Alchemical language in Elizabethan England

The use of alchemical language in late sixteenth-century England can be divided into two categories: sincere and satirical. On one hand, sincere alchemical scholars grappled with the challenge of translating classical and medieval alchemical texts and navigating the inherent linguistic opacity and strategies of dissimulation that shaped the tradition. On the other, satirical portrayals of alchemy, also rooted in medieval precedent, mocked these very difficulties, framing alchemical language as needlessly inflated and deliberately obfuscatory.

Let us begin with the sincere. The history of alchemy is as much a history of reading, writing and communicating as it is a history of science or philosophy. As Tara E. Nummedal reminds us, alchemy was, for many, a ‘textual practice’.Footnote ¹⁰ Like the humanist translators of classical texts, early modern alchemists were invested in the recovery, interpretation and transmission of older works. Alchemists, however, had to balance their roles as mediators of these texts, simultaneously working for their own or their patrons’ profits and as protectors of valuable alchemical secrets. Alchemists often situated themselves as the ‘heirs’ of medieval greats like Roger Bacon, George Ripley and Thomas Norton as a way to establish their own authority even when, as William R. Newman shows, their own practice owed little to these older texts.Footnote ¹¹ This ensured the longevity of alchemical imagery and language, since the ‘twin strategies’, as Newman puts it, of highly figurative alchemical language were to show that one could ‘reveal’ the secrets of alchemy whilst also retaining that secret for themselves.Footnote ¹² As a result, the act of identifying, interpreting and understanding alchemical language was, like the practice itself, a mystified process. Georgius Agricola, writer of the influential metallurgical treatise De re metallica (1556), offers a common complaint that ‘all these alchemists employ obscure language … There are many other books on this subject, but all are difficult to follow, because the writers upon these things use strange names’.Footnote ¹³ Ancient and medieval alchemical texts used code names, allegory, riddles and illustrated visual clues to both communicate and protect their alchemical processes. Medieval alchemical texts were often versified, which Eoin Bentick argues was a useful borrowing, since ‘alchemical writing is inherently paradoxical, seeking both to conceal and reveal at the same time, and so alchemists borrowed from poetry this ability to gesture towards something whilst never explicitly naming it’.Footnote ¹⁴ Jennifer M. Rampling likewise notes the paradoxical nature of alchemical language as revealing and concealing, as alchemical texts ‘often outline a detailed succession of chemical processes … [and] the final stages are often described with far greater consistency than the first step’.Footnote ¹⁵ Protecting the identity of the prima materia through code names or riddles meant that the clarity of the latter stages was undone. As sixteenth-century practitioners, translators and antiquarians attempted to make sense of, use and translate these texts, the desire to both conceal and reveal would continue in mediations of older alchemical texts.

Translating and making accessible alchemical texts was a complex task and early modern translators and editors made clear to their readers the obscurity and unintelligibility of the language they were mediating on the reader’s behalf.Footnote ¹⁶ The anonymous 1597 translator of Roger Bacon’s The Mirror of Alchimy offers a typical example of this. They preface the work with a promise of elucidating the ‘cloudie’ language of past alchemists:

The early modern translator–alchemists had to negotiate carefully their relationship with earlier texts. They must balance a recognition of the ‘obscure’ language and practices of medieval alchemy with also defending the legitimacy of the practice and their own abilities to perform and translate alchemical processes. In his 1577 alchemical treatise The Key of Alchemy, Samuel Norton speaks to the difficult language of medieval texts, in particular that of Ripley, and the role of the early modern alchemist in mediating and presenting these ‘secrets’. Norton notes that though some ‘mightily inveigh against’ Ripley, this is because they ‘understand him not’.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the difficulty of understanding, Norton claims to have found ‘plainness’ in Ripley, stating,

Norton’s ‘preamble’ to his alchemical manuscript may be typical of textual engagement with alchemical practice, but it also alerts us to the complex role of inaccessible language and the role of the mediator in alchemical texts. Norton admits to the difficulty of interpreting Ripley and his own struggles in identifying the intermediate stages between beginning and attaining the philosophers’ stone, such as fermentation. Yet, whilst ironically concealing his own intermediate steps of interpretation, Norton claims to find a plain and clear explanation in Ripley. Crucially, plainness and obscurity of language are not opposed in Norton’s reading. Instead, Norton at once declares to understand ‘plainly’ the complex alchemical language of this earlier text whilst also shrouding in mystery both his alchemical and his reading practices.

Despite the growing number of English alchemical texts promising to clear away the cloudy riddles of medieval alchemy, its obscure language persisted, both as an inherent feature of the tradition and as a key element of its cultural reception. Running parallel to the sincere alchemical textual tradition was a satirical one, equally rooted in the medieval past and similarly preoccupied with modes of communication. English alchemical satire can be traced to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where alchemical language proliferates even as it collapses into unintelligibility. Chaucer’s yeoman is assisting his master in an alchemical swindle and uses the language of alchemy not to explain the art but to display its inherent deceit and inaccessibility. He describes alchemy as an ‘elvysshe craft’, which makes it ‘semen wonder wise’, yet its ‘termes [are] so clergial and so queynte [so scholarly and so strange]’.Footnote ²⁰ The yeoman is able to list multiple alchemical processes and materials, noting their extensiveness – ‘Ther is also ful many another thyng/That is unto oure craft apertenyng’ – yet states his own inability to speak them correctly: ‘Though I by ordre hem nat reherce kan,/By cause that I am a lewed [unlearned] man.’Footnote ²¹ Despite his repeated assertions that he ‘kan nat telle’ or ‘I have yow toold ynowe’ or ‘Nat nedeth it for to reherce hem alle’, the yeoman continues his display of alchemical language, bookending each extended description of alchemical processes with either a promise to stop speaking or an assertion of the failure of their attempts.Footnote ²² This practice of emphasizing alchemical language by promising to stop speaking it is a typical example of occupatio, a favourite rhetorical device of Chaucer’s. Yet it also speaks to the explosive and uncontainable nature of alchemical language, a theme that continues in early modern satire.

We might describe the alchemical language satirized here as ‘puffed up’. Puffery can be applied to both the material and linguistic practices of satirized alchemists, as words and substances are inflated and expanded. Another word for an alchemist, particularly the deceitful or amateur sort or the alchemist’s assistant, was a ‘puffer’. Chaucer’s canon and his assistant yeoman who must ‘blowe the fir til that myn herte feynt’ would be seen as ‘puffers’, as would the instrument used to stoke the fire.Footnote ²³ This association continued into the early modern period. Alchemists are defined by their ‘continuall blowing to make their furnaces yeeld forth great treasure’ and might provide ‘no little profite to themselves and disadvauntage to the buier, beside puffe ringes’.Footnote ²⁴ One medical account of ‘windinesse in the stomacke’ suggests that it is caused by a man’s ‘vaporous windy opinion of some rare quality in himselfe’, after which his stomach will ‘blow (like an Alchymist) to a great masse’.Footnote ²⁵ Alchemists do not only physically ‘blow’ and ‘puff’; their words are puffed up too. The yeoman is unable to contain the very language that he admits to not understanding even as he cries, ‘Fy! Spek nat therof, for it wol nat bee’, reminding us that the expansive language of alchemy is not enough to bring its promises into being.Footnote ²⁶ The alchemical language of satire is as paradoxical as that of sincere uses of it. It is inexpressible yet cannot be contained. Puffery offers a useful metaphor for this, since it is explosive and windy, and signifies what might be big without and hollow within.

This Chaucerian mode of alchemical satire was developed in the Elizabethan period when another alchemist’s assistant appears with a similarly confused yet expansive list of alchemical terms. John Lyly was a courtier best known for popularizing euphuism, a highly ornate style of prose characterized by its balanced sentences and excessive similes, but he dramatized satirical alchemical language in his play Gallathea. First performed at court in 1588 and printed in 1592, Gallathea is often discussed for its concluding transformation of a girl into a boy, but its subplot follows Rafe, a young man testing out various occupations, including alchemy. His first encounter with the craft, however, is not through its practices or equipment but through its language, mediated by the alchemist’s assistant, Peter. Like Chaucer’s yeoman, Peter is both brimming with alchemical jargon and incapable of comprehending it:

The language of alchemy is so alien to Rafe that he mistakes it at first for the occult or infernal speech of ‘devils’. We know, however, that Peter’s insistence that alchemy’s mystifying terms are inextricable from its secrecy is in line with the long alchemical tradition of using deliberately inaccessible language. Yet Peter’s list of alchemical terms is riddled with errors as he frequently misnames key processes, such as ‘almigation’ for ‘amalgamation’ and ‘frementation’ for ‘fermentation’.Footnote ²⁸ This satirical alchemical language, then, is even more obscure than its sincere counterpart, since its error-laden rendering of alchemical terms transforms them into gibberish, even if they still point to real alchemical language and processes. Like Chaucer’s tale, Lyly’s satirization is also attuned to the inflated nature of both alchemy and its language. Like the yeoman who must ‘blowe the fir til that myn herte feynt’, Peter too must do ‘nothing but blowing of bellows’. And when he finishes his first lengthy list of alchemical terms, we might imagine him breathless as he says, ‘With as many termes unpossible to be uttered, as the Arte to be compassed.’Footnote ²⁹ Peter is speaking not only to the inaccessibility of this language, but also to its expansive and inflated nature, in which the number of terms and their length make them, once again, both inexpressible and uncontainable.

In both the sincere and satirical uses of alchemical language, its communicative capabilities are under scrutiny. Unintelligibility is a shared concern. Sincere alchemists seek at once to explicate and conceal meaning, whilst satirical renderings both mimic and mock the language they claim to debunk, as alchemists’ assistants seem unable to contain the jargon they dismiss. Yet alchemy was not the only sphere undergoing an intense metalinguistic investigation in Elizabethan England. Running parallel to these alchemical mediations were broader discussions about the use and abuse of the English language, which reached their peak in the inkhorn controversy. This debate was entangled in nationalist, religious and intellectual concerns, as writers negotiated the boundaries of intelligibility. In the most pointed satirical treatment of the controversy, the pamphleteer Nashe employs alchemical imagery to critique linguistic excess, as he examines the competing forces of inflation and distillation in literary-linguistic production.

Alchemy and inkhornisms

Peter’s rapid-fire listing of alchemical terms, all ending in the Latinate suffix ‘-ation’, may have registered as a familiar mockery of inaccessible language to early modern audiences, though not in an immediately alchemical context. In the same year that Lyly’s Gallathea was printed, Nashe launched his attack on his rival Gabriel Harvey’s language, cataloguing a string of ‘over-rackt absonisme[s]’, ill-sounding words, including ‘energeticall persuasions: Rascallitie: materiallitie: artificiallitie, Fantasticallitie: divine Entelechy: loud Mentery: [and] deceitfull perfidy.’Footnote ³⁰ This satirical list of linguistic excess functions much like Peter’s babble of ‘termes unpossible to be uttered’, drawing attention to the contemporary intersection of Latinate neologizing and the translation of alchemical terminology into English. Both passages engage, albeit humorously, with intellectual traditions of translation and linguistic antiquarianism and show how such language, whether scholarly or pseudo-scientific, can veer into the deliberately or accidentally unintelligible. Nashe asks his readers to discern ‘whether [these words] be currant in inkehornisme or no’, situating Harvey’s language not within alchemical satire but within the inkhorn controversy, a metalinguistic debate concerned with the intelligibility and value of English words.Footnote ³¹

By the sixteenth century, English had long been regarded as a ‘base’ and ‘insufficient’ language, especially in comparison to Latin. As Peter Burke relates, there was widespread commentary across early modern Europe on the ‘riches or poverty’ of any vernacular language.Footnote ³² To compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the English language, writers and translators were forced to borrow and neologize, and, by 1592, Nashe’s rival Harvey thanked his contemporaries for ‘their studious endevours, commendably employed in enriching, & polishing their native Tongue, never so furnished, or embellished, as of-late’.Footnote ³³ Alchemists, humanist translators and energetic neologizers of the sixteenth century all turned to Latinate vocabulary to enrich the English language. For alchemists, this linguistic expansion enabled the translation and publication of English alchemical texts. For humanists, it provided a means to translate classical and medieval works into English. And for prolific neologizers, from Nashe to William Shakespeare, it allowed for the creation of new words, adapting and merging existing terms to enrich the lexicon and make the language more dynamic.

However, this process of linguistic borrowing was not without its critics. As English grew, so did anxieties about its intelligibility. The proliferation of Latinate terms, referred to as ‘inkhorn terms’ or ‘hard words’, became the target of fierce critique during the inkhorn controversy. The linguistic innovation that began as a desire to expand and enrich English soon devolved into ‘inkhornism’ – excessive borrowing and neologizing that rendered English unintelligible, obscure and often ridiculous to anyone without a firm grip of Latin. The diplomat and rhetorician Thomas Wilson advised his readers as early as 1553 to avoid excessive linguistic borrowing, prioritizing plain English above all else: ‘Emong al other lessons, this should first be learned, that we never affect any straunge ynkehorne termes, but so speake as is commonly received … Some seke so farre for outlandishe Englishe, that thei forget altogether their mothers language.’Footnote ³⁴ Other complaints of this nature include the poet and rhetorician George Puttenham’s attack on those who ‘seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin’ and the orthographer John Hart’s concern that Latin borrowings ‘hindereth the unlerned from understanding of the matter’.Footnote ³⁵ Paula Blank suggests that, to early modern commentators, ‘the idea that English was a “foreign” language – even to native speakers – was felt to be a uniquely contemporary phenomenon’, especially since the language truly had expanded by thousands of words.Footnote ³⁶ As shown by these complaints, in which borrowers ‘hindereth the unlerned’ and ‘forget altogether their mothers language’, the inkhorner faces multiple charges. He not only alienates his countrymen through his exclusive and excessive use of foreign borrowings; he betrays his nation too.Footnote ³⁷

The length, or polysyllabic nature, of borrowed words was a regular feature both of celebrations of the expansion of English and of critiques of inkhorn terms. The Tudor scholar and educational writer Roger Ascham, for example, argues that because English uses mostly ‘wordes of one syllable’, translations out of Greek or Latin ‘doth rather trotte and hoble, than runne smothly in our English tong’.Footnote ³⁸ Nashe similarly complains, ‘our English tongue of all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monosillables which are the onely scandall of it’, suggesting that to remedy this words must be conjoined or borrowed out of Greek, French, Spanish and Italian.Footnote ³⁹ This suggestion that English was fundamentally monosyllabic meant that polysyllabic words became associated with foreignness and inkhornism. The poet George Gascoigne wryly commented in 1575 that, since polysyllabic words ‘cloye a verse and make it unpleasant’, writers should

As such, overinflated words were at the heart of the inkhorn controversy.

With these sincere linguistic concerns came satirical jabs. The connection between ‘big’ polysyllabic words and inkhornisms is dramatized in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. In a play full of neologisms, two characters in particular are denigrated for their ‘fier new wordes’, the Spanish braggart Armado and the pedant Holofernes.Footnote ⁴¹ The inflated quality of their words is noted when Costard, a country bumpkin, speaks with Moth, Armado’s servant, as he jokes, ‘I marvaile thy [master] hath not eaten thee for a worde, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.’Footnote ⁴² ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’, the longest word in Shakespeare’s works and an overblown Latinism meaning the ability to attain honours, mocks the unintelligible, inflated inkhorn words that Wilson and Gascoigne decry. It would soon be used by Nashe to describe the deceitful and mystifying language used by trickster physicians, who ‘deafen our eares with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panachaea their soveraigne Guiacum’.Footnote ⁴³ This article began with Nashe’s connection between alchemical language and inkhornisms, as Winter states that alchemists are nothing without their ‘inkehorne termes’. Yet elsewhere in Nashe’s prose, the analogy is inverted. Rather than satirizing alchemists, Nashe uses the language of alchemy and its well-known associations with puffery and deceit to critique the similarly ‘puffed up’ language of his literary rivals.

Nashe entered the English literary scene in the late 1580s. After graduating from Cambridge and starting his career as a state-backed, anonymous pamphleteer in the Marprelate controversy, Nashe’s first credited appearance in print was his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589). Lorna Hutson describes this as an opportunity for Nashe to ‘conduct a spirited review of the state of English letters’, praising Greene and other earlier writers invested in the humanist aims of expanding the English language whilst simultaneously critiquing the current ‘stagnation in which authors appear to be mere retailers of classical and continental merchandise’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Recently graduated, newly arrived in London, and in the first print publication in his name, Nashe addresses the preface to Menaphon to ‘the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities’ and immediately inserts himself into debates surrounding inkhornism: ‘I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is growen of late; so that everie moechanicall mate abhorres the english he was borne too, and plucks with a solemne periphrasis, his ut vales from the inkhorne’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The pedantic scholar greeting others (‘ut vales’) daily with ‘solemne periphrasis’ and full of inkhornish Latinisms that is ridiculed by Nashe would later appear in literary figures such as Love’s Labour’s Lost’s Holofernes. Nashe references the inkhorn here, but ‘periphrasis’ is an even more loaded term in this context. ‘Periphrasis’ was already an established Latin rhetorical term, translated by Elyot in his Bibliotheca Eliotae as ‘circumlocution, one worde expressed by many’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the sixteenth century, however, the word was also directly borrowed into English, such as in Thomas More’s Apologye, in which he admits to have ‘fallen on a fayre fygure unware, that ys I trowe called periphrasys’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Over the century we see the status of this rhetorical term diminish from a ‘fayre fygure’ to what Puttenham describes as ‘holding somewhat of the dissembler, by reason of a secret intent not appearing by the words’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ‘Englishing’ of this rhetorical term and its subsequent devaluing exemplify the growing mistrust of superfluous and mystifying rhetoric. He that ‘falls on’ periphrasis unnecessarily expands his language in a way that makes it artificial and robs it of substance. This expanded, insubstantial language is further critiqued by Nashe as he moves on to an explicitly alchemical metaphor: the ‘idiote art-masters, that intrude themselves to our eares as the alcumists of eloquence; who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nashe’s reference to the ‘stage of arrogance’ tells us that this particular complaint is launched against playwrights, whom he later suggests ‘repose eternitie in the mouth of a player’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nashe’s connection between ‘bombastic’ and ‘blank verse’ may be familiar to Shakespeareans, since Robert Greene’s famed 1592 critique of Shakespeare, the ‘upstart Crow’, would similarly attack the playwright’s ability ‘to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’.Footnote ⁵¹ Robert Stagg shows that the dual meanings of ‘bombast’ as both to ‘stuff’ with unnecessary matter and to ‘swell’ or ‘inflate’ alerts us to bombastic blank verse’s paradoxical status as ‘both too little and too much’, as Shakespeare ‘pads out [his blank’s] essential emptiness (their blankness) with portentous rhetoric and vacuous sound’.Footnote ⁵² The shared imagery of excessive ‘stuffing’ and empty sound continues in Nashe’s preface, as he furthers his attacks:

The writers that Nashe attacks have ‘stuffed’ imaginations, ‘overflowing’ with ‘conceits’ that ‘over cloy’ them, making them unable to invent anything new through ‘extemporal’ means. As a result, they must transform these unoriginal ‘cholericke incumbrances’ into airy blank verse, which has the space of a hollow yet volubile drum perfect for ‘drumming decasillabon’ – the decasyllable or iambic pentameter typically used in blank verse. Nashe’s own desire to avoid inflated language continued in his other works, such as his call to a muse in Christs teares over Jerusalem to ‘file away the superfluous affectation of my prophane puft up phrase, that I may be thy pure simple Orator’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is presented within a broader attack on the morality of inflation as Nashe attacks sinners, stating, ‘It is not your pinches, your purles, your floury jaggings, superfluous enterlacings, and puffings up, that can any way offend God, but the puffing up of your soules, which therein you expresse.’Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘Puffings up’ represent, then, not just inflated language, but all superfluous and ambitious objects and souls.

In Nashe’s second credited work, The Anatomie of Absurditie, the imagery of empty containers and drums continues. As he promises to ‘runne through Authors of the absurder sort, assembled in the Stacioners shop, sucking and selecting out of these upstart antiquaries’, Nashe complains of a literary scene diluted with ‘unlearned Idiots’, and goes on to describe them as ‘brainlesse Bussards’ like ‘emptie’ eggs that ‘floateth above’, unlike full eggs that sink in water.Footnote ⁵⁶ He quickly expands this metaphor of hollowness:

Here, both the hollow egg and the empty drum reiterate the deceitful emptiness of the ‘puffed-up’ phrases and ‘swelling bumbast’ of the ‘alcumists of eloquence’ attacked in his earlier preface to Menaphon, with ‘alcumists’ swapped out for ‘Authors’ in Anatomie. This passage also continues Nashe’s interest in the paradox of such language, which is both massy and hollow, empty within yet sounding ‘big without’. These attacks are reminiscent both of the changing status of ‘periphrasis’ discussed earlier, ‘one worde expressed by many’, and of the alchemical satire seen in Lyly, which is similarly a ‘confused masse of wordes without matter’, using many words, often long and unintelligible, to signify little other than that they represent satirized alchemy, which also, as Nashe’s Winter puts it, ‘bring[s] forth no action’.

The inflated imagery of both the ‘puffer’ alchemist and the ‘puffed-up’ author are evoked by Nashe in his preface to Menaphon too. That something might be deceitfully expanded once ‘puffed up’ with air, only to prove hollow within, connects the ‘swelling’ of alchemy (both its techniques and is falsities) and the empty-headed poet that Nashe attacks. Inflation, swelling and puffing are traits of the ‘alcumists of eloquence’, but these words will be used in much more ambivalent ways over Nashe’s career. Jason Scott-Warren’s object-oriented reading of Nashe, for example, centres on his ‘swollen’ and ‘hollow’ imagery and the ‘windy emptiness’ and stuffiness of his language.Footnote ⁵⁸ We might see this as a progression in Nashe’s literary style once free of the limits of a preface, but there are many moments in this first work that relish linking alchemical imagery with literary production.

Nashe goes on to employ alchemical language to put forward his own linguistic commentary. Though he denounced the ‘swelling bumbast’ of playwrights, he praises some scholars for ‘repurg[ing] the errors of Arts expelde from their puritie, and set before our eyes a more perfect Methode of Studie’.Footnote ⁵⁹ He hails the poet Edmund Spenser as that ‘miracle wit’ that would produce English gold should ‘an forreiner [try] to bring our english wits to the tutchstone of Arte’ – ‘touchstone’ at this point was both metaphorical and a literal stone used to rub gold and silver against to test their purity.Footnote ⁶⁰ There are some writers, then, who escape Nashe’s criticism, but the language used to describe them is no less alchemical than the ‘puft up’ language of playwrights. This suggests that while Nashe engages with alchemical satire to attack the inflated language of his contemporaries, literary and alchemical perfection is possible.

For Nashe, the inflated words of both inkhornism and alchemy can be combated through another alchemical procedure – distillation. The act of distillation, separating dross from valuable matter, was a useful metaphor for the act of writing since, as Philip Ball suggests, there was ‘something highly attractive in the image of distillation as the way to obtain a potent essence from everyday fare; indeed, poetry is itself a kind of distillation of language’.Footnote ⁶¹ Margaret Healy similarly identifies late sixteenth-century England, with its writers interested in the poet-as-maker trope, as a ‘remarkable phase in the history of poetic theory in which the technique of writing was understood to involve “distillation”’.Footnote ⁶² In sonnet 54, for example, Shakespeare imagines poetry’s ability to preserve and make sweeter the beloved’s beauty through the distilling power of verse, as the poem’s final couplet shows, comparing the more lasting scent of distilled roses and temporary living rose: ‘And so of you, beautious and lovely youth, / When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.’Footnote ⁶³ In later works, Nashe develops his alchemical metaphors for literary creation to consider how the inflated alchemical language of ‘puft up’ poets might also be distilled. In Pierce Penilesse, Nashe favourably contrasts those who ‘study twentie yeeres to distill golde out of inke’ against younger writers who ‘doe nothing but devise how to spend’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In The Unfortunate Traveller, however, the perils of distillation as a means to create literary ‘gold’ are presented. The narrator, Jack Wilton, accompanies a fictionalized Earl of Surrey who is travelling to Italy to woo a lady, Geraldine. While the playwrights Nashe complained of in his preface to Menaphon attempted to ‘embowell the clowdes in a speach of comparison’, ‘embowel’ is changed for ‘distil’ in Unfortunate Traveller. Composing sonnets for his beloved, Surrey ‘eclipsed the Sun and Moone with comparisons’ and Nashe describes the earl’s poetic process as when ‘The alcumy of his eloquence, out of the incomprehensible drossie matter of clouds and aire, distilled no more quintescence than woulde make his Geraldine compleat faire’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Surrey is no more successful than the playwrights at producing valuable literature. Like the ‘alcumists of eloquence’ in the preface to Menaphon, Surrey’s poetic matter is ‘aire’, and when Surrey attempts to ‘distil’ this ‘drossie matter’, the resulting ‘quintescence’ pays little compliment to Geraldine. The swollen, airy language critiqued earlier in Nashe’s career is exchanged for constricting, weighty language. When Surrey mistakes another woman for Geraldine, he delivers the following poem,

Rather than airy and inflated, Surrey’s language is ‘stifling’ and punctuated with weighty, metallic, and earthy imagery, as the recipient has eyes like searing irons and stifling tresses of hair, a suffocating inversion of both Petrarchan love poetry and the inflated imagery deployed earlier. Even the metamorphosis offered by alchemy so often displayed in early modern sonnets is debased as Surrey asks the mistaken beloved to ‘Like Circes change me to a loathsome swine’. Surrey performs poetic distillations, but by using the ‘drossie matter of clouds and aire’ as his prima materia, his alchemical poetry fails, only creating more dross. Yet Nashe, like the alchemists of his time, remains elusive as to what prima materia might be effective for producing literary gold.

Nashe’s repeated use of alchemy to attack the broader failings of language exhibited by Surrey and Nashe’s own contemporaries is typical of what Dermot Cavanagh terms the ‘double-sidedness’ of his satire.Footnote ⁶⁷ Cavanagh notes that Jack Wilton ‘deploys the arts of language in a way that both satirizes their artificiality and that allows him to exploit their utility in instrumental ways’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This mode of Nashean satire, however, is true of alchemical satire more broadly. From Chaucer’s early use of alchemical-linguistic satire in which the yeoman claims that there is no need to ‘reherce’ the alchemical language of his master whilst doing just that to Lyly’s uncontainable list of phoney alchemical terms, the deployment of alchemical language is a deliberate mode of satire in which alchemy’s inflated language can be made both to signify and to satirize itself. Both alchemical writers and early modern satirists were involved in a game of concealing and revealing meaning, asking their readers and audiences to interpret and differentiate dross from valuable matter. Alchemical language is inflated, empty and inaccessible, but by placing alchemy within the broader literary-linguistic politicization of mystifying language, Nashe and his contemporaries suggest that an alternative literary-linguistic perfection is possible. Linguistic perfection would go on to become a central concern of seventeenth-century scientists, but, even in the early decades of the century, the inflationary rhetoric of both alchemists and inkhorners lingers in both sincere and satirical reflections on the use and abuse of language.

Windy echoes in the seventeenth century

By the early seventeenth century, the inkhorn controversy had waned, but its core concerns about communication and intelligibility persisted in both sincere and satirical treatments of alchemy, ultimately influencing the emerging discourse of ‘new’ science. This final section explores how the Elizabethan literary engagement with alchemical imagery as a means of linguistic commentary, particularly the language of inflation, wind and puffery, echoed in the decades that followed and shaped broader metalinguistic debates in both literary and scientific circles.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the linguistic debates that had flourished in 1590s London evolved and found new expression in the universities. Francis Bacon’s 1605 Advancement of Learning redirected concerns about unintelligible and deceptive language away from inkhorners and trickster alchemists, focusing instead on the realm of scientific inquiry. In the Advancement, he begins the linguistic commentary that he would later develop in Novum Organum and reflects on the energetic neologizing and linguistic scholarship of the century prior. Noting the increased interest, following the Reformation, in ‘ancient Authors, both in Divinitie, and in Humanitie, which had long time slept in Libraries’, Bacon cites the ‘necessitie of a more exquisite travaile in the languages originall, wherin those Authors did write’ as the cause of linguistic ‘excesse’.Footnote ⁶⁹ At this point, in a turn of phrase strikingly similar to Nashe’s attack on ‘confused masse[s] of wordes without matter’, Bacon states that ‘men began to hunt more after wordes, than matter’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bacon does not name inkhornisms, a term that was falling out of fashion by this point, but his complaint has the same root. Humanist translation and antiquarian language caused an ‘excesse’ of words. Bacon was also aware of the potential of wind, air, clouds and inflation as metaphors for the linguistic and imaginative work of windy orators who ‘agitate’ people like wind ‘troubles’ the sea and the ‘vapourous imaginations’ of those who engage in ‘Naturall Magicke, Alchimie, Astrologie’, who ‘in steede of a laborious and sober enquirie of truth[,] shall beget hopes and Beliefes of strange and impossible shapes’.Footnote ⁷¹ Bacon’s linguistic commentary is rarely connected to the preceding inkhorn controversy, yet the concerns with intelligibility, puffed-up scientific practice and the usefulness of inflated, airy imagery as a mode of critique continue.

Two years after the publication of The Advancement of Learning, a play titled Lingua: or The combat of the tongue, and the five senses for superiority, by Cambridge playwright Thomas Tomkis, was published. This academic play takes place in the microcosm of the mind and dramatizes a battle between Lingua, the female personification of language, and the five senses. Tomkis’s drama has already been connected to new science elsewhere, particularly his later play Albumazar, which both satirizes the likes of alchemy and astrology and showcases enough engagement with the latest scientific discourses to characterize Tomkis as a ‘playwright who was deeply engaged with early modern natural philosophy’.Footnote ⁷² In Lingua, the titular Lingua moves at ease between languages, ancient and vernacular. In response to her linguistic flexibility, Common Sense imagines and condemns her speech as a failed alchemical experiment, stating, ‘I am perswaded these same language makers have the very quality of colde in their wit, that freezeth all Heterogeneall languages together, congealing English Tynne, Graecian Gold, Romaine Latine all in a lumpe.’ He then suggests that Lingua use the ‘cleane current of a pure stile’ instead, foreshadowing the language of Abraham Cowley’s 1667 celebration of the Royal Society’s linguistic reformation, since they have ‘vindicated Eloquence and Wit’ and now philosophy has a ‘candid Stile [that] like a clean Stream does slide’.Footnote ⁷³ Common Sense, much like Nashe’s Winter and Bacon, shows a wariness towards ‘language makers’, be they alchemists who can ‘tell miracles’ or orators who flit between tongues so frequently that their speech becomes an indistinguishable ‘lump’ of fused metals.

The debates between the senses and Lingua on the right and proper use of language are paralleled with the conversations between their array of pages, who each represent other senses and attributes of the mind. In one scene, Lingua’s page Mendatio (lying) spots Heuresis (invention), the page of Phantastes (imagination), ruminating on his alchemical practice, and the tropes of alchemical satire continue:

Mendatio can identify Heuresis’s alchemical interests (he is ‘turned Chimick’) purely by his ‘talke’, and Heuresis’s talk, much like that of Chaucer’s yeoman and Lyly’s Peter, is all inflation. He must ‘blow’ and ‘blast’ his fire and work his ‘bellowes’ with the wheel. Once again, alchemical talk is tied to inflation. It is relevant too that it is the personification of invention, the capacity of the mind required for creating the ‘hopes and Beliefes of strange and impossible shapes’ and windy orations, that Bacon critiqued. Lingua draws upon the alchemical and linguistic satire of the Elizabethan period, but its dramatization of the relationship between language and the senses also points towards the scientific-linguistic discourses of the century ahead, in which ‘lingua’ would continue to be denigrated for its capacity to deceive.

Alchemical language receives a more extended and well-known dramatization in Jonson’s The Alchemist, in which conmen Subtle and Face play, among other roles, a phoney alchemist and an alchemist’s assistant to dupe the wealthy but foolish Sir Epicure Mammon and his dubious friend Pertinax Surly. Neither Mammon nor the audience ever see the laboratory where the promised transmutations are to take place, although the explosion at the play’s conclusion and the discovery by Lovewit, the owner of the house the play takes place in, of ‘smoak’d’ walls and ‘A few crack’d pots, and Glasses, and a Fornace’ suggest that genuine attempts were made.Footnote ⁷⁵ Instead, both Mammon and the audience are only exposed to the language of alchemy as proof of its workings. Subtle is an adept at mimicking alchemical language, language that on the one hand, as Eggert argues, ‘partakes in, rather than merely scoffs at, the scientific discourse of Jonson’s day’, since it displays a clear knowledge of these terms, yet on the other hand undermines its alchemical meaning and replaces it with a satirical one when deployed in an explicitly duplicitous fashion.Footnote ⁷⁶ Surly’s response to Subtle’s alchemical speech, much like Peter’s garbled listing of alchemical terms, shows how easily such language can be mimicked even by one who understands none of it:

Rather than dismiss Surly’s parody as mere ignorance, Subtle insists that this obscurity is intentional:

Subtle then aligns alchemical secrecy with a venerable tradition of mystification in sacred and literary discourse:

This scene dramatizes many of the literary-linguistic contexts that drew upon serious discussion of alchemical language. Rather than denounce Surly’s mimicry as the ramblings of one who does not understand the practice, Subtle tells him that this language is deliberately obscured. Subtle then situates alchemical language within a broader tradition of deliberately obscure and inaccessible language: Egyptian hieroglyphics, biblical scripture and classical poetry – the ‘first Springs of Wisdome’. The scene thus offers more than a comic send-up of alchemical puffery. It stages a metalinguistic debate about the politics of specialized language, about who gets to speak obscurely and why, and aligns the theatrical satire of alchemical language with broader early modern concerns about clarity, authority and access. The debate between the trickster alchemist and the sceptic here is not about alchemy’s capacity to transmute metals, but rather about the politics of inaccessible, figurative language itself.

Jonson’s use of alchemy as a means to satirize inaccessible language more broadly continues in his court masque, Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court. Mercury, representing both the substance often used as prima materia, the first matter, in alchemy and the Roman god of money, communication and trickery, attempts to escape Vulcan, the blacksmith god, and his court of alchemists who try to catch him before he ‘evaporate[s]’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Mercury’s dual role as an alchemical substance and the god of communication suggests that these courtly alchemists are attempting to trap him not only to use his substance for their work, but to gain mastery over the communicative and potentially manipulative power of language too. This is strengthened when Mercury describes the ‘materials’ of alchemy, in which alchemical and verbal matter are mingled:

Most of the ‘materials’ listed are not alchemical materials, but words. Mercury finds amongst the glass and minerals ‘fylings of figures’, a ‘conserve of questions’, ‘a drop of trueth’, a ‘tartar of false conveyance’ and a ‘huge deale of talke’. The linguistic ‘materials’ of alchemy outnumber the chemical, reminding us that for Jonson, as for Nashe’s Winter, the success of alchemy only went as far as the power of its ‘termes’. Yet Jonson’s attack on alchemical language is also an attack on those who would use artificial, overblown language – figures, false conveyance and a ‘huge deale of talke’. Mercury’s status as both an alchemical substance and a god associated with writing, communication and trickery reminds us that Jonson’s satire is as concerned with the politics of alchemical language, or any form of artificial, deceitful language, as it is with alchemy itself. Despite his condemnation of it, Mercury readily deploys alchemical language as a means to signify a broader spectrum of affected, inflated and inaccessible language.

This interest in inflated language returns us to material inflation in alchemical satire. Like Lyly’s Peter, Jonson’s Surly, after finishing his mimicry of alchemical terms, emphasizes the impossibility of reciting alchemical terms in their entirety since the practice uses ‘worlds of other strange Ingredients, / [that] Would burst a man to name’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Alchemy may aim for multiplication, but in The Alchemist airy inflation that leads to explosion is another result of both alchemy’s practice and language. The Alchemist is full of wind, inflation and swelling. In its first lines, Subtle tells Face, ‘I fart at thee’, hinting at the windy and explosive language and acts he will perform.Footnote ⁸¹ When Face takes on the role of the alchemist’s assistant, he also takes on the name ‘Lungs’, which Mammon refers to him as, sometimes alternating with ‘Puffe’.Footnote ⁸² The link between inflation and alchemy connects the language and practice of alchemy itself, the puffing and blowing of bellows performed by alchemists and their assistants, like Chaucer’s yeoman and Lyly’s Peter. Gallathea’s Peter spends his time doing ‘nothing but [the] blowing of bellows’ and Face likewise tells Mammon, ‘I have blown, sir, / Hard for your worship.’Footnote ⁸³ Mammon himself has a desire for inflated and airy spaces. When speaking of his plans for the wealth that alchemy will bestow on him, he says, ‘I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft’, perfume ‘vapour’d’bout the room, / To lose ourselves in’, and ladies who ‘shall fan me with ten estrich tails / A-piece, made in a plume to gather wind’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The inflationary imagery of The Alchemist is, as Elizabeth Rivlin suggests, a ‘metaphor for the desire to inflate oneself, subjectively, economically, and socially’.Footnote ⁸⁵ I add to this that it also represents the desire to inflate one’s language. Although the literal use of ‘puff’, an imitative word meaning to blow out air or to inflate something, was well in use by this point, the sixteenth century sees the earliest recorded uses of ‘puff’ in a metaphorical sense – ‘puffing’ as to give undue, ‘inflated’ praise or to cause someone to ‘swell’ with vanity.Footnote ⁸⁶ The inflated imagery of satirized alchemical language denotes both the literal work of alchemy, which required ‘puffers’ to blow the furnace, and the metaphorical potential of puffing, inflating and swelling as representative of both the inflated language of alchemy and the work of trickster alchemists who ‘puff up’ their patrons with inflated promises. Jonson, like his literary predecessors, uses alchemy to satirize not only the inflated promises of alchemy and its puffed-up practices, but also inflated and deceitful language itself, which is likewise ‘puffed up’.

The satirical portrayal of alchemy in The Alchemist – its wind, puffery and explosive inflation – extends beyond the practice itself to a broader linguistic critique. The very mechanics of alchemy, with its bellows and vaporous transmutations, provide a fitting metaphor for rhetorical excess, where words, like air, can be overblown to the point of explosion. Jonson’s satire, then, is not merely a rejection of fraudulent alchemical promises, but a continuation of anxieties central to the inkhorn controversy and Bacon’s Advancement: the fear that language, if left unchecked, could become as unstable and deceptive as alchemical experimentation. By embedding alchemical inflation within his literary and linguistic satire, Jonson, like Tomkis, Nashe and Lyly before him, reveals how the period’s preoccupation with language – its clarity, accessibility and capacity for deceit – was inextricable from its broader intellectual and scientific concerns. As the seventeenth century moved towards Baconian empiricism and calls for linguistic precision, alchemical puffery remained a potent symbol of rhetorical artifice.

To conclude, when Sprat warned members of the Royal Society against the ‘swellings of style’ in 1667, the connection between inflation and linguistic excess in scientific history already had a long textual and cultural history. Even alchemy remains on Sprat’s mind when imagining a verbal style tied to air, swelling and smoke, as he describes their linguistic practices in terms that directly connect the ‘smoak’ of their language with the material ‘smoak’ of their practice:

When read in the larger context of Sprat’s call for a plain style, his dismissal of alchemists aligns their language with their practices: both are simply ‘smoak’. Sprat’s association of alchemical secrecy with ‘smoak’ not only discredits the language of the ‘chymists’, but also treats their mode of writing and experimentation as a form of epistemological pollution. The comparison to smoke – lingering, obscuring, difficult to grasp – positions alchemical rhetoric as a direct threat to the Royal Society’s emerging values: clarity, transparency and the visible demonstration of truth. Yet Sprat’s own stylistic choices remain haunted by the very inflation he condemns. His prose, while ostensibly plain, still draws on metaphor, irony and pointed caricature. The smoky residue of alchemy clings to the linguistic ideals of early modern science, even as they attempt to purge it. The society’s insistence on a plainness may aspire to strip language of its airs, but the fear of linguistic puffery that it responds to had already been thoroughly rehearsed in the satirical playbooks of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This article has shown that literary alchemical satire – especially in the wake of the inkhorn controversy – offered a crucial testing ground for early modern anxieties about language long before the Royal Society institutionalized them. In texts by Nashe, Jonson and Tomkis, alchemical excess became a way of diagnosing the slipperiness of words, the dangers of obscurantism, and the need for communicative reform. Far from being mere comic asides, these alchemical echoes are part of a longer intellectual genealogy that connects linguistic innovation to scientific enquiry. Reading alchemical satire as a linguistic commentary reveals that the concerns later articulated by Bacon and Sprat did not emerge ex nihilo, but from a vibrant and suspicious literary culture already preoccupied with the instability of words. In this context, alchemy’s windy words matter not just for what they reveal about fraudulent science, but also for how they prefigure the linguistic disciplines that modern science would claim for itself.

Recognizing alchemy as a linguistic problem as much as a material one invites a reassessment of its place in the history of science. The textual experiments of Nashe, Jonson and Tomkis do not merely parody failed transmutations; they stage a deeper contest over how knowledge is made legible – or rendered illegible – through language. These literary texts, alert to the volatility of words, help illuminate how the instability of alchemical language became a productive site for negotiating the values that would later define scientific prose. In tracing this genealogy, we can better understand how the rise of plain style was shaped not in spite of alchemy’s smoke and puffery, but through the very linguistic tensions that alchemical writing and its satirizations brought to the surface.