Abstract
John Donne’s Metempsychosis,1 a poem enriched with what H.W. Janson calls “a truly awesome amount of biblical and zoological lore,”2 chronicles the transmigrations of a soul through a successive series of vegetable, animal, and human hosts.3 In his engagement with Pythagorean metempsychosis, Donne participates poetically in philosophical debates that preoccupied contemporary moral and natural philosophers, and this strange poem articulates in embryo, as it were, many of these larger concerns: what was the nature of the linkage between soma and psyche? If a soul transmigrated, did it remember its past lives? Was the rational soul unique to human beings? Did the vegetative and sensitive soul join human beings to plant and animal life in ways that changed their connection to the environment? These questions, and the ethical and philosophical implications of metempsychosis, interrogate the fundamental beliefs of humanism. Where Pico della Miran-dola argued that reason radically distinguished men from animals,4Donne used the ideas of the tripartite soul and Pythagorean transmigration of souls to examine humanism’s darker side: if the vegetable and animal souls are not finally subsumed into the rational soul, but rather coexist with it, then the sovereignty over all living things that God supposedly conferred upon human beings is called into question.
I am profoundly grateful for an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library and for the generous responses from audiences at the Folger colloquium and the Renaissance Society of America annual conference (New York, 2004) who listened to an earlier version of this chapter.
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Notes
References to Metempsychosis are to Milgate’s edition, John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) and appear parenthetically in the chapter. The prefatory epistle is designated by the page number, and quotations from the poem specify line numbers.
H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952), 272.
Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 455–463, 464–484.
See also Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
M. Van Wyk Smith, “John Donne’s Metempsychosis (concluded),” R.E.S. n.s. 24.94 (1974)
Brian Blackley, “The Generic Play and Spenserian Parody of John Donne’s Metempsychosis,” (Unpub. Doct. Diss., University of Kentucky, 1994).
One of the central vehicles of Pythagorean doctrine and its parody was Lucian’s Dialogues, especially “The Dream, or the Cock.” Examples of Renaissance parodies of Pythagorean doctrine include Ben Jonson’s, Volpone, Act 1.1, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, 4.1., and Twelfth Night: 1.5.2. For a study of Pythagorean influence in antiquity, see Christopher Riedweg, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, trans. Steven Rendali (C.H. Beck, 2002, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Karl P. Wentersdorf, “Symbol and Meaning in Donne’s Metempsychosis or The Progresse of the Souk,” SEL 22.1 (1982): 69–90, 89. Janel Mueller’s important discussion of the genre of Metempsychosis is foundational (“Donne’s Epic Venture in the Metempsychosis,” Modern Philology 70.2 [1972]: 109–137).
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), 15.
First published in French in 1577, it began to be translated into English in 1586. Its currency is indicated by the numerous editions in the 1590s and in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Madalene Shindler (“The Vogue and Impact of Pierre de la Primaudaye’s ‘The French Academie’ on Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature,” Unpub. Doct. Diss., University of Texas, 1960) asserts that in 1658, it was the second most popular book in England (vi). See also Anne Lake Prescott’s “Growing Encyclopaedic” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 157–169.
M. van Wyck Smith’s “John Donne’s Metempsychosis,” R.E.S. 24.93 (1973): 17–25.
John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981): 136.
Gail Kern Paster provides a brilliant analysis of animal and human passions in “Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Other Passionate Animals: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier” in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 135–188. She was an inspirational presence throughout the writing of this chapter. See also George Boas on theriophilies (The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1933]) and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1984).
Kenneth Gross, “Donne’s Lyric Skepticism: In Strange Way,” Modern Philology 101, 3 (2004): 371–399; 372.
George Chapman, The Odysseys of Homer, ed. Rev. Richard Hooper (London: Reeves & Turner, 1897), Book 10, 11. 320–326.
See D.C. Allen, “Donne on the Mandrake,” Modern Language Notes 74.5 (1959): 393–397.
See W. Milgate, “A Difficult Allusion in Donne and Spenser,” Notes and Queries, n.s. 13.1 (1966): 12–14 for a discussion of sources.
Philemon Holland, The Historie of the World, Commonly called, the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus (London, 1601), 231.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Blackwell, 1939; repr., 1994).
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Harvey, E.D. (2007). The Souls of Animals: John Donne’s Metempsychosis and Early Modern Natural History. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_4
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