Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England

by Katherine Eggert

"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 disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

Genres: History

368 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disknowledge is an interesting examination of the state of knowledge at the end of the Renaissance as this relates to British Literature and Alchemy. An odd combination but a fruitful area for epistemological mining.

Disknowledge is a complicated topic but essentially, and therefore incorrectly, it is as the author suggests:

"The term disknowledge describes the conscious and deliberate setting aside of one compelling mode of understanding the world...in favor of another. The state of knowing that results from disknowledge is not pure ignorance, but rather something more like...'enlightened false consciousness'."

Perhaps more simply put it means believing something one knows is not true, but believing it nonetheless because it has a certain epistemological merit/value within the context of a particular cultural/historical environment. Eggert's project is, in the end, literary and Foucauldian and therefore is not reliant up external evidence or empirical evidence. It's the old struggle between Plato (Idealism/Rationalism) and Aristotle (Empiricism). Humanities academics tend to come down on the side of Rationalism and therefore find it taxing to have to offer proofs that are replicable. This book falls into the Rationalist school of thought...therefore, readers should not look for proofs beyond textual self-reference.

Fun read nonetheless...as long as the reader is not hoping to understand the world a little better through the effort of reading this mildly academic exercise in solipsism.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars because few proofs are offered and none of these convincing.

Recommended for post-structuralists and cultural critics who've only a passing acquaintance with the real (Aristotelian) world.

[J. W. Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some fascinating insights, but rather cynical.