal by insisting (falsely) that up until that moment one didn’t know”; see Halpern, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 46. The text that ostentatiously overplays disavowal then recognition into disavowal then shocked recognition is more ethical in the sense that it registers, in its shock, the lie inherent in not taking responsibility. Similarly, Harry Berger, Jr., looking in Shakespeare’s plays for characters’ degree of conscious awareness of their own denial, notes those “shades of expression that display or betray sensitivity to the failure of acknowledgment—the failure, that is, to acknowledge one’s complicity in what has been done to others or to oneself”; see Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), xiii.
132. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Self-Deception, Akrasia and Irrationality,” in The Multiple Self, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115–32.
133. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 97–98. The cheerfulness of the position of bad faith is frequently omitted in depictions of the modern condition, but we should not forget that Friedrich Nietzsche describes the “free spirit” of Human, All Too Human—the modern philosopher who has given up seeking the “truth”—as being in an exuberant state of good health; see Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 7–9.
134. Martin Luther, D[octo]ris Martini Lutheri colloquia mensalia: or, Dr Martin Luther’s Divine Discourses at His Table, trans. Henry Bell (London, 1651), 480. See Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden (1912; repr., Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1967), 1:566. In the context of an anti-Semitic remark about Jews as alchemists and con artists, Luther declared that “this practising of alchemy is a disgraceful deception, for all know money cannot be made by this sophistry”; Martin Luther to the elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, 9 March 1545, in The Letters of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. Margaret A. Currie (London: Macmillan, 1908), 451.
135. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 30. For the magical and alchemical foundations of Bacon’s scientific thought, see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Ravinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1–35. Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 256–71, specifically argues that Bacon owes his defense of the “artifice” involved in experiment to alchemical discourse. Janacek, Alchemical Belief, 89–98, describes Bacon as expressing his admiration for alchemy indirectly, through messages deeply hidden within his open contempt. Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks, 104–17, astutely analyzes Bacon’s mixed attitude toward alchemy across his oeuvre. For Bacon’s attraction to the Hermetic tradition as prisca theologia, see Stephen A. McKnight, The Modern Age and the Recovery of Ancient Wisdom: A Reconsideration of Historical Consciousness, 1450–1650 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 127–42.
136. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 27.
137. Ibid. Bacon repeats this Aesopian analogy between the well-worked vineyard and alchemy in the Novum organum, book 1, aphorism 85; see Francis Bacon, Novum organum with Other Parts of The Great Instauration, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 95.
138. Graham Oddie, “Truthlikeness,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2014 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 18 August 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/truthlikeness/.
139. “Truthiness Voted 2005 Word of the Year by American Dialect Society,” 6 January 2006, accessed 18 August 2014, http://www.americandialect.org/Words_of_the_Year_2005.pdf.
140. Knapp, “Work of Alchemy.”
141. Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–57.
142. Sherman, “Gold is the strength.” Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, 143–67, develops a detailed and persuasive account of the similarities between alchemical fantasies and Marx’s commodity fetishism. Tara Nummedal confirms the point of alchemy’s ushering in capitalist conceptual frameworks from the standpoint of commercial legal history: early modern alchemists and their patrons, who were often involved in mining operations, increasingly signed contracts for future product, an arrangement that limited the financial risk for the employers; see Nummedal, “On the Utility of Alchemical Fraud,” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe, 173–80.
143. Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 7. Crane’s study of how sixteenth-century England retained Aristotelianism as a knowledge framework is an important treatment of the utility of outmoded science in the Renaissance; see Crane, Losing Touch with Nature.
144. Umberto Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” PMLA 103 (1988): 254–61.
145. Sybille Krämer, “Das Vergessen nicht vergessen! Oder, ist das Vergessen ein defizienter Modus von Erinnerung?,” Paragrana 9 (2000): 251–75; David Lowenthal, “Preface,” in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Suzanna Küchler (Oxford: Berg, 1999), xi–xiii.
146. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 3; Thomas Browne, Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 1:1.
147. For a fascinating analysis of Pseudodoxia Epidemica as an exercise in forgetting modeled on alimentary purgation, see Grant Williams, “Textual Crudities in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” in Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies, ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (London: Routledge, 2004), 67–82.
148. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1:28.
149. Henry More, The Apology of Henry More (1664), quoted in Sarah Hutton, “The Cambridge Platonists,” in A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 313.
150. See Didier Kahn, “Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Preliminary Survey and Synthesis, Part I—Preliminary Survey,” Ambix 57 (2010): 249–74.
151. Robert M. Schuler, ed., Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700: From Previously Unpublished Manuscripts (New York: Garland, 1995), xxvii, xxix–xxxi. See also Robert M. Schuler, English Magical and Scientific Poems to 1700: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1979).
152. Joshua Poole, The English Parnassus, or, a Helpe to English Poesie (London, 1657), A3v. Stanton Linden makes the point that a huge portion of alchemical writing was done in verse, a fact that establishes it as a self-consciously literary genre; see Linden, “Introduction,” in George Ripley, George Ripley’s Compound of Alchymy (1591), ed. Stanton J. Linden (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), xlii–xliii.
153. Eirenaeus Philalethes [George Starkey], Secrets Reveal’d (London, 1669), 4 (B2v), 6 (B3v).
1. Robert Southwell, “The Burning Babe,” in The Poems of Robert Southwell, S. J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 15–16, lines 3, 7. All subsequent references to this poem are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.
2. Lancelot Coelson, Philosophia maturata: An Exact Piece of Philosophy Containing the Practick and Operative Part Thereof in Gaining the Philosophers Stone (London, 1668), 19.
3. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13; for the institution of transubstantiation as doctrine, see chap. 1, esp. 14–34.
4. The disparity of Ambrose’s and Augustine’s opinions acquired more specificity in the ninth-century debate between two Frankish monks: Paschasius Radbert, who took the Ambrosian view that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are equivalent in essence to the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and Ratrumnus, who argued in Augustinian terms that the sacraments are “visible words”; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 15–16.
5. Since a statement is invalidated if its subject is altered or removed by its predicate, argued Berengar, the verb is in Christ’s assertion “This [bread] is my body” makes sense only if the subject (“this bread”) remains intact at the end of the sentence. Thus, the Eucharistic bread cannot materially change; Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 290.
6. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 18–19. James F. McCue points out that it was not Berengar’s queries about Christ’s physical body but his crediting the notion that the Eucharist was entirely symbolic that necessitated his recantation; see McCue, “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation from Berengar Through Trent: The Point at Issue,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 385–430. Brian Stock argues that Berengar’s skepticism about transubstantiation was based not simply on grammar but rather on a very sophisticated theory of allegorical interpretation; see Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 272–81.
7. Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 12–13.
8. Ibid., 52.
9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (1920), IIIa, q.77, a.1, accessed 18 August 2014, http://www.newadvent.org/summa.
10. Aquinas, Summa theologica, IIIa, q.77, a.1–7. For an excellent account of the fine distinctions Aquinas makes regarding the Eucharistic accident of quantity, see Stephen E. Lahey, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102–34.
11. For the ongoing debates over transubstantiation, see McCue, “Transubstantiation from Berengar through Trent”; Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 3–21; and Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For medieval Scholasticism’s difficulties in aligning Aristotelian metaphysics with the doctrine of transubstantiation, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 12–82; Gary Macy, “The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 11–41; David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984); and Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
12. Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 93–100.
13. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 32. Aquinas himself resorted to the circular reasoning of proving transubstantiation is true by asserting that it is true: “Some have held that the substance of the bread and wine remains in this sacrament after the consecration. But this opinion cannot stand: first of all, because by such an opinion the truth of this sacrament is destroyed, to which it belongs that Christ’s true body exists in this sacrament”; Aquinas, Summa theologica, IIIa, q.75, a.2.
14. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 325. Explicitly influenced by William of Ockham, Wyclif was condemned by the Council of Constance in 1414 for (among other things) his physics, including his assertion that “it is impossible for two corporeal substances to be co-extensive”—an assertion that denies Aquinas’s proposition that the accidents of the bread and wine are spatiotemporally coterminous with the substantial form of Christ’s body and blood; Lahey, John Wyclif, 103.
15. Lahey, John Wyclif, 128. The language of Wyclif’s followers similarly displays a fairly sophisticated understanding of how transubstantiation did not comport with Aristotelian physics; see Fritz Kemmler, “Entrancing ‘tra(u)ns/c’: Some Metamorphoses of ‘Transformation, Translation, and Transubstantiation,’ ” Disputatio: An International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages 3 (1998): 176–222.
16. For the persistence of Aristotelian physics in Renaissance learning and beyond, see Charles H. Lohr, “Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy as Sciences: The Catholic and the Protestant Views in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 280–95; Henry S. Turner, “Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599),” ELH 68 (2001): 529–61, esp. 538–40; and Crane, Losing Touch with Nature.
17. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 2:571. See Kilian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 32–39.
18. Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 9–11.
19. Redondi’s discovery of a report penned by the Holy Office of the Inquisition was the smoking gun in establishing that the church found Galileo’s The Assayer (1623), which posits atomism on the basis of his and others’ experiments with light, problematic primarily because Galileo’s atomism disproves that the substance of bread and wine is annihilated in the transubstantiated Eucharist. The Inquisition official writes, “if one admits [Galileo’s] philosophy of accidents is true, it seems to me, that makes greatly difficult the existence of the accidents of the bread and wine which in the Most Holy Sacrament are separated from their substance . . . one will also have to say . . . according to this doctrine that there are the very tiny particles with which the substance of the bread first moved our senses, which if they were substantial . . . , it follows that in the Sacrament there are substantial parts of bread or wine, which is the error condemned by the Sacred Tridentine Council”; Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 334. See also Rubin, Corpus Christi, 350.
20. Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 103–4. Descartes’s philosophical works were placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books in part because his revision of matter theory debunked Aquinas’s transubstantiative physics. Descartes, like William of Ockham, denied that a body’s “quantity” or extension could be separated from that body, and furthermore denied that accidents existed at all except in the mind of the perceiver; Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 100–107. For the origins of Descartes’s matter theory in the Eucharistic puzzle, see Tomaso Cavello, “Real Accidents, Surfaces and Digestions: Descartes and the ‘very easily explained’ Transubstantiation,” in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, ed. Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 11–25; and Steven M. Nadler, “Arnauld, Descartes, and Transubstantiation: Reconciling Cartesian Metaphysics and Real Presence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 229–46.
21. McDonnell, John Calvin, 63; McCue, “Transubstantiation from Berengar to Trent,” 413. Luther’s training at the University of Erfurt qualified him to discuss matter theory with authority, both in relation to the Eucharist and more generally. He cited William of Ockham as one of his great influences, and in 1517, at about the same time he was writing the Ninety-Five Theses, he was also planning a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics; see Martin Luther to John Lang, 8 February 1517, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–86), 48:38.
22. William N. West, “What’s the Matter with Shakespeare? Physics, Identity, Playing,” South Central Review 26, nos. 1–2 (2009): 103–26.
23. Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: W. Baxter, 1825), 907–908n. At one moment, the Order for Holy Communion declares that when communicants receive the Sacrament, they “eat the flesh of [God’s] dear Son Jesus Christ, and . . . drink his blood.” At another, it avers that communicants merely “spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood”; John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 263, 258; emphasis added.
24. William Tyndale to John Frith, 1536, in John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. George Townsend (London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley, 1845), 5:133.
25. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politie the Fift Book (London, 1597), 177 (Q5r). J. R. Parris argues that Hooker takes a Calvinist position on the Eucharist, rejecting anything but Christ’s symbolic presence; still, Parris acknowledges, Hooker is not eager to make the denial of transubstantiation a matter of faith; see Parris, “Hooker’s Doctrine of the Eucharist,” Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (1963): 151–65.
26. Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 88.
27. Avicenna’s text was translated in the early thirteenth century by Alfred of Sareshal as Liber de congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum (The book of the congealing and concretion of stones). It was initially attributed to Aristotle because it was appended to a manuscript of Aristotle’s Meteorology. See Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 36–44.
28. Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 56. Newman points out that the Margarita decreti, a synopsis of Gratian’s twelfth-century canon law encyclopedia, the Decretum, was incorporated into copies of that influential text.
29. As the Aurora consurgens attributed to Thomas Aquinas puts it, the end product of alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, “separateth the purer parts from the impure, that the impure parts being cast away, the work may be fulfilled with the pure”; Marie-Louise von Franz, ed., Aurora consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1966), 95. Whereas von Franz dates the Aurora consurgens to the thirteenth century, contemporary to Aquinas, Lynn Thorndike dates it to the fifteenth in A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), 4:335.
30. The Breve breviarum (ca. 1270) falsely attributed to Roger Bacon, for example, argues that “the specific form can be dissociated from a given portion of [for example] silver, whose matter can then be informed by the specific form of gold. The form itself is indivisible and even impassible, but by its participation in matter it creates a new substance”; Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 68.
31. Alchemy’s claim to reduce material to prime matter also ran afoul of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Margaret D. Garber relates a mid-seventeenth century quarrel at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University between J. Marcus Marci, dean of the faculty of medicine, and the Jesuit Roderigo Arriaga, dean of the faculty of arts. Marci postulated, contra Aquinas, that two substantial forms can coexist, basing his theory on the way alchemists create the philosopher’s stone: first they strip gold of its accidents by using a solvent, then they combine it with “philosophical mercury” to create an alchemical elixir in which the substantial forms of both the gold and the mercury remain. But if two substantial forms can coexist, so too might the substantial forms of bread and wine coexist in the Eucharist with the substantial forms of the body and blood of Christ. See Garber, “Transitioning from Transubstantiation to Transmutation: Catholic Anxieties over Chymical Matter Theory at the University of Prague,” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe, 63–76. Garber also describes how Marci’s theoretical physics tended toward atomism, another schema that, as described above, would void transubstantiation.
32. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel: S. Karger, 1982), 82–125.
33. Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 131–68.
34. Allen Debus notes that while English writers referenced Paracelsus largely for his medicinal theories and practices, he was also recognized as theologically dangerous. According to Debus, Paracelsian theory did not gain currency in England until the 1570s, and did not really take off until the first decade of the seventeenth century, when Thomas Tymme’s translations of sections of the Paracelsian alchemist Joseph Dechesne were published as The Practise of Chymicall, and Hermeticall Physicke (London, 1605). Tymme’s introduction to this text argues that alchemy and theology concur because both the Creation and the Last Judgment were/will be alchemical processes. Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne, 1965), 49, 88.
35. Andrew Weeks describes how Paracelsus deliberately inserted himself into the Lutheran-Zwinglian-Erasmian quarrel over the nature of Christ’s Real Presence in the bread and wine of Holy Communion; see Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 110–11. See also Ute Frietsch, “Zwischen Transmutation und Transsubstantiation: zum theologischen subtext der Archedoxis-Schrift des Paracelsus,” Nova Acta Paracelsica 19 (2005): 29–51.
36. Indeed, Paracelsus determined that the resurrected Christ does not possess human flesh, but rather has only the eternal, spiritual body any Christian receives in baptism and reinhabits at the time of her resurrection; Webster, Paracelsus, 200. For Paracelsus’s views on the nature of Christ’s body, see Dane T. Daniel, “Coping with Heresy: Suchten, Toxites, and the Early Reception of Paracelsus’s Theology,” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe, 53–62.
37. “[E]r sagt, do er das Brot in der Hand hat: Das ist mein Leib, do er den Wein hat: das ist mein Blut. . . . [W]ir vom Fleisch seind, und nit ohn Fleisch, des himmlischen Fleischs, das durch den heiligen Geist inkarniert ist worden. . . . Darumb ist er in uns und wir in ihm, darumb von deswegen, dass wir aus Gott geboren seind und seind des Fleischs und Bluts, das vom Himmel gestiegen ist, dass das Word, das Fleisch ist worden in unsern Händen.” Paracelsus, “Erklärung des 1 Kap. Joh.,” in Schriften Theophrasts von Hohenheim genannt Paracelsus, ed. Hans Kayser (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1921), 457–58; my translation. Andrew Weeks notes that in his Eleven Treatises on the Origin, Causes, Signs, and Cure of Specific Diseases, Paracelsus explicitly takes the Eucharist as evidence for the relation between the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the human body): just as Christ is invisibly in the Host, so too is the macrocosm invisibly in the human body; Weeks, Paracelsus, 122.
38. Paracelsus’s work was proscribed by the faculty of the University of Paris in 1578 and gained mention on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1583 (where it remained until 1897); see Frietsch, “Transmutation und Transsubstantiation,” 30. Paracelsus himself had died long before, in 1541. Hugh Trevor-Roper associates the censoring of Paracelsus’s work with his becoming associated with a dissenting and antimonarchist position via his popularity among Calvinist alchemists; see Trevor-Roper, “Paracelsianism Made Political 1600–1650,” in Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas and Their Transformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 119–33. For the gamut of Paracelsus’s ideas on the Eucharist, see Hartmut Rudolph, “Hohenheim’s Anthropology in the Light of His Writings on the Eucharist,” in Paracelsus, ed. Grell, 187–206.
39. Norton, Ordinal of Alchemy, 78, lines 2519–20. For the identity of Thomas Norton, see John Reidy, “Introduction,” in Norton, Ordinal of Alchemy, xxvii–lii. Kemmler, “Entrancing ‘tra(u)ns/c,’ ” speculates that the length of time it took for the word transubstantiation to enter the English vernacular indicates the skepticism with which the doctrine of transubstantiation was viewed.
40. Von Franz, ed., Aurora consurgens, 129, 131.
41. This connection between the Eucharist and Christ’s incarnation was what fueled some truly gruesome medieval visions of Christ as a child being sacrificed on the altar during Holy Communion; see David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 10–11.
42. Johann Valentin Andreae, The Hermetick Romance: Or the Chymical Wedding, trans. E. Foxcroft (London, 1690), 3, 200–201.
43. Nicholas Melchior Cibinensis, “Addam et processum sub forma missae,” in Theatrum chymicum, ed. Lazarus Zetzner (Frankfurt, 1659), 3:758–63. Cibinensis’s work first appeared in the 1602 edition of the Theatrum chymicum. Cibinensis has not been identified; the name is probably a pseudonym. For a summary of scholarly speculation on this author’s identity, see Láng, Unlocked Books, 158–61.
44. The relevant illustration from Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae (1617) is reproduced in Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976), 138, fig. 258. Maier explains that he “saw the perfection of [the Philosopher’s Stone]. . . . in the nativity, life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as commemorated in the Eucharist.” See John Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible: Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), Phoenix of the Theologians (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 18–19. For the philosopher’s stone as the “philosopher’s child” of the “chemical wedding” of sulfur and mercury, see Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148–50.
45. Mary Baine Campbell, “Artificial Men: Alchemy, Transubstantiation, and the Homunculus,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 2 (2010): 8, accessed 18 August 2014, http://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_02campbell_comp3_083010_JM_0.pdf.
46. Gabriel Naudé, The History of Magick, trans. John Davies (London, 1657), 274 (T1v); originally published as Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie (The Hague, 1625).
47. Lynn Staley argues that a reformist equation between transubstantiation and alchemy took place even long before Protestantism took hold, in Chaucer’s portrayal of the alchemist-priest in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale; see Staley, “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 179–259, esp. 212.
48. William Prynne, Aurum reginae (London, 1668), 131. Henry VI’s hiring priests to undertake alchemy because of their transubstantiative expertise has been taken as historical fact by generations of scholars working on alchemy, but as the passage quoted indicates, Prynne fabricates this story in order to reinforce his point that priests were no better than alchemists. The mistake of treating Prynne’s anecdote as a true account of Henry VI’s alchemy policy may be traced back to Charles Mackay’s not picking up on Prynne’s sarcasm; see Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), 3:50.
49. Benjamin Lany [or Laney], A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty at Whitehall, April 5. 1663 (London, 1663), 4 (A3v).
50. John Donne, “A Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross to the Lords of the Council, and other Honorable Persons, 24. Mart. 1616. [1616/17],” in John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 1:203.
51. George Goodwin, “Of That Loude Lye, and Fond Fiction of Transubstantiation,” in Babels Balm: or The honey-combe of Romes religion, trans. John Vickers (London, 1624), 65 (L1r). This edition is a translation of Goodwin’s Melissa religionis pontificae (1620).
52. Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, 5.436–42; emphasis added.
53. William Vaughan, The Soules Exercise (London, 1641), 226.
54. Donne, “A Sermon Preached in Saint Pauls in the Evening, November 23. 1628,” in Donne, Sermons, 8:288–89.
55. For example, Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 294, baldly states that alchemy is “otherwise called Multiplication.”
56. Norton’s defense of true alchemy as not “multiplication” is based on the alchemical claim discussed above, that alchemy is not artificial but natural; Norton, Ordinal of Alchemy, 17, lines 439–42. For alchemists’ description of the penultimate stage of purification as “multiplication,” see Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 132–33. The image alchemists associated with “multiplication” was the pelican, who feeds her young with her blood; this is Eucharistic imagery as well.
57. Alexander Ross, Arcana microcosmi (London, 1652), 253.
58. When I say that Donne was nostalgic for transubstantiation as nonsense, I do not mean to imply that the Protestant Donne regarded all other aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine as nonsensical. I would agree, for example, with Roberta Albrecht, who reads Donne’s alchemical imagery as reconstructing the Roman Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary in an acceptably Protestant form; see Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as Alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005).
59. Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Robert N. Watson calls this fantasy of an exceptional, incorruptible earthly body Donne’s wish for personal immortality; see Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 156–252.
60. Arnold Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 161 (1998): 39–83.
61. John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave, ed. T. S. Healy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 9.
62. Donne, “A Sermon upon the XX. Verse of the V. chapter of the Booke of Judges. . . . Preached at the Crosse the 15th of September. 1622,” in Sermons, 4:206.
63. Donne, “Preached at S. Pauls upon Christmas day. 1626,” in Sermons, 7:295. Whalen, Poetry of Immanence, 90–93, argues that in this sermon Donne displays affinities to transubstantiative theology as a means of critiquing the more extreme varieties of Calvinist election. See also R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 95–99.
64. Donne, “Preached at S. Pauls upon Christmas Day. 1626,” in Sermons, 7:296.
65. Donne, “The First Sermon Preached to King Charles, at Saint James: 3[rd] April. 1625,” in Sermons, 6:249–50.
66. Donne, “Preached at S. Pauls, June 21. 1626,” in Sermons, 7:191.
67. A number of critics have usefully discussed alchemy and purification in Donne. See especially Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks, 154–92; Edgar Duncan Hill, “Donne’s Alchemical Figures,” ELH 9 (1942): 257–85; and Jocelyn Emerson, “Donne and the Noble Art,” in Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, ed. Elizabeth Lane Furdell (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 195–221.
68. John Donne, “The Canonization,” in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967), lines 23–35. All subsequent references to Donne’s poems, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. While I give the spelling of Donne’s poems as it appears in Shawcross’s edition, I have modernized the spelling of the poems’ titles for familiarity’s sake. For the alchemical significance of the “phoenix riddle,” see Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks, 174–80.
69. Previous critics have explored manifestations of the Eucharist in Donne’s secular poems. Regina Schwartz argues that Donne’s secular love poems unite mortal and immortal bodies in sacramental fashion; see Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 87–160. Whalen, Poetry of Immanence, 22–60, sees Eucharistic elements in the way Donne’s secular poetry endows profane elements with sacred status.
70. Hamilton, Accident, 52.
71. My discussion of Paracelsian alchemy in the “Nocturnal” and “Love’s Alchemy” comments (though with much different emphasis) on many of the images discussed in W. A. Murray, “Donne and Paracelsus: An Essay in Interpretation,” Review of English Studies 25, no. 98 (1949): 115–23.
72. Kathleen H. Dolan interprets the metaphorical alchemical process of the “Nocturnal” as a fairly straightforward one: the speaker’s self begins in prime matter, proceeds through a stage of “death” or putrefaction, and is rebegotten into new life; see Dolan, “Materia in potentia: The Paradox of the Quintessence in Donne’s ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,’ ” Renascence 32 (1979): 13–20. This reading depends, however, on equating the “nothing” from which the elixir is made with prime matter. Prime matter, although it is pure potentiality, is not nothing. The chaos from which God formed the world was prime matter, but Christian theologians, who necessarily endorsed God’s creating the earth ex nihilo, took care to stress that chaos was preceded by nothingness.
73. Malcolm Mackenzie Ross initiated the argument that Donne’s poems seek Eucharistic status in Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954). For other major studies along these lines, see James S. Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 159–90; Eleanor J. McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 33–68; Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999); and Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne’s Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets,” in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 193–220.
74. Frances Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Targoff, John Donne.
75. See Debus, English Paracelsians; and Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Maier, 1976), 273–79. As T. S. Healy reminds us in his edition of Ignatius His Conclave (1610), a work in which the iconoclastic alchemist himself makes an appearance, Donne owned a copy of Paracelsus’s Chirurgia Magna and seemed to know other Paracelsian works, as well; Healy, “Introduction,” in Donne, Ignatius His Conclave, xxxi. See also Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 270, 273.
76. Donne, Ignatius His Conclave, 21.
77. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 61.
78. Paracelsus was never entirely consistent on whether the life-giving balsam and mummy were exactly the same or whether mummy merely had balsamic qualities; see Pagel, Paracelsus, 101; and Webster, Paracelsus, 138, 151.
79. For the early modern confusion over what constituted mummy, see Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London: Routledge, 2011), 20–26. For a compelling analysis of mummy as a commodity circulating between England and the Mediterranean, see Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 151–74.
80. Katharine Park attributes Paracelsus’s enthusiasm for using freshly dead bodies as mummy to northern European folk belief that the life force remained in the recently deceased. Indeed, Paracelsus preferred to employ the bodies of those who met violent deaths, since their life force was unabated by illness or old age. See Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111–32. See also Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 163–80, esp. 173; and Sugg, Mummies, 77–90, 181–88. Robert Fludd explains the superiority of mummy from the hanged or strangled corpse by the fact that, whereas corpses that are consigned to the earth (by burial), to water (by drowning), or to fire (by burning) are immediately given over to corruption, bodies that are consigned to the air (by hanging or strangling) “will remain incorrupted. . . . [T]his airy kind of Microcosmicall Mummy, is most proper for the conservation of vitall spirits in the living man.” See Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 248 (I4v).
81. John French, The Art of Distillation (London, 1653), 90 (O1v). Since French’s two active ingredients, mummy and turpentine, both had the reputation of being highly “balsamical” or preservative, his elixir is doubly engineered to heighten the body’s alchemical efficiency. For medicinal cannibalism in the early modern period and beyond, see Sugg, Mummies; and Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17–34.
82. Richard Sugg, “ ‘Good Physic But Bad Food’: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and Its Suppliers,” Social History of Medicine 19 (2006): 225–40; Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, 115–26. Schwyzer, Archaeologies, 158, also connects the ingestion of mummy with transubstantiation.
83. For an analysis of the use of mummy as both threatening and curative, see Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism. Richard Halpern’s suggestion that Shakespeare and Donne associate women with the stinking “waste products” of alchemy might usefully be applied to one aspect of the horror of Eucharistic cannibalism, that the ingested body and blood of Christ are eventually mingled with the communicant’s feces; see Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 14–17. For the problem of the fecal “material remainder” of the Host, see Stephen Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap,” in Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 136–62.
84. Daniel Featley, The Grand Sacrilege of the Church of Rome (London, 1630), 296 (Ss4v).
85. Paracelsus [attrib.], Of the Nature of Things, in Sendivogius, New Light of Alchymie, 53 (Gg3r). David A. Hedrich Hirsch cleverly attributes another of Donne’s scientific interests, atomistic theory, to the fact that atomists who followed Lucretius described atoms as perfect and indestructible—properties that would extend, if atomism is true, to the human body itself; see Hirsch, “Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 31 (1991): 69–94.
86. John Donne to Henry Goodyer, in John Donne, Letters to Several Persons of Honour (London, 1651), 98; Donne, Devotions, 61. For Donne’s interest in “balsam,” see Don Cameron Allen, “John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 42 (1943): 322–42; and Joseph A. Mazzeo, “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” Isis 48 (1957): 103–23.
87. Donne, Devotions, 117.
88. Ambroise Paré, The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), 448 (Qq2v).
89. See “To the Countess of Bedford [Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right],” which describes the Countess as in possession of the eternal “Balsamum” (22–24); and “To the Countess of Huntingdon [Man to God’s image],” which proposes that in this countess’s (miraculous) case a woman may be virtuous because she has been alchemically, rather than eucharistically, transubstantiated (25–28). For a comprehensive analysis of Donne’s use of alchemical imagery to compliment female patrons, see Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks, 162–69.
90. John Donne, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 216.
91. As Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, 164–67, describes it, alchemy in this poem is attractive to Donne because, relying on a now outmoded physics in which the earthly and divine correspond, it invests the otherwise purely commodified material of this world with spiritual meaning. Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, 142–59, reads Elizabeth Drury’s body as medicine that is regenerative for Donne precisely because it is absent and hence not burdened by gross human (and especially feminine) corporeality.
92. John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 88.
93. Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote, “Introduction,” in Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe, ed. Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 15–16.
94. Patterson, “Perpetual Motion”; Patterson, “Place of the Modern.”
95. Thomas Docherty is perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for the position that Donne’s interest in the new science and in a Montaignean skeptical secularism, which are of a piece with his poetic experimentation, represent Donne’s “fall into history” and hence into modernity; see Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986). Drawing from Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a Shakespearean proto-Cartesian skepticism that threatens to undo the whole world, Anita Gilman Sherman argues that Donne’s wit is a hedge against such skeptical undoing; see Sherman, Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 41–64.
96. Donne, “Preached at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne Knight,” in Sermons, 7:260. This sermon acknowledges that dead bodies are not useful as medicine: “Jezabels dust is not Ambar, nor Goliahs dust Terra sigillata, Medicinall” (7:272).
97. George Herbert, “The Altar,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 26, line 15. All subsequent references to Herbert are to this edition, unless otherwise noted, and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number in the case of poetry or page number in the case of prose. I obviously disagree with Richard Strier, who declares that “The Altar” “does not in any way refer to the Eucharist”; see Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 191. Strier argues more generally for Herbert’s Calvinist leanings on the question of the Eucharist. Herbert’s theological positioning on the spectrum from Laudian to Puritan continues to be a matter of debate, but surely Gene Edward Veith, Jr., is correct in identifying Herbert’s poetry as voicing a range of stances on the question of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist; see Veith, Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 205–20. For criticism that attends to how Herbert views the sacrament as a means toward union or at least conversation with God, see Heather A. R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 46–51; Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 117–37; Whalen, Poetry and Immanence, 110–26; and Young, Doctrine and Devotion, 106–40. Generally speaking, these critics view Herbert as promoting an Augustinian view of language as sacramental, the Word made flesh. This kind of reading owes much to Stanley Fish, for whom Herbert’s poems are self-consuming artifacts that require the reader to experience what each poem describes; see Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 157–223.
98. Booty, ed., Book of Common Prayer 1559, 248.
99. Christ’s blood is “balsam” in The Temple’s “The Sacrifice” and “An Offering” and Passio discerpta’s Poem XIII (“Christus in cruce”). Christ’s gaze in “The Glance” causes the speaker to feel “a sugred strange delight, / Passing all cordials made by any art, / Bedew, embalme, and overrunne my heart” (5–7); and Christ’s mother the Virgin Mary in “To all Angels and Saints” is “the holy mine, whence came the gold, / The great restorative for all decay / In young and old” (11–13).
100. On the grounds of the abstractness of the imagery, Strier, Love Known, 46, denies that either “The Agonie” or the similarly themed “Divinitie” has anything to do with the Eucharist. I disagree; my sense is that the Eucharist is evoked in the changeability denoted in the metaphors. Ryan Netzley notes that Herbert stands at arm’s (or at least tongue’s) length from Eucharistic controversy in “The Agonie,” as he does elsewhere in The Temple, by making the experience of Holy Communion one of taste, not ingestion; see Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 23–65.
101. For the revisions of “The Elixir” from the Williams manuscript to the first print edition of The Temple (1633), see Herbert, Works, 185, note to lines 21–24. Yaakov Mascetti reads Herbert’s revisions of this poem as an increasing commitment to alchemy as a figure for refining the dross both of the speaker’s sinful state and of the poem itself; see Mascetti, “ ‘This is the famous stone’: George Herbert’s Poetic Alchemy in ‘The Elixir,’ ” in Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: AMS, 2007), 301–24.
102. Herbert, Works, 435, 436. Herbert translated Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning into Latin for its incorporation into De augmentis scientiae (1623). Bacon acknowledges “The paines, that it pleased [Herbert] to take, about some of [Bacon’s] Writings” in his dedication to Herbert of his Translations of Certaine Psalmes into English Verse (1625); F. E. Hutchinson, “Introduction,” in Herbert, Works, xl. For Herbert’s acquaintance with Bacon and specifically his admiration for Bacon’s scientific works, see Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 81–86. For the way Herbert’s poetry evidences both an attraction to and reservations about Baconian science, see Harold Tolliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 22–33.
103. Bacon, Novum organum, 55–56, 46; emphasis in the original.
104. Ibid., 133, 142.
105. Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes, ed. David Webb (Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 2000); Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Some English thinkers attempted to reconcile atomism and Aristotelianism; see Stephen Clucas, “ ‘The Infinite Variety of Formes and Magnitudes’: 16th- and 17th-century English Corpuscular Philosophy and Aristotelian Theories of Matter and Form,” Early Science and Medicine 2 (1997): 251–71.
106. Serres, Birth of Physics, uncovers the affinities between Lucretian physics’ basis in a theory of complex flow and contemporary physics’ and mathematics’ interests in post-Cartesian fluid mechanics and in nonlinear contingency. Goldberg, Seeds of Things, describes how Epicurean atomism shares with poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory an emphasis on a universe consisting of ongoing possibility. Greenblatt, The Swerve, emphasizes the freedom Lucretius gave early modern writers to view the world with secular skepticism.
107. Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
108. Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 73.
109. Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 47–48.
110. In important work on the Summa perfectionis, an influential thirteenth-century text attributed to the Arab alchemist Jābir ibn Hayyān or “Geber,” Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 23–44, not only posits that the text was written by the monk Paul of Taranto but also argues that it propounds a kind of experimentally based atomism rather than an Aristotelian theory of alchemy; see also Geber, The Summa perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study, trans. and ed. William R. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Alan Chalmers replies that Geber’s descriptions of alchemical experimentation depended on a “rough and ready” sense of how mercury and sulfur behave in alchemical use rather than on a truly atomistic physical theory; see Chalmers, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms (Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag, 2009), 83–86. Similarly, Chalmers, 88–94, counters Newman’s argument (in Atoms and Alchemy, 85–153) that Daniel Sennert developed an early seventeenth-century theory of atomism based on alchemical experiment by claiming that Sennert accommodated his experiments to his pre-existing atomistic theory, rather than the reverse. For French natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi’s Christianized atomism, see Kargon, Atomism in England, 65–68. For an excellent account of seventeenth-century atomism and protoexperimentalism leading up to Boyle, see Christopher Meinel, “Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism: Theory, Epistemology, and the Insufficiency of Experiment,” Isis 79 (1988): 68–103.
111. Epicurean atoms, as Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 34, points out, are “imperceptible, colorless, tasteless . . . lack[ing] almost every feature by which bodies can be known, virtually every characteristic that characterizes matter.” For the eager reception of Descartes’s and Gassendi’s physical theories at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1640s and 1650s, see Mordechai Feingold, “Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies,” in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Tyacke, 405–12.
112. René Descartes, “Author’s Replies to the Fourth Set of Objections,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), 2:173. For Montaigne’s influence on Descartes, see Philip Ford, “Lucretius in Early Modern France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 227–41.
113. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 32–65. Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics, connects Herbert’s love of ordinary matter to his Eucharistic imagery.
114. David Glimp, “Figuring Belief: George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures,” in Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World, ed. Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 112–31.
115. Herbert, Works, 258.
116. Ibid., 257.
117. Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, 124–25.
118. The lack of a need for God in Descartes’s system was an inference that he fully recognized but upon which he declined to make a definitive pronouncement. Geoffrey Gorham argues that Descartes’s theories of space and motion tried to have it both ways: he posited God’s continuous involvement in the ongoing creation of motion, but he also posited that intermediary intelligences (that is, humans) can initiate motion. Thus Pascal was and was not right when he claimed that Descartes needed God only to set the world in motion. Geoffrey Gorham, “Cartesian Causation: Continuous, Instantaneous, Overdetermined,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 389–423.
119. Bacon, Novum organum, 141; Kargon, Atomism in England, 61.
120. Alan Rudrum, “ ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: Henry Vaughan, Alchemical Philosophy, and the Great Rebellion,” in Mystical Metal, ed. Linden, 325–38.
121. Thomas Vaughan, The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 14. Comparing Henry Vaughan’s translations of Henry Nollius to Thomas Vaughan’s publications, Ralph M. Wardle finds that Henry Vaughan relied entirely on Thomas Vaughan’s work for all Paracelsianism beyond that which pertained to the Paracelsian medicine Henry Vaughan practiced; see Wardle, “Thomas Vaughan’s Influence upon the Poetry of Henry Vaughan,” PMLA 51 (1936): 936–52.
122. Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia theomagica (1650), in Works, 51. Thomas Vaughan habitually refers to Aristotelian physics as a religion in need not just of reformation but of demolition: “Thou wilt tell me perhaps, this is new Philosophy and that of Aristotle is old. It is indeed, but in the same sence as Religion is at Rome”; Vaughan, Anthroposophia theomagica, in Works, 53.
123. Thomas Vaughan, Anima magica abscondita (1650), in Works, 106.
124. Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia theomagica, in Works, 55. For Thomas Vaughan as protoexperimental scientist in partnership with his wife, Rebecca Vaughan, see Thomas Vaughan, Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s “Aqua vitae: non vitis” (British Library MS, Sloane 1741), trans. and ed. Donald R. Dickson (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001).
125. Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia theomagica, in Works, 47; Donald Dickson, “Thomas Vaughan and the Iatrochemical Revolution,” The Seventeenth Century 15 (2000): 18–31, esp. 19. Dickson’s essay ably describes Thomas Vaughan’s dual commitments to esoteric alchemy and the seemingly incompatible experimental protochemistry.
126. Henry Vaughan, Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 142. All subsequent references to Vaughan’s poems are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.
127. Jonathan F. S. Post describes Vaughan’s poetry written during the Civil War as an effort to instill patience in the face of worldly strife, and to look either backward to an Edenic past or forward to the Resurrection; see Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Nigel Smith asserts that this seeming detachment is actually a royalist resistance to populist revolt; see Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 267–73.
128. Rudrum, “These fragments,” 335.
129. Alan Rudrum, “Vaughan, Henry (1621–1695),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed 18 August 2014, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28130.
130. For an excellent summary of the ongoing historical debate over whether religion (or theology) and science (or natural philosophy) came to be separate spheres during the seventeenth century, see Margaret J. Osler, “Mixing Metaphors: Science and Religion or Natural Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science 36 (1998): 91–113. Webster, Great Instauration, argues that Puritan millenarian eschatology encouraged a science that saw the current world as imminently perfectible. True enough, but millenarianism did not instruct seventeenth-century Puritans to work out theological principles’ application to the structure of basic matter.
131. For Vaughan’s alchemical imagery, see especially Wilson O. Clough, “Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy,” PMLA 48 (1933): 1108–30; Richard H. Walters, “Henry Vaughan and the Alchemists,” Review of English Studies 23 (1947): 107–22; Alan Rudrum, “The Influence of Alchemy in the Poems of Henry Vaughan,” Philological Quarterly 49 (1970): 469–80; Thomas O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of Silex Scintillans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 100–130; and Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks, 224–46.
132. See, for example, “St Mary Magdalen,” “The Feast,” and “The Law, and the Gospel.”