the view from the interior: the new body scholarship in renaissance/early modern studies

The View from the Interior: The New BodyScholarship in Renaissance/Early ModernStudies

Sean McDowell*Seattle University

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of the central concerns of the emerging field ofhistorical phenomenology in Renaissance/Early Modern studies. It compares thisnew scholarship with the older historicism of the 1930s–1960s and concludes byposing questions about the direction of the new scholarship and the challenges itfaces.

One of the fastest growing areas of scholarship in Renaissance/Early ModernStudies centers on how writers from the period represented the felt experi-ence of the body.1 Indeed, scholarship on the early modern body – itsmateriality, its processes, its relationships to affect and cognition, its role inenculturation, and its connections to the physical world – coalesced in the1990s into its own field, as manifested in numerous academic conferences,single-author monographs, and collections of essays. One would expect thatthis emerging field, given its filial relationships with New Historicism andcultural materialism, would have grown exclusively out of feminist theory,political criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, or other distinctly modern (orpostmodern) developments in literary scholarship. While these interpretivemethodologies do influence it, however, the new body scholarship derivesmore of its energy from early modern humoral discourse – the old Galenicphysiology and its concomitant faculty psychology, which, like one of theflayed bodies from Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), has beenopened to the inquisitive eyes of some of the brightest readers of Renaissanceliterature. Scholars within the field call it “historical phenomenology,” theprocess of “imagining how emotions” or other interior phenomena “mighthave been experienced differently by early modern subjects” (Paster,Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson 2–3). As Bruce R. Smith explains, historicalphenomenology

asks the reader to take words, not as symbols, signs with only an arbitrary relationto the thing toward which they point, but as indexes, signs with a natural ormetonymic connection with somatic experience. (326)

© Blackwell Publishing 2006

Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 778–791, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00346.x

The goal of historical phenomenology is to reconstruct early modern thinkingabout self-experience, so that interpreters of literature can interpret repre-sentations of the interior life with greater sophistication.

What may seem strange about historical phenomenology to academicsor other interested readers unfamiliar with it is a sense of déjà vu: weren’tthe subjects of Renaissance bodies, humoralism, and faculty psychology therecipients of considerable attention in the older historicism, namely in thework of E. M. W. Tillyard,Theodore Spencer, A. O. Lovejoy, C. S. Lewis,Lawrence Babb, J. B. Bamborough, Louis I. Bredvold, and others?2 Itis true that some commonplaces highlighted in the older scholarship recurwith unacknowledged frequency.3 On the whole, however, the new bodyscholarship approaches embodiment with significantly different interests,emphases, and goals and thus is providing readers with a greater degree ofhistorical sensitivity about embodiment. The present essay cannot encapsulateall of the contributions so far advanced by historical phenomenology becausethese are too extensive to be summarized in only a few thousand words. Itwill, however, offer an overview of the broad interests of the field, contrastthe new approach to the body with that of the older scholarship, and posea few salient questions about the general direction of the new approach andsome issues it raises.

On the whole, historical phenomenology shares with the older historicisma return to the extensive medical, anatomical, psychological, and behavioralliterature of the English and European Renaissance. Some of these treatises– for example, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) – arewell-known and even in print today. Others, like Levinus Lemnius’s TheTouchstone of Complexions (1581),Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mindein Generall (1604), or Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia; or, A Descriptionof the Body of Man (1615), are more obscure and harder to find. Regardlessof the notoriety of the source, or lack thereof, these treatises together areseen to form a composite picture of commonplace attitudes and assumptionsthat early moderns accepted as widely and as unhesitatingly as we accept thepremises of our own Freudian, behavioral, or pharmacological paradigmsfor human cognition and experience. The new scholarship departs from theold in finding in this cultural context not rigid and static taxonomies forexplaining human personhood, but supple, nuanced explanations for thefelt experience of embodiment.“So different from our own counter-intuitivebut more effective therapies,” Michael C. Schoenfeldt writes, early modernpsychophysiological4 treatises “describe not so much the actual working ofthe body as the experience of the body” (Bodies and Selves 3) Humoralpsychology, he continues,

is a more versatile discourse of motive and emotion than these previous studies,concerned largely to diagnose characters by humoral type or to reveal the“Renaissance idea of man,” would suggest. It is at least as precise and nuancedas the procedures we use to organize and analyze selves. In returning to thisvocabulary, then, I am not seeking to replace one kind of procrustean taxonomy

© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 778–791, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00346.x

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of behavioral types with another. There is no single “idea of man (or woman),”but a variety of different and competing models deployed (sometimes by thesame author, in the same paragraph) to different ends. (20)5

As Schoenfeldt suggests, historical phenomenology differs from the olderscholarship in a shift from a description of physical operations to an accountof felt experience. The shift reveals the instability at the heart of facultypsychology because it opens our consideration of bodily and mental processesto a greater variety of forces. The connections between the humorsand the environment, through food, evacuation, and climatic influence,allow behavior to be seen as far more situational than before. Our increasingawareness of the intricacies early moderns saw within the processes ofsensation reveals how easily individual faculties could misinterpret (orhyperinterpret) the perceivable world. Even the relations among individualfaculties, the appetites and common sense, for example, or the imaginationand the will, appear messier than previously thought when we realize eachone possessed greater agency than the later Cartesian mind/body divisionsuggested. In fact, historical phenomenologists embrace the “taxonomicmorass” because, in the words of the editors of a recent collection of essays,“we see it as providing data to be analyzed rather than noise to be filtered”(Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson 6).

The analyses of early modern phenomenology frequently address thethemes of mutability and instability. Thus, in The Body Embarrassed: Dramaand the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993), one of thepioneering works of the new body scholarship, Gail Kern Paster sees thebody as “porous” and susceptible to a vast range of influences, all capableof influencing behavior. Even “[b]odily events that in the absence of diseasewe ordinarily regard as trivial – nosebleeds, for instance, or splinters,” Pasterwrites, “ – might in the humoral body be fraught with significance asunwilled alterations of the body’s internal state, as exceptional evacuationsor perilous invasions of this porous and fragile envelope” (12). To cite anadditional example, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, in The Body in Parts:Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (1997), building on the workof Caroline Walker Bynum on the veneration of body parts in medievalEurope, argue that by the end of the sixteenth century, the confidence thatmedieval Christians placed in “the ultimate unity of religious and socialsystems modeled on bodily organization was no longer viable” (xiii).6 Oneconsequence of this shift, which the ensuing essays in the collection explore,is the “way in which the impossibility of fully integrating parts into wholesbrought about a privileging of the body part as such.” In this way, thecollection demonstrates one of, if not the prevailing interests of the new bodyscholarship: an emphasis on bodily fragmentation, the agency of body partsin competition with each other, and the subsequent psychological instability.

Yet, in spite of the prevalent awareness of the omnipresent potential forpsychophysiological instability, historical phenomenology as a whole doesnot advance a strictly chaotic, indeterminate definition of personhood.

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Indeed, Schoenfeldt’s work concentrates the empowerment of the individualthrough a mastery of Galenic physiology. In contrast to New Historicism,which “has tended to emphasize the individual as victim of the power thatcirculates through culture,” he stresses the “empowerment that Galenicphysiology and ethics bestowed upon the individual”: his Bodies and Selvesconcerns control,“not the authoritarian state that so frequently characterizesNew Historicist descriptions of Renaissance England,” but “rather theself-control that authorizes individuality,” how to “fortify a self, not policea state” (11). Another orderly vision of embodied selfhood emerges fromF. David Hoeniger’s magisterial Medicine and Shakespeare in the EnglishRenaissance, which undertakes to explain the medical systems of thoughtthat inform how Shakespeare and his contemporaries conceived of therelationships between “physiological processes” and the “mind and soul”(13). Such knowledge, in turn, enables us to understand “what many passagesin Shakespeare’s plays and poems mean,” so that Shakespeare’s presentationof the interior lives of characters does not appear quite as mysterious as itotherwise may seem. More comprehensively defined, then, the field as awhole aims to realize the full implications of the fact that, as Schoenfeldtsays,“Galenic medicine provided a range of writers with a rich and malleablediscourse able to articulate and explain the vagaries of human emotions incorporeal terms” (6). Whether Renaissance writers focus on interior orderor disorder in their works, the assumptions they employ when creating theircharacters prove complex enough to capture the richness of an emotionallife perpetually in dialogue with the physical world. Contemporary scholarsinterested in the body seek to define that complexity to provide us with amore accurate understanding of how early modern Europeans thought theyexperienced the world, as well as the differences between the past and presentnotions of embodiment.

The differences between the old and the new body scholarship becomeclear when we consider their contrasting approaches to the same literarypassage – for instance, Milton’s treatment of the affective turmoil Adam andEve experience after the Fall (Paradise Lost, 9.1121–32):

They sat them down to weep, nor only TearsRain’d at thir Eyes, but high Winds worse withinBegan to rise, high Passions,Anger, Hate,Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook soreThir inward State of Mind, calm Region onceAnd full of Peace, now toss’t and turbulent:For Understanding rul’d not, and the WillHeard not her lore, both in subjection nowTo sensual Appetite, who from beneathUsurping over Sovran Reason claim’dSuperior sway: (qtd. from Hughes’s edition)

Both E. M. W. Tillyard (1943) and Schoenfeldt (1999, 2004) interpret thispassage within the context of early modern psychology. But their readings



take decidedly different turns because of the ways in which each defineswhat is most important to know about seventeenth-century psychology.

As is well-known,Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, along with Lovejoy’sThe Great Chain of Being, became a primary target of New Historicists in the1980s and 1990s because, some critics alleged, it painted too ordered a pictureof early modern perspectives, particularly in the political realm. Even so, asrecently as 1990, it remained a staple in college classrooms across the nation.7

As a result, we could do worse than to select Tillyard’s text as a touchstonefor our consideration of the concerns of the older historicism. While Tillyardis concerned largely with Elizabethan cosmology, he devotes a section of hischapter on the Great Chain of Being to “Man” and a part of that section to theMilton passage. To understand Tillyard’s explication, we first must considerthe aspects of early modern psychology that most interest him and how hedefines them. For, his definitions determine his reading of the passage.

Tillyard begins with an account of the humors and the natural, vital, andanimal spirits that squares with the descriptions of the current historicalphenomenologists. He shows the connections between the four humors andthe four elements through their physical properties of heat, coldness, dryness,and moistness. He then discusses the composition of temperament, how thecombination of humors within the body contributes to personality, how apredominant humor gave “a man his distinctive mark,” and how “this rigidtheory of character” caused the Elizabethans to feel “very close to the restof nature and in particular very susceptible to the action of the stars”(70). After a brief discussion of “melancholy adust,” the phenomenon wherebya humor is burnt from excessive heat to create a kind of madness, he turnshis attention to the rational faculties, the parts of the soul that most interesthim. In the Renaissance,Tillyard contends, the exercise of reason was “oneof the great human prerogatives,” in that it separated humans from the restof creation and was the principal pathway to virtue within the Christiancosmic scheme. All of these ideas may seem like standard fare until we pauseto examine the ways in which Tillyard has anatomized the rational faculties,which he oversimplifies, apparently in an effort to suggest a more stable,idealistic psychology than one finds in the Renaissance treatises.

Like scholars writing now,Tillyard is mindful of bodily connections withone’s psychology, even if he accords them much less weight in the internalbattle over moral conduct. He locates all the higher faculties in the brain,which he subdivides as follows:

Like the body, the brain was divided into a triple hierarchy. The lowest containedthe five senses. The middle contained first the common sense, which receivedand summarised the reports of the five senses, second the fancy, and third thememory. This middle area supplied the materials for the highest to work on. Thehighest contained the supreme human faculty and reason, by which man isseparated from beasts and allied to God and the angels, with its two parts, theunderstanding (or wit) and the will. It is on these two highest human faculties,understanding and will, that Elizabethan ethics are based. (71)



While on the surface, this description seems relatively straightforward, itproves problematic upon closer inspection, in that Tillyard has distorted theoperations of some faculties many Renaissance writers delineated morecarefully. The problem is most noticeable in the way he subdivides “reason”into two parts – the understanding and the will. He treats the latter as thepower responsible for finalizing decisions about conduct. To the former,meanwhile, he attributes a host of responsibilities: the understanding

had to sift the evidence of the senses already organized by the common sense,to examine the exuberant creations of the fancy, to summon up the right materialfrom the memory, and on its own account to lay up the greatest store ofknowledge and wisdom. (73)

The understanding separates humans, who can learn, from beasts, whocannot. It is “allied to the angelical” understanding, though it operatesdiscursively, whereas angels understand intuitively (71). It is the most gloriousof human faculties because it is the one responsible for fulfilling the humanimperative to “know yourself.”

If we compare the above account to Nicholas Coeffeteau’s in A Table ofHumane Passions (trans. 1619), we can see that Tillyard has assigned theunderstanding such a complete range of attributes that it almost comes acrossas a complete person in itself. Meanwhile, the will seems to operate moreas a lieutenant than as a true partner. By contrast, in Coeffeteau’s account,the understanding functions more like a part within a complex system; likeall parts, it has strengths and limitations and requires the other parts tofunction properly. Some of the attributes Tillyard lists are the same – thesifting of sensual information, for instance, and the storing up of knowledge.But the status of knowledge differs greatly, in that for Coeffeteau, theunderstanding stores divine principles and is incapable of processing senseinformation until its particulars have been purged. As Coeffeteau points out,because the understanding is

a more Noble power than the Sensitiue [appetite], it cannot receive those Images andformes, so materiall, grosse and sensible, as they are of themselues in their particular being,for that they are not proportionable to the purity and excellency of her condition. (23–4)

Coeffeteau is not clear how this process of abstraction occurs. He speculatesabout the existence of “another power wonderfully Noble, whose office is topurge and to clothe” the forms and shapes presented by the imagination “witha new Lustre,” so that the understanding can handle the information.Regardless of how the abstraction process occurs, however, he is clear thatthe main function of understanding is to analyze the material presented toit by comparing it to universal principles about good and evil and then advisethe will on a suitable course of action.8 The will, then, functions as “Queeneof the powers of the soul,” in that “she” is the one faculty that “ordaines whatthey [the others] shall imbrace, & what they shal fly as it pleaseth her” (28).



Lest these distinctions I am drawing between Coeffeteau and Tillyardseem merely academic, the meaning of Milton passage changes, dependingon which set one keeps in mind. Here is the passage again:

They sat them down to weep, nor only TearsRain’d at thir Eyes, but high Winds worse withinBegan to rise, high Passions,Anger, Hate,Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook soreThir inward State of Mind, calm Region onceAnd full of Peace, now toss’t and turbulent:For Understanding rul’d not, and the WillHeard not her lore, both in subjection nowTo sensual Appetite, who from beneathUsurping over Sovran Reason claim’dSuperior sway: (qtd. from Hughes’s edition)

In Tillyard’s reading, these lines illustrate the “old Platonic and consistentlyorthodox opposition between the bestial and the rational in man” (75). Theappetites and their attendant passions, which “originate in a part of the bodylower than the head,” have overleaped “sovran Reason” and now hold “sway.”The passage thus becomes one more example of a division between mindand body, a division that has become demonically overturned because ofthe Fall.

From the standpoint of Coeffeteau’s psychology, however, a moresophisticated, and perhaps more perilous transformation has occurred. Yes,the passions now hold sway; but the cause of their ascendance is a fracturingof the symbiotic partnership between understanding and will. Understandingsuddenly “rul’d not” – that is, it not only no longer rules over the flow ofinformation coming into the rational soul, but also, Milton suggests, it is nolonger capable of ruling – judging information from the world and the restof the body by applying the wisdom of divine rules. It has lost that integralconnection with divine reality. Without knowledge of this comparativefunction and its loss, one misses Milton’s pun. Meanwhile, the will hears“not her [understanding’s] lore”; in other words, the will cannot hear theresults of understanding’s consideration of divine guidelines because theseare not forthcoming and also, perhaps, because it, too, is distracted. Thewill thus has lost ready access to the “lore” that originated in heaven. Intothe sudden, confused silence between these powers, the sensual appetites(concupiscible and irascible) have invaded. They cannot be mastered untilthe partnership re-forms, and even when it does, as Adam and Eve pray forforgiveness in Book 10, it will never be as strong as it once was in theprelapsarian world.

The richness of Milton’s passage leaps out when one appreciates theresonances of his terminology. Though informative,Tillyard’s book is notinformative enough to render this richness of reference fully operational.Not surprisingly, historical phenomenologists quarrel with the olderscholarship generally for oversimplifying complex Renaissance ideas about



the body and thereby misleading modern readers about the nuances of earlymodern psychological thought.

So how would a historical phenomenologist today approach Adam’s andEve’s plight during the recrimination phase of Book 9? First, the dichotomybetween mind and body, between reason and the passions, so integral toTillyard’s reading, would diminish, if not disappear, because a historicalphenomenologist would consider it an element of post-Cartesian thinkingabout personhood. Schoenfeldt pursues this path in a pair of readings thatemphasize the physicality of the human pair’s suffering.

In Bodies and Selves, which advances a book-length argument concernedwith showing “all acts of ingestion and excretion as very literal acts ofself-fashioning,” Schoenfeldt reads the passage as part of Milton’s “alimentalvision” (11, 142). Because “Milton’s concern with the material processes ofexistence” is so “intense and pervasive” that his “Garden of Eden is in manyways a Garden of Eating,” the physical properties of the forbidden fruitaffect the physiology of those who consume it, in that the fruit is digestedand thereby introduced materially into the economy of humors within Eveand then Adam (139). The “internal tempests” of the first pair “represent atonce the overthrow of inner reason by appetite, the introduction of disorderinto the natural world, and the physiological gastritis that unregulated appetiteproduces” (152). Although he rightly notes that unrestrained appetites haveovercome “reason” with disastrous results, he emphasizes the connection betweenphysiology and moral discourse by examining Milton’s puns on “temperance”:

Adam’s “distempered breast” (9.1131), like Eve’s cheek in which “distemperflushing glowed” (9.887), offers in its pun on dysfunctional temperance both acause – a failure to exercise temperance over appetite – and an effect – the diseaseof distemper that results from improper balance of the humors – of the Fall. Thediscourse of temperance makes intemperate consumption the source of moraland physiological illness. (152)

Throughout Schoenfeldt’s description, appetite is charged with suggestionsof material, even digestive consumption, rather than with less concretemanifestations of lack (e.g., possession of the beloved’s love). The substanceof the tasted fruit has wrought physiological damage on the human pair asgreat as, if not greater than, the moral corruption the fruit represents.

In a more recent essay on the passions, Schoenfeldt (2004) revisits Milton’sdescription, this time to describe the destabilizing potential of the passionsunchecked. He characterizes Adam and Eve as “microclimates” that arebesieged by passions within and influenced by the “morally andmeteorologically roiled” world without. As he continues to explain,

Humans at the Fall suffer an internal revolt among their appetites and passions;this revolt entails a microcosmic and physiological version of the disobediencethey have performed. The passions that should obey right reason instead assaultit, blurring the very capacities that would be necessary to apprehend even a partialtruth, much less to act upon it. (63)



In this reading, the passions acquire a deterministic power over behavior. Thedeterminism of Schoenfeldt’s reading becomes a little clearer in his treatmentof Satan’s influence on Eve’s dreams prior to the Fall. Schoenfeldt notes thatin Book 5,Adam’s words of consolation to Eve (“Evil into the mind of Godor Man/May come and go, so unapprov’d, and leave/No spot of blamebehind” (117–19))

belie the elaborate description that Milton gives to the operation of Satan’s wordson the organs of her fancy, and also fly in the face of much contemporaneoustheorizing about the transformative power of demonic interventions. (59)

He then diminishes the role of the understanding-will partnership in thisprocess by facetiously characterizing the protection Adam mentions as a“non-stick coating given to the interior walls of the prelapsarian moralconsciousness.” Once again, because Satan can influence the physical body– he can “taint with venom” Eve’s “animal spirits” – his influence appearsstronger in Schoenfeldt’s account than it might in others that are lessmaterialistically oriented. The moral battle shifts to bodily processes andaway from less tangible faculties (i.e., faculties less easily folded intophysiological processes) because of an emphasis on the physical. By focusingon the body, Schoenfeldt in both of his readings illuminates the fragility ofthe physiological landscape in Milton’s poem and draws much neededattention to the material concreteness with which Milton portrays hischaracters. He thus contributes greatly to our knowledge of the complexityof Milton’s fictional world. His version of Paradise Lost looks different fromTillyard’s – more material, less overly humanistic.

Now that we have contrasted historical phenomenology with the olderhistoricism, we are in a better position to explore some issues the new scholar-ship raises. Although many issues are in need of exploration, in the interestsof space, I shall focus on three and phrase each one in the form of a question.

First, might an exclusively material reading of early modern psychological discourseimpose limitations on the sophistication that properly historicized interpretations ofliterature can achieve?

As much as historical phenomenology has generated new insights intothe nuances of early modern psychophysiological theory, one cannot helpbut notice that a focus on organs, body parts, humors, and/or passions aloneoffers only an incomplete explanation of Renaissance portrayals of interiority– for instance, Milton’s psychological portrayal of the Fall. If Tillyard isguilty of oversimplifying reason in his account of Milton, Schoenfeldt omitsdetailed consideration of the senses, imagination, common sense, memory,will, and understanding – the faculties that participate as much as the appetitesin the transactions between the rational powers, the body, and the materialworld. While it was generally accepted in the Renaissance that the passionsderived their energy from the balance (or imbalance, as the case may be) ofthe humors, the arousal and abatement of specific passions depended notonly on this materially generative force, but also on a variety of faculties and



powers responsible for thought and sensation. These could be exploredfurther, given the other gains in awareness historical phenomenology hasbrought forth. Only a systemic description can do justice to the complexityof early modern psychological assumptions.

At present, however, the emphasis on the body has caused someinterpreters to avoid using the term “soul” when discussing Renaissancepsychology, even though this term was the predominant one for describingmental and affective operations. No doubt, this emphasis may be a reactionto the older history of ideas approach, which tended to treat the soul as toodisembodied. Moreover, it also appears to be a conscious effort to transcendthe Cartesian mind-body split. The present influence of Descartes on modernassumptions about these matters, however, does not mean that earlierWestern cultures located notions of selfhood exclusively in the material. Towrite off the discourse of immaterial selfhood as merely a figment of theCartesian mind/body split is to miss the varying degrees of embodimentdescribed in the soul-body discourse of Elizabethan and Stuart England. Theearlier treatises develop degrees of embodiment, as some parts of the soul aremore intrinsically attached to the body than others. Yet, as long as even theword “soul” appears only sporadically in the new scholarship on the body,we run the risk leaving the more intangible (and debatable) faculties of thesoul insufficiently explored. We should remember that many of the mostprominent Renaissance psychologists were also divines – Thomas Wrightwas a Catholic controversialist; Nicholas Coeffeteau, a Dominican bishop;and Edward Reynolds, the Anglican Bishop of Norwich. To treat them asdistanced from, or disinterested in, the spiritual implications of their workis to impose disciplinary boundaries they would have considered alien.Some scholars, such as Richard Rambuss and even Schoenfeldt in his mostrecent work-in-progress,9 are in the process of addressing the implicationsof religious ideas on humoral discourse in the early modern period.Nevertheless, more work needs to be done to reconcile the realms ofspirituality and of psychophysiology, as Renaissance writers understood theirinterrelations, and as we are reconstructing their understanding.

Second, is the new historical phenomenology primarily an investigation of culturalphenomena, as opposed to a pathway into literary interpretation? In other words,does it seek to advance a thesis, or a set of theses, about early modern culture – as ifcultural explication were itself the primary goal?

I first heard this objection voiced in a seminar on the senses at theShakespeare Association of America meeting in 2003. More recent publications,or perhaps more specifically, the presentation of these publications, suggestthat the physiological context has achieved the status of primary reading.For instance, the intriguing anthology of essays, Reading the Early ModernPassions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, styles itself on its back coveras a work of “Cultural Studies / History,” even though the essays thereinexamine the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, Milton, and Davenant,among other literary figures. The focus on culture here is perhaps the



strongest direct tie between historical phenomenology and New Historicism.Yet while some scholars might argue that historical phenomenology hasbecome more a branch of cultural than of literary studies, they would dowell to remember how useful these new investigations into Renaissancehumoral discourse, medicine, and psychology can be in helping us tocomprehend the meaning of significant references that all-too-often comeacross as needlessly obscure. As I hope I have demonstrated in my ownexplication of the Milton passage above, knowledge of this context canenrich a reading experience because it provides more ready access to whatJohn T. Shawcross calls the “author’s text”: the “text the author has providedfor the reader to read, with all its potentialities” (4). The new scholarship isuncovering a fuller range of materials Renaissance writers used to createthese “potentialities.”

A better question about the so-called “primary” and “secondary” readingdistinction might be, to what extent does our choice of contextual sourcesinfluence the kinds of readings we produce? It is true that the touchstonesmodern interpreters use for their contextual evidence influence the kindsof readings that emerge. For example, Paster, David Hillman, and CarlaMazzio often quote Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia (London, 1616), awork that presents detailed discussions of humors, body parts, and themechanistic functioning of the body; whereas other scholars favor othertreatises that provide more detailed examination of individual passions andspend less time on the material body. My own work, which so far has focusedon affective verisimilitude and Renaissance notions of reader response, hasreceived its greatest inspiration from Coeffeteau, who demarcates individualpassions so that readers might understand the causes, effects, and functionsof these emotions, and when needed, devise remedies for excessive dosesof them.10 The sources chosen inform and often even determine the degreeto which an interpreter foregrounds the materiality of the body. We arechasing commonplace assumptions – assumptions so prevalent in a societythat individuals in the Renaissance acquired them often as part of everydayliving and not necessarily as part of an identifiable reading experience.For all we know, we may be recapitulating in our analyses the sorts ofdebates about materialism that occurred during dinner conversationsjust prior to the mid-seventeenth-century development of associationisticpsychology.

Finally, given the widespread differences in terminology and descriptions, is ageneralized account of humoral flow, passionate transport, and/or body/mindoperations truly applicable to every Renaissance writer, or must we be more rigorousin probing the assumptions of individual writers on a case-by-case basis?

Another way of posing this question is, to what extent can we considerthe elements of the phenomenological context truly commonplaces of theage – ideas shared by all or a majority of people? To the person, the newphenomenologists appear well aware of the dangers of universalizing. For,as some put it,



while similarities in emotional experience argue strongly for the biological basisof human emotion, the insistence on universality can be too dismissive of thevariousness of emotional expression and experience – and thus sharply limitedin its explanatory potential. (Paster, Hillman, and Mazzio 2)

What is true of cultures is also true of individuals, in that individuals createtheir own personalized constructions of popular or cultural beliefs – witnessCarlo Ginzburg’s (1976) fascinating account of the cosmology of thesixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio.11 And yet for every writer tocommunicate affect to readers or to audience members, as the case may be,key notions about the inner constitution of human beings must be shared;otherwise, an audience will not be able to make sense of their fictional,lyrical, or dramatic rendering. As Paster has written,“there must be epistemiclimits to the possible sweep of idiosyncratic thought” (Humoring the Body23). Even Shakespeare

whom we honor for having greatly expanded the semantic capacities of his nativetongue thinks within the intellectual framework of his cultural moment andparticipates in the cosmological practices of his time.

The same framework that enables a writer to communicate with readers/auditors can be reconstructed in terms applicable to other writers.

Still, any description of early modern phenomenology must allow forvariances in the interpretation of the system. For this reason, the mosteffective treatments of a writer’s thinking about personhood tend to be thelonger ones, simply because the scope of the task of description is too largefor single essays. Two of the best recent treatments of Shakespeare’s use ofhumoral discourse have been book-length studies – F. David Hoeniger’sMedicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (1992) and Paster’s Humoringthe Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004). While neither one isa complete analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, each greatly augments ourunderstanding of Shakespeare’s habits of characterization as his originalaudiences might have understood them. The current academic publishingtrend to prefer thematic books about multiple authors over monographsabout single authors may run counter to the demands of explicating theidiosyncratic flexibility that faculty psychology appears to have fostered.Historical phenomenology is showing us that there is more to early modernaffect than meets the eye. The more we learn about the early modern body,the more we see in the literature.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Seattle University, English/Creative Writing Department, 901 12thAve., PO Box 222000, Seattle,WA 98122–1090, USA.1 For a glimpse of the debates occurring within this area of scholarship, see Floyd-Wilson et al.(2005), Strier and Mazzio (2005) in the Shakespeare section of Literature Compass.2 The Elizabethan World Picture, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man,The Great Chain of Being,TheDiscarded Image,The Elizabethan Malady,The Little World of Man, and The Intellectual Milieu of JohnDryden, respectively.



3 For example, in The Muses’ Concord (1976), an insightful book about the relationships betweentheories of knowledge and perception and the arts in seventeenth-century England, H. JamesJensen notes that the psychological terms of faculty psychology were “as much a part of an acceptedmythology of man and his mind as our own Freudian psychology” and were “sometimes equallyconfusing”; that the “faculty psychology is practical, serviceable, and highly complex”; and thatone of the problems we face in studying it is that its terms “are not that unfamiliar to us and oftenare used as part of our own language, but with changed meanings. We still lose our ‘temper’; weare supposed to use of ‘imaginations’ to figure things out; and either we memorize something orwe learn it ‘by heart’” (5). Compare these observations with the following from Gail Kern Paster:“Because such phrases no longer fit the facts of our bodies as we come to know and experiencethem, the signifiers of humoralism could easily be dismissed as dead metaphors or inconsequentialidioms that distort their signifieds whether they appear in earlier texts or contemporary utterances”(Body Embarrassed 7). See also this remark from Michael C. Schoenfeldt:“Reading the descriptionsof corporeal processes available in works of Renaissance medicine, one is frequently struck by anuncanny experience of familiarity and strangeness. This is in part because the vocabulary is onewe still use today, but the meanings of the terms have shifted” (Bodies and Selves 7). Jensen’s bookremains one of the most invaluable treatments of its subject, even if comparatively few scholarsin Renaissance studies know of it.4 I take the adjective “psychophysiological” from Gail Kern Paster’s recent book, Humoring theBody (2004). This locution accurately conveys the conviction in much recent scholarship on thebody that we cannot think of early modern psychology apart from the material body – that whatPaster calls a “psychological materialism” (12) is at the heart of personhood for Shakespeare andhis contemporaries. I discuss the material emphasis of the new scholarship later in this essay.5 When Schoenfeldt mentions the older historicism, he provides a footnote in which he referencesthe work of Ruth L. Anderson, J. B. Bamborough, Herschel Baker, John W. Draper, Lily B.Campbell, Lawrence Babb, and Bridget Gellert Lyons.6 See Bynum (1992).7 To prepare the “Required and Recommended Readings for Students” section of his Approachesto Teaching the Metaphysical Poets (1990), Sidney Gottlieb polled a host of college professors fromacross the United States and Canada about books they considered important for students andteachers of Metaphysical Poetry. The results showed that Tillyard’s book was one of the threemost highly recommended “introductions to the basic intellectual framework of the seventeenthcentury” (11). The other two were Basil Wiley’s Seventeenth-Century Background and Louis I.Bredvold’s Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden.8 To make matters more complex, and to complicate further Tillyard’s association of the under-standing with knowledge, Coeffeteau notes that the sensible soul also stores its own knowledgein the memory, which common sense and imagination freely draw upon before they pass senseimpressions to the rational powers. We have here a system of filtration and interpretation performedby a number of faculties with potentially competing agendas.9 In his plenary lecture at the Twenty-First John Donne Society Conference in February, 2006,Schoenfeldt discussed the impact of “eloquent blood” on our understanding of soulful embodiment.10 See for example my essays, “Patrick Cary’s Education of the Senses” and “Finding Readers:Herbert’s Appeals to the Passions.”11 See Ginzburg (1976). Ginzburg describes Menocchio’s religious beliefs as an “astonishing conver-gence” of “obscure peasant mythologies” and popular beliefs “grafted onto an extremely clear andlogical complex of ideas, from religious radicalism, to a naturalism tending toward the scientific,to utopian aspirations of social reform” (xix–xx).

Works Cited

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1642. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951.Baker, Herschel. The Image of Man. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1947.Bamborough, J. B. Little World of Man. London: Longmans, Green, 1952.Bredvold, Louis. The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century

Thought.Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1934.



Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. New York: New York Review Books, 2001.Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in

Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992.Campbell, Lily B. Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1930.Coeffeteau, F. N. Table of the Humane Passions with Their Causes and Effects. Trans. Edward

Grimeston. London: Nicholas Okes, 1621.Crooke, Helkiah. Microcosmographia; or,A Description of the Body of Man. London, 1615.Draper, John W. The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1945.Floyd-Wilson, Mary, et al. “Shakespeare and Embodiment: An E-Conversation.” Literature Compass

2 (2005): Shakespeare section. Blackwell Publishing. 14 May 2006. <http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00180.x>.

Ginzburg, C. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. JohnTedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.Trans. 1980.

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Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio.The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe.New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Hoeniger, F. David. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark: U of DelawareP, 1992.

Jensen, H. James. The Muses’ Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.

Lemnius, Levinus. The Touchstone of Complexions. Trans.T. Newton. London, 1581.Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1964.Lovejoy,A. O. The Great Chain of Being. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1957.Lyons, Bridget Gellert. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance

England. New York: Routledge, 1971.McDowell, Sean. “Finding Readers: Herbert’s Appeals to Readers.” George Herbert Journal. 26.1,

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Religious Lyric. Ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP,2001, 164–84.

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Paster, Gail Kern.The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England.Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.

——.Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: U of ChicagoP, 2004.

——, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, ed. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays inthe Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.

Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in

Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.——. “‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost.” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays

in the Cultural History of Emotion. Ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson.Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. 43–67.

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Smith, Bruce R. “Premodern Sexualities.” PMLA 115.3 (2000): 318–29.Spencer,Theodore. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man. New York: Macmillan Company, 1942.Strier, Richard and Carla Mazzio. “Two Responses to ‘Shakespeare and Embodiment: An

E-Conversation.’” Literature Compass 3(1) (2006): 15–31. Shakespeare section. BlackwellPublishing. 14 May 2006. <http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00219.x>.

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the view from the interior: the new body scholarship in renaissance/early modern studies

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