Shaping Sense – The Paramaterial Phantasy

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“And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown”: Why the “Paramaterial Phantasy”?

While studying mind models available in the early modern period, I noticed an unusual confluence of supposed “influences” on the mind that generate paradoxical aspects within medieval and early modern constructions of the Imagination or the Phantasy. These paradoxes reveal…

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The Contents

I “And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown”: Why the “Paramaterial Phantasy”? 2012 Shaping Sense II “Such shaping fantasies”: Shakespeare’s Paramaterial Phantasy 2013 Shaping Sense · William Shakespeare III “True minds,” Untrue Minds, and “Eyes untrue”: The External and Internal Senses in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 113 2013 Shaping Sense V Reason’s “uneven mirror”: Idols of the Mind and Francis Bacon’s Phantasy 2013 Shaping Sense VI The “plague of phantasms”: Petrarch’s Secretum and the Paramaterial Objects of Sense in Human and Non-Human Animals 2013 Shaping Sense VII Something is Rotten in Helkiah Crooke’s Gendered Representation of the Nose 2013 Early Modern Senses · Shaping Sense VIII Monstrous Phantasies: Imagining the Fetus in Ambroise Paré’s “Of Monsters and Prodigies” 2013 Early Modern Senses · Shaping Sense IX “Runne through [t]he[i]r vaynes”: Phantasies of Desire in Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe’s Sonnet 63 and Sestine 5 2013 Early Modern Senses · Shaping Sense X “A mere Phantasm or Imagination”: Philosophical Skepticism and Joseph Mede’s Crisis of Sense 2013 Early Modern Senses · Philosophical Skepticism · Shaping Sense XI George Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst (1583): Animating the Early Modern Eye 2013 Early Modern Senses · Shaping Sense · Tangents XII “Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees”: Othello’s Tears and the Weeping Trees of Acacia and Myrrh. A Corrective Gloss to Most Modern Editions of Shakespeare. 2013 Scholarship · Shaping Sense · Tangents XIII The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy. Part Two. 2013 Early Modern Senses · Philosophical Skepticism · Scholarship XIV The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy. Part One. 2013 Early Modern Senses · Philosophical Skepticism · Shaping Sense XV Double Vision: Thomas Hobbes’ Eye in “A Minute or First Draft of the Optiques” (BL Harley MS 3360) 2013 Early Modern Senses · Philosophical Skepticism · Scholarship XVI “In my mind’s eye”: Species, Phantasms, Skepticism, and the Phantasy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in Early Modern Theater 2013 Early Modern Senses · Philosophical Skepticism · Scholarship XVII “Their phantasies differ”: The Phantasy in Raleigh’s translation of Sextus Empiricus 2014 Philosophical Skepticism · Scholarship · Shaping Sense XVIII “Double bewitchment”: Love-Beams, the Mutual Gaze, and the Interpenetrating Visions of Marsilio Ficino’s De Amore 2017 Early Modern Senses · Scholarship · Shaping Sense

Notes, Tangents & Woodcuts

Antonis Mor, Mary I of England, 1554 2026 Sources Shaped William Caxton’s printer’s mark 2026 Sources Shaped Portrait of Anne Boleyn (the Hever portrait) 2026 Sources Shaped Portrait of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey 2026 Sources Shaped Nicolas de Larmessin, Johannes Gutenberg 2026 Sources Shaped Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513 2026 Sources Shaped Title page of The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purse, 1611 2026 Sources Shaped Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Sir Thomas More, 1527 2026 Sources Shaped Portrait of Richard III 2026 Sources Shaped The Hoccleve portrait of Chaucer 2026 Sources Shaped John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, 1564 2026 Sources Shaped Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514 2026 Sources Shaped Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus 2026 Sources Shaped Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Henry VIII 2026 Sources Shaped Paul Fürst, Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom, 1656 2026 Sources Shaped Ministry of Information, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” 1939 2026 Sources Shaped John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Karl Marx, 1875 2026 Sources Shaped Gustav Schultze, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 2026 Sources Shaped James Montgomery Flagg, “I Want YOU for U.S. Army” 2026 Sources Shaped Martin Droeshout, Shakespeare, First Folio title page 2026 Sources Shaped “Objet petit a”: More Senseshaper Woodcuts from the Void. Enjoy! 2017 #WoodcutWednesday · Scholarship · Silly Things Donald Trump Woodcut: Megalomanicus Logorrheus 2017 Scholarship “Print is Dead”: More Medieval and Early Modern Inspired Woodcuts, With a Second Edition of Henry VIII, HVIIIERS Gonna HVIII 2016 #WoodcutWednesday · Satire · Silly Things HVIIIers Gonna HVIII: Henry VIII and Other Senseshaper Woodcuts Inspired by the Medieval and Early Modern Periods 2015 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things · Tangents The Cheerios and Coca Cola Super Bowl Controversy: Capitalism with a Human [Multicultural] Face 2014 Politics How to Make a Woodcut: Senseshaper’s Process of De-Digitizing the Archives 2014 #WoodcutWednesday · Fantasies · Silly Things The First Cuts are the Deepest: Senseshaper’s (Zachary Fisher’s) First Months of Woodcutting 2014 #WoodcutWednesday · Fantasies · Silly Things Making Woodcuts: Week One of a New Hobby 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Fantasies Re-Membering the Penis in Early Modern English Woodcuts; Now with More NSFW GIF 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things · Tangents The Interactive Galenic Humoral Man Beta 2013 Tangents #WoodcutWednesday: “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Masquein’)” by T-Cramm (AKA Thomas Cranmer) ft. H-8 (AKA Henry VIII, AAKA Henry Tudor) 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Satire · Silly Things “Vegetable Love”: Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Herrick’s “The Vine,” and the Attraction of Plants 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things · Tangents GIF-ing the Woodcut; Or, Early Modern Party Animals 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things Ren Lyfe: Renaissance and Early Modern Fashion Geekery; or, Philip Stubbes and John Rainolds Would Disapprove of my Fashion Sense 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things Petrarch’s Cat and the Casa del Petrarca: The Excremental Remainder of Literary Tourism 2013 Delusions The Medieval and Early Modern Meme Menagerie, or, Grumpy Cat is a Time Lord 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things Part I: “Envious people be the greateste mortherers of the worlde & gretest theves”: Othello III.iii. 160-166 and Richard Pynson’s 1506 The Kalender of Shepherdes. A Possible New Source for Othello. 2013 Tangents · William Shakespeare “Let it turn to something else”: Conservative Ideology and the Reshaping of American Masculinity in Red Dawn from 1984 to 2012 2013 Film · Tangents My Medieval Grumpy Cat meme made it into a Dutch newspaper! 2013 Satire · Silly Things #WoodcutWednesday-Haters Gonna Hate 2013 #WoodcutWednesday #WoodcutWednesday test… But at least it has a cool pic. 2013 #WoodcutWednesday Utopian Fantasy: Imagining the Form of an Online Scholarly Journal 2013 Fantasies · Sense of Myself · Tangents Memeing the Early Modern: Danse Harlem Shake Macabre #WoodcutWednesday 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things We Cannot Allow This Twitter Image Gap! An Early Modern #WoodcutWednesday Challenge 2013 #WoodcutWednesday · Silly Things Grumpy Cat Responds to the Medieval Cat-Print Manuscript 2013 Satire · Silly Things BREAKING: New royal bones found, this time near Dover. Move over Richard III, make way for Regan and Goneril! 2013 Satire “I know the place”: Locating the Woodcut in William Griffith’s 1570 Edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat 2013 Tangents · William Baldwin Reuben’s Mandrakes 2013 Politics · Tangents Navis Stultorum: The [GOP] Ship of Fools 2012 Politics · Satire What’s in a pin? Hollywood Revisions and the Ideological Power of The Hunger Games 2012 Tangents The Shifting “Horns” of Thomas More’s Utopian Womb 2012 Tangents Pleasure Reading: A Reminder that I Needn’t a Pen to Read 2012 Delusions The Noble Lyfe and Natures of Man? Constructing the boundary between man and beast in an early modern bestiary. 2012 Tangents