Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. Why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about the body as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers...

Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? The contributors of this book explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as fetishes and Renaissances, the cartographic unconscious, and the topographic imaginary, these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the English literary Renaissance. What might it have meant, in the sixteenth-century "age of eloquence," to speak indistinctly; to mumble to oneself or to God; to speak unintelligibly to a lover, a teacher, a court of law; or to be utterly dumfounded in the face of new words, persons, situations, and things? This innovative book maps out a "Renaissance" otherwise eclipsed by cultural and literary-critical investments in a period defined by the impact of classical humanism, Reformation poetics,...