The Subtle Knot

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.

"How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages many religions and intellectual movements have posed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the subtle body, positing some kind of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. This book traces the history of this idea from the late Roman empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. The book begins in the late Roman Empire, moving chronologically through the Renaissance, British project of colonial Indology, development of Theosophy and occultism in the 19th century through to the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's"--

Through close readings of Frost's poetry and often ignored prose, Mark Richardson argues that Frost's debates with Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, and H. L. Mencken informed his poetics and his poetic style just as much as did his deep identification with earlier writers like Emerson and William James.

Reproduction of the original: Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) by Charles Morris