Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England

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 study of early modern embodiment, historical phenomenology, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. It provides new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing the transactional and dynamic aspects of the relationship between body and world.

The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments, and inner emotional states as well as 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 variety, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm. It engages with Gail Kern Paster's groundbreaking scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology throughout, and offers new readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and others. Contributions consider the epistemiologies of navigation and cartography, the significance of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and perceptions of an animate spirit world.

Mary Floyd-Wilson, Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA,Garrett A. Sullivan, Liberal Arts Professor, Department of English, Penn State University, USA

Professor Mary Floyd-Wilson teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama and Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. She has co-edited with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. the essay collection Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England and Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion with Gail Kern Paster and Katherine Rowe. She and Darryl Chalk have co-edited the forthcoming volume Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, and she is currently writing a book about the early modern English devil.


Professor Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. teaches in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage; Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster; and Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton. With Mary Floyd-Wilson, he has co-edited Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. He co-edits with Julie Sanders the Oxford University Press book series Early Modern Literary Geographies.

1. Introduction, Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.
2. How gardens feel: The natural history of sensation in Spenser and Milton, Michael Schoenfeldt
3. Hi mho ji kudd: The transformation of Thomas Stephens in Goa, Jonathan Gil Harris
4. Anatomy, cartography, and the new world body, Valerie Traub
5. Place and memory: History, cognition, phenomenology, John Sutton
6. Meteorology, embodiment, and environment in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mary Thomas Crane
7. "My hand would dissolve, or seem to melt": Poetic dissolution and Stoic cosmology, Kristen Poole
8. Passions of the flock, Julian Yates
9. Speaking (of) faces: The gestural body in Measure for Measure, Elizabeth D. Harvey
10. Sleeping in error in Spenser's Faerie Queene, book 1, Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.
11. The habitation of airy nothings in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mary Floyd-Wilson
12. Afterword, Gail Kern Paster