At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period

by Susan Wiseman, Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert

Overview

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renegotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying and pornography).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333973844
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	09/05/1999
Edition description:	1999
Pages:	269
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

BRIAN CUMMINGS Lecturer in English in the School of European Studies, University of Essex JESS EDWARDS University of North London MARGARET HEALY Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex MICHAEL NEWTON Author and Editor MARY PEACE co-editor with Vincent Quinn of a Textual Practice special edition entitled Luxurious Sexualities and The Body Politic in Eighteenth-Century Britain JULIE SANDERS Reader in English, Keele University JONATHAN SAWDAY Professor of English Studies, University of Strathclyde STEPHEN SPEED Buckinghamshire University College ALAN STEWART Reader in Renaissance Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: the Dislocation of the Human; E.Fudge, R.Gilbert, S.J.Wiseman Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Bud and the Poverty of Philology; A.Stewart Animal Passions and Human Science: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World; B.Cummings Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: 'Plausibility' in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy; M.Healy Midwifery and the New Science in the Seventeenth Century: Language, Print and the Theatre; J.Sanders Calling Creatures By Their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man; E.Fudge Cartographic Arrest: Harvey, Raleigh, Drayton and the Mapping of Sense; S.Speed 'The Doubtful Traveller': Mathematics, Metaphor, and the Cartographic Origins of the American Frontier; J.Edwards Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and Early Modern Hermaphrodites; R.Gilbert 'Forms Such as Never Were in Nature': The Renaissance Cyborg; J.Sawday Bodies Without Souls; The Case of Peter the Wild Boy; M.Newton Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape-Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Rousseau; S.Wiseman The Economy of Nymphomania: Luxury, Virtue, Sentiment and Desire in Mid-Eighteenth Century Medical Discourse; M.Peace Index

Editorial Reviews

"All [the essays] are lively and original, and offer new perspectives on a provocative and... inexhaustible subject" --Eileen Reeves, Renaissance Quarterly

From the Publisher

Notions of humanity in the early modern period are analyzed in a dozen thought-provoking essays on such topics as apes, cartography, pornography, hermaphrodites, cyborgs, whether Peter the Wild Child had a soul, Francis Bacon's difficulty with categorizing humans separately from animals, 18th century concepts of female sexuality, and theories of blushing. The contributors are all academics in the UK. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR