Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Why It Matters for the Hypnerotomachia

The HP has been read allegorically in multiple registers: as an allegory of love (the surface narrative), of alchemical transformation (Beroalde and the BL/Buffalo annotators), of humanist self-cultivation (Lefaivre), and of architectural and political dreams (Temple 1998).

Why It Matters in Scholarship

Priki (2009) shows how each historical audience imposed its own allegorical framework based on cultural context. The multiplicity of allegorical readings reflects the HP's deliberate obscurity and its capacity to sustain contradictory interpretive schemes simultaneously.

Key Passages / Evidence

• ... the act of sex teleologically transcends the senses to a mystical union of divinity and mortality. The transformation of the soul is that Polphilo has had to undergo in order to proceed to this... [O'Neill (Durham thesis)]
• <!-- Page 224 --> their suffering consisted of love-sorrow, then we applied ourselves to their cure without revealing to them, much less to others, what we had discovered. We ordered them to take... [O'Neill (Durham thesis)]
• ... to suit my bitter and unbearable languor than that the kindly heavens should allow me to see you again], observing that the effect of the beloved’s absence has caused emotional trauma which... [O'Neill (Durham thesis)]

Source Documents

Lefaivre 1997 (Alberti attribution); O'Neill (Durham thesis); O'Neill (authorship); Semler 2006 (Dallington); Teaching_Eros_The_Rhetoric_of_Love_in_th; Word_Image_2015_apr_03_vol_31_iss_2_Nygren_Christopher_J_The_Hypnerotomachia_Pol