‘Alcumists of eloquence’: The alchemist and the inkhorner in early modern England

This article examines the intersection of alchemical satire and linguistic critique in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, situating it within the context of the inkhorn controversy – a debate over linguistic excess and neologisms in Elizabethan England. Alchemical language, long characterized by its mystique and opacity, was a frequent target of satire, with writers like Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson critiquing its inflated rhetoric as much as its failed transmutations. Yet such alchemical appearances in literature often signal anxieties over the use of language itself. In this article, I argue that early modern alchemical satire functioned as a mode of literary-linguistic critique. A key trope in these satires is inflation: just as alchemists relied on ‘puffing’ bellows in their experiments, their language and the ‘inkhorn terms’ of linguistic innovators were also mocked as similarly ‘puffed up’. Tracing these connections from Geoffrey Chaucer’s conman alchemist to Thomas Sprat’s complaint about the ‘swellings of style’, this article demonstrates how alchemical and linguistic satire were mutually reinforcing, forming a precursor to early seventeenth-century scientific discourse, and later calls for linguistic clarity over rhetorical excess.