Book ID: CBB600709517

The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience (2018)

unapi

Habinek, Lianne (Author)


McGill-Queen's University Press


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 304 pages
Language: English

In the early modern period, poetic form underpinned and influenced scientific progress. The language and imagery of seventeenth-century writers and natural philosophers reveal how the age-old struggle between body and soul led to the brain’s emergence as a curiosity in its own right. Investigating the intersection of the humanities and sciences in the works of authors ranging from William Shakespeare and John Donne to William Harvey, Margaret Cavendish, and Johann Remmelin, Lianne Habinek tells how early modernity came to view the brain not simply as grey matter but as a wealth of other wondrous possibilities – a book in which to read the soul’s writing, a black box to be violently unlocked, a womb to nourish intellectual conception, a creative engine, a subtle knot that traps the soul and thereby makes us human. For seventeenth-century thinkers, she argues, these comparisons were not simply casual metaphors but integral to early ideas about brain function. Demonstrating how the disparate fields of neuroscientific history and literary studies converged, The Subtle Knot tells the story of how the mind came to be identified with the brain.

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Reviewed By

Review Jonathan Sawday (2019) Review of "The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 117-119). unapi

Review Jason Scott-Warren (2019) Review of "The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 827-828). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB600709517/

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Authors & Contributors
Vita Fortunati
Robinson, Benedict
Anderson, Penelope
Eklund, Hillary
Lee, Daniel D.
Sperrazza, Whitney
Concepts
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Science and culture
Occult sciences
Ecology
Science and society
Time Periods
Early modern
17th century
16th century
Renaissance
19th century
18th century
Places
England
United States
Spain
Italy
Germany
France
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