Speaking (of) Faces

Measure for Measure is a play that reveals how bodily and affective language is entangled with anatomical understandings of muscles, gesture, and early modern psychology. The face was the primary map for the passions and the mobility of shifting affects, as well as the body’s primary social façade; its complex ability to register or to contain emotion is embedded in the languages of intersubjective interaction, a social geography of communication. This chapter explores how passionate expression is registered as somatic speech acts through readings of facial expression and in moments of disguise (veiling, muffling, substitution). The play stages how human desire flows between and among people, how it solicits and resists legal and political regulation, and how it operates invisibly both as a felt force for the individual subject and as an uncontainable force moving between human subjects.

Afterword

Early modern scholarship’s turn to the body in the 1990s was driven by powerful dissatisfaction with the universal models of autonomous selfhood and trans-historical emotion inherited from traditional intellectual history. Newer cultural histories of the body produced a foundational recognition of the early modern body’s porous openness and of an ecological self in continual interaction with its environment. In rich archival detail, the chapters in this volume refine the embodied self’s complex placement in its inspirited cosmos from the animated ground up. Together, they demonstrate that the geography of embodiment is fundamental to any properly constituted historical phenomenology because the early moderns believed that their passions were reflected everywhere—in meteorology, sleep, landscapes, sheepfolds, and foreign lands.

The Habitation of Airy Nothings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Faith in an invisible, intrusive spirit world necessarily shapes how early moderns understood the various and constant transactions between self and place. A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only stages the unseen spirit world for its audience, but it also suggests that the embodied minds of Demetrius, Bottom, and even Theseus have been unknowingly breached and altered by invisible spirituous entities. Cognition and affect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream prove to be ecological. However, our understanding of how early moderns perceived this ecology should encompass their belief in indiscernible, nonhuman agents. As scholars have observed, the distribution of cognitive and affective processes across brain, body, and world extends the human mind into the environment. A Midsummer Night’s Dream helps us see how early moderns also discerned this process in reverse, where an animated, and surprisingly motivated, spirit world extends through brains and bodies.

Sleeping in Error in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 1

This chapter considers how Edmund Spenser coordinates the contradictory nature of sleep—its status as something both within and beyond an individual’s control—to religious difference. Spenser associates Protestantism with ‘timely rest’ and Catholicism with a ‘daemonic’ conception of sleep that overtakes Redcrosse and comes to emblematize his alienation from Una, the ‘true faith’. These two conceptions of sleep also form the basis for what Spenser constructs as Catholic and Protestant models of cognition, affect, and embodiment. However, Spenser smudges the differences between these models even as he highlights them, and, in doing so, betrays an anxiety about the potential indistinguishability of error and truth.

‘My Hand Would Dissolve, Or Seem to Melt’

Early modern English literary texts resound with references to ‘melting’ and ‘dissolving’—persons, the earthly environment, and the larger cosmos are associated with dissolution. This concern with melting and dissolving originates in Stoic physics: as with Galen’s model of the humoral body, Stoics understood the material universe to be composed of a fiery liquid known as pneuma. The inheritance of Stoic theories of cosmology and material physics provided early moderns with a vibrant and dynamic way of understanding matter; this material understanding inflected the experience of the body as well as expectations for the behaviour of the earthly environment and the wider cosmos. Stoic physics thus influenced not only the particular idea of the humoral body, but the very relationship of human and environment and corresponding affective states. This influence is exemplified in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

Place and Memory

Despite the new mobility of early modern English society, practices of personal and shared remembering were still anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was richly scaffolded by landscapes, artefacts, architecture, and institutions which themselves bore traces of individual and cultural intervention. This chapter discusses historical variation in two forms of remembering: explicit memories of specific past events, and embodied memories enacted in routine and habitual or skilful action. It is motivated by recent historical scholarship, especially from Nicola Whyte and Andy Wood, on topographies of remembrance in early modern landscape. It connects this new cultural history to the focus on lived bodily experience which characterizes historical phenomenology. It shows personal memory and embodied or habitual memory in play together, interacting in coordinated or competing ways, and assesses the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.

How Gardens Feel

This chapter considers the ways that Edmund Spenser and John Milton focus their considerable epics on the scrupulous calibration of physical sensation with a range of environmental textures. Spenser, it is argued, offers a lush topography of corporeal temptation; he is primarily concerned with how environments can pollute individuals. Milton, by contrast, is concerned both with the ways that environments can pollute individuals, and the ways that individuals pollute environments. The landscapes of Spenser and Milton challenge individuals to manage their responses to sensuous environmental stimuli. While Spenser creates a lush paradisal garden that must be boisterously razed by a knight representing the virtue of Temperance, Milton proposes that if humans behave temperately, they might erect within themselves the infrastructure of a lost paradise.

Passions of the Flock

How did the modelling of human emotions through sheep and wolf avatars in early modern humoral psychology contribute to understandings of how and why theatre appealed to human spectators? Reading Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in General through the lens provided by the work of Gail Kern Paster, this chapter offers an account of these dynamics in the context of the public theatre as remembered in Thomas Nashe’s Piers Pennilesse.

Meteorology, Embodiment, and Environment in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent agents of meteorology, the branch of natural philosophy that explained the unruly and impermanent world of elements that existed below the sphere of the moon. Although the conclusion of the play stages a resecuring of social and institutional control over unruly natural forces, it leaves questions about how permanent that control can be. As anthropomorphized forces of nature, the fairies reveal the limits of human ability to control the natural world, highlighting the power of what Jane Bennett has called ‘vital materialism’.

Hi Mho Ji Kudd

Harris tells the story of Father Thomas Stephens, whose interactions with the landscape, language, and food of India refashioned his English body. By unpacking the phrase ‘hi mho ji kudd’, a Konkani translation of ‘hoc est corpus meum’ (which is inscribed beneath the altar in a Jesuit church in Goa), Harris provides an account of a more worldly transformation than that offered by the Eucharist. As the author of the epic poem Kristapurana (Story of Christ), Stephens participated in the ‘Jesuit tradition of inculturation’. And yet, Stephens’s love of the Marathi language ‘Indianized’ not only the Christianity he preached but also his own body. Stephens’s poetic use of the kalpataru, the coconut tree, as Eden’s Tree of Life, invokes a daily experience of interacting with Goan coconuts, underscoring the recalibration of Stephens’s flesh ‘into something Indian’.