Abstract
The opening essays of Plutarch’s Moralia, as translated by Philemon Holland in 1603, describe how young men ‘may take profit by reading poemes’. Plutarch argues that the acquisition of sober habits of reading was one skill among many which kept men’s minds and bodies neat and clean, and advises students to commit themselves to a period of solitary self-examination after reading or listening to lectures:
he must enter into his owne heart and examine himselfe when he is alone, how he was mooved and affected…whether he find any turbulent passions of his minde thereby dulced and appeased; whether any griefe or heavinese that trouble him be mitigated and asswaged.
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Notes
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), sig. E3r.
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman, introd. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 7; quoted by Elaine Scarry in her introduction to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons ed. Scarry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. xiv.
In Theaetetus 150, 161 and 209, men give birth to a child of the brain (an idea) which may be kept or discarded, just as an infant might be kept or exposed as not worth bringing up. On the connection between genius and virility, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angelika: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 120.
Ben Jonson ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 479.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 640 and 135; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 140. Olney praises Sidney’s ‘pen-breathing words’ in An Apology for Poetry (1595), sig. II4r. Wendy Wall explores the reasons why love lyricists sometimes presented their work as ‘the writer’s surrogate body’ in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 45–9 (p. 45).
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003), pp. 102 and 28. Juliana Schiesari remarks in her discussion of Hamlet that ‘the cultural category of melancholia cannot separate the affect from its display.’ See The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 238.
For a longer discussion of the importance of the passions in sixteenth-century theories of rhetoric and poetry, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988), p. 281.
See Ian Maclean, Renaissance Nature of Women: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 34–7
Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of the Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’, English Literary Renaissance 28, 3 (1998), 416–40.
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© 2007 Katharine A. Craik
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Craik, K.A. (2007). Introduction. In: Reading Sensations in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206083_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206083_1
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