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 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

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