Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience

The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience

Habinek, Lianne

Hardcover

Literary CriticismSports GeneralCognition

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773553185
ISBN13: 9780773553187
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Jun 6 2018
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.27
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

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.

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