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"Mind and body -- History -- 17th century"
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Shakespearean sensations : experiencing literature in early modern England
\"This strong and timely collection provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems. With dedicated essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Twelfth Night, the collection explores how seriously early modern writers took their relationship with their audiences and reveals new connections between early modern literary texts and the emotional and physiological experiences of theatregoers\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Representation and the mind-body problem in Spinoza
This first extensive study of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher’s thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind’s relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza’s positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In this way, Della Rocca’s exploration of these two problems provides a new and illuminating perspective on Spinoza’s philosophy as a system.
eBook
Descartes's dualism
Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes's defense of incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body.
eBook
Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England
The astrologer-physician Richard Napier (1559-1634) was not only a man of practical science and medicine but also a master of occult arts and a devout parish rector who purportedly held conversations with angels. This new interpretation of Napier reveals him to be a coherent and methodical man whose burning desire for certain, true knowledge contributed to the contemporary venture of putting existing knowledge to useful ends.
Originally trained in theology and ordained as an Anglican priest, Napier later studied astrological medicine and combined astrology, religious thought, and image and ritual magic in his medical work. Ofer Hadass draws on a remarkable archive of Napier's medical cases and religious writings—including the interviews he claimed to have held with angels—to show how Napier's seemingly inconsistent approaches were rooted in an inclusive and coherent worldview, combining equal respect for ancient authority and for experientially derived knowledge. Napier's endeavors exemplify the fruitful relationship between religion and science that offered a well-founded alternative to the rising mechanistic explanation of nature at the time.
Carefully researched and compellingly told, Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England is an insightful exploration of one of the most fascinating figures at the intersection of medicine, magic, and theology in early modern England and of the healing methods employed by physicians of the era.
eBook
Proto-Endocrinological Theories of Masculinity/Femininity (1490–1904)
From the mid-seventeenth century, resorption of a testicular \"ferment\" and resorption of some part of the semen constituted reputable accounts of secondary sexual characteristics. Only in the early twentieth century was the latter, \"recrementitious secretion\" theory, explicitly considered superseded by one of internal secretion, an advance ushering in the hormone era. A reconstruction of these proto-endocrinological concepts is offered onward from the first, 1490 print edition of Galen's On Semen. Early modern physicians picking up from Galen deliberated widely on the medium and pathway of male and female testicular influences on \"the entire body,\" including the mind, causing \"femininity\" and \"masculinity\" in physical, mental-temperamental, and behavioral terms. A switch is discernible from \"heat and strength\" (Galen) to blood-borne \"virility\" or testicular vapor (such as proposed in 1564 by Tomás Rodrigues da Veiga), to iatrochemical postulations of a \"seminal ferment\" (suggested in the late 1650s, perhaps independently, by Thomas Willis at Oxford and Lambert van Velthuysen in Utrecht), finally to a \"seminal recrement\" or \"reabsorbed semen\" concept soon after (emergent in the posthumous work of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, among others). During the late eighteenth century, mounting controversy surrounded both the very idea of that concept and the involved anatomical pathways, informed by multiple experiments.
Journal Article
Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice
In early modern Europe, ideas about nature, God, demons and occult forces were inextricably connected and much ink and blood was spilled in arguments over the characteristics and boundaries of nature and the supernatural. Seitz uses records of Inquisition witchcraft trials in Venice to uncover how individuals across society, from servants to aristocrats, understood these two fundamental categories. Others have examined this issue from the points of view of religious history, the history of science and medicine, or the history of witchcraft alone, but this work brings these sub-fields together to illuminate comprehensively the complex forces shaping early modern beliefs.
eBook
Vernacular Bodies
Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, Vernacular Bodies looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.
eBook
Magic and Masculinity
In early modern England, the practice of ritual or ceremonial magic - the attempted communication with angels and demons - both reinforced and subverted existing concepts of gender. The majority of male magicians acted from a position of control and command commensurate with their social position in a patriarchal society; other men, however, used the notion of magic to subvert gender ideals while still aiming to attain hegemony. Whilst women who claimed to perform magic were usually more submissive in their attempted dealings with the spirit world, some female practitioners employed magic to undermine the patriarchal culture and further their own agenda. Frances Timbers studies the practice of ritual magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focusing especially on gender and sexual perspectives. Using the examples of well-known individuals who set themselves up as magicians (including John Dee, Simon Forman and William Lilly), as well as unpublished diaries and journals, literature and legal records, this book provides a unique analysis of early modern ceremonial magic from a gender perspective.
eBook
Solomon's Secret Arts
The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. But in this illuminating book, Paul Monod reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult.
Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new antiestablishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, finds Monod, the occult was not discarded in favor of \"reason\" but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.
eBook
Detestable and Wicked Arts
In Detestable and Wicked Arts , Paul B. Moyer places
early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic
perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive
examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that
discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of
witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of
occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.
Focusing on witchcraft cases in New England between roughly 1640
and 1670, Detestable and Wicked Arts highlights ties
between witch-hunting in the New and Old Worlds. Informed by
studies on witchcraft in early modern Europe, Moyer presents a
useful synthesis of scholarship on occult crime in New England and
makes new and valuable contributions to the field.
eBook