Abstract
This chapter turns toward posthumanist theory and explores early modern anxieties about prosthetics, automatons, and other human-object hybrids. Starting with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this chapter argues that wax models the possibilities of both human supplementation and supplantation in the period. In Paré’s Workes, we see a careful limiting of the scope of the surgeon to stay within nature’s bounds, while simultaneously reading the body as malleable. Descartes’ Meditations reveals considerable anxiety about automatons in and around his famous wax passage, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene unleashes a wax woman upon Faerie Land, calling into question what it means to be both human and woman in the period.
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Maxwell, L.M. (2019). Wax Hybrids: Re-thinking Subjects and Objects in Ovid, Paré, Descartes, and Spenser. In: Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16932-9_6
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