Book Reviews: Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body, Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites, Edmund Spenser: Selected Letters and other Papers, the Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England. Textual Constructions of a National Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-120
Author(s):  
Caroline Lamb ◽  
Joan Fitzpatrick ◽  
David Coleman ◽  
Agnes Lafont
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
Spirit World

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England gathers essays from prominent scholars of English Renaissance literature and history who have made substantial contributions to the field’s discussions of early modern embodiment, environment, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. The essays in this collection provide new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing understandings of the relationship between the body and world as transactional and dynamic rather than static or fixed. The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments; inner emotional states and affective landscapes. Rather than always being territorialized onto individual bodies, ideas about early modern embodiment are varied both in their scope and in terms of their representation. Reflecting this variation, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm: essays consider, for example, the epistemologies of navigation and cartography, the implications of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and the perceived influences of an animate spirit world. Throughout the volume, scholars engage with Gail Kern Paster’s groundbreaking and influential scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology. Moreover, contributors offer new readings of early modern literary authors, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, and John Milton.

“The Body of This Death”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Physical Constitution

In Romans 7:24, Paul utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of poets in early modern England, among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of his unusual phrasing and figuration. The Bible carefully specifies “this death,” which suggests that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. Yet physical death is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s figures of Sin and Death explore the inextricability of spirit and flesh in the body that is this death.

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