Alchemical poetry 1575-1700 from previously unpublished manuscripts /

Preceding the formal structures of modern chemistry and allied through the mists of time to magic, mysticism, medicine, and the occult, alchemy has had a strange, compelling, yet peripheral attraction for scholars and lay readers alike. This pseudoscience, as curiously attractive in its own time as it still seems to be today, was well known to Chaucer (Canon's Yeoman's Tale), used by Donne ("Love's Alchymie"), and dramatized by Jonson (The Alchemist). The present volume publishes--for the first time--14 separate poems that comprise "a condensed, retrospective history of Western alchemy up to the eighteenth century." The poems range from an epigram of 12 lines to an epic of 2,917. The editor of this thoroughly researched, handsome text provides a critical and biographical introduction to each poem, notes, and glossed commentary. The comprehensive general introduction provides the reader with context and history for what Schuler calls a "marginal genre if ever there was one." Graduates; researchers; professionals. E. J. Zimmermann Canisius College