Pierced with Passion: Brains, Bodies and Worlds in Early Modern Texts

This chapter explores early modern theories and representations of the cognitive connectedness of brain and body – a connectedness effected by fluid processes of emotion, sensation, and intellection that found coherent expression in disparate early modern literary forms and disciplines, from imaginative narratives by Spenser to theological/philosophical and medical texts by Melanchthon, Lemnius, and Thomas Wright. Rooted in versions of Galenism, wherein conceptual ‘piercings’ afforded perceptions of embodiment as extended and in dynamic, enactive engagement with others – including imagined characters and readers. The metaphor facilitated models of reciprocal exchanges of emotion from one literary character to another, from imaginative texts to readers, from the deity to its creatures, and from the world to the body and brain. An idea of affective penetration that early moderns represented by the pierced body helped shape systemic versions of what we today call embodied, enactive and extended affectivity.