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Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England

Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton

Michael C Schoenfeldt author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

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Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England cover

Explores the close relationship between inner psychology and bodily processes as represented in English Renaissance poetry.

Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. The notion of bodily humors in Galenic medicine provides poets with a compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which selves inhabit and experience bodies.Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in early modern English literature. After Galen, the predominant medical paradigm of the period envisaged a self governed by humors, literally embodying inner emotion by locating and explaining human passion within a taxonomy of internal organs and fluids. It thus gave a profoundly material emphasis to behavioural phenomena, giving the poets of the period a vital and compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which selves inhabit and experience bodies. In contrast to much work on the body which has emphasized its exuberant 'leakiness' as a principal of social liberation amid oppressive regimes, Schoenfeldt establishes the emancipatory value that the Renaissance frequently located not in moments of festive release, but in the exercise of regulation, temperance and self-control.

'… this study offers resourceful and inspired readings of central texts in English poetry, presented in elegant style and including some rather memorable witticisms.' Anglia

ISBN: 9780521669023

Dimensions: 229mm x 154mm x 13mm

Weight: 310g

220 pages