num_pages: 368
description: Disknowledge: knowing something isn't true but believing it anyway. In Literature Alchemy and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England  Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect reasonable and wrongheaded.Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne George Herbert Henry Vaughan John Dee Christopher Marlowe William Harvey Helkiah Crooke Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery rhetoric and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare Ben Jonson and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new posthumanist mode of writing fiction.Covering a wide range of authors and topics Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledgewillfully adhering to something we know is wrongresonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
language: English
title: Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England
publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press