The Paramaterial Phantasy
I have been arguing for a medieval and early modern paramaterial phantasy which paradoxically positioned the phantasy and its spirits somewhere between the material and the immaterial, and between the body and the soul. In this post, I want to explore Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic construction of love in his De Amore (On Love) to further […]
Part I. “He thinks tis but our fantasy”: The Ontology and Epistemology of Ghosts and Spirits In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the skeptical and possibly Stoic Horatio reveals to the melancholic eponymous prince that he has seen a phantasm. Before Horatio can even reveal his harrowing yet problematic tale of seeing a “form like [Hamlet’s] father,” […]
NB: I just discovered this image so this post will be brief and very tentative. I hope to follow it up with more extensive research soon and will post a more expansive discussion of this image at a later time. Last week, while I was working on revising a post on vision in Hobbes’ Leviathan […]
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 I. The Three Fleshly Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Augustine famously discusses the three eyes of a perceiver. He details that, first, there is the eye of the flesh. Second, […]
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 II. The Revolution of the Eye and De-centering the Eye’s Sovereign In the first section, I discussed Andre du Laurens’ extended metaphorical treatment of the eye’s structure. There, du Laurens […]
For the past few days, I have been working on a long essay on the anatomy of the eye and the importance of the crystalline humor in early modern elite and popular discourses on sight, but I took some time away from editing to play around with both Flash and a digital edition of George […]
Hitherto, I have been focusing on the relationships established among the objects of the world and the objects of the mind predominantly in popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy. I do so, in part, because the divisions between perception and reality, and between appearance and reality, for contemporary critical practice, are a given and are […]
A few years ago, Gordon Braden introduced me to the peculiar sonnet from Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe. At that time, I remember finding the pairing of Jove’s “golden shower” with the speaker’s desire to become the urine of his beloved both hilarious and intriguing. I wondered whether this was the first instance in English […]
I have been discussing the paramaterial objects of the medieval and early modern mind as if they paradoxically took part in both the material nature of external objects and the immaterial abstraction of the soul. I will have more to say about the strange positioning and representation of those objects in later posts, but here […]
In his Microcosmographia, Helkiah Crooke, drawing upon and adapting Placentinus, takes issue with the traditional hierarchy of the external senses in the opening gambit of book eight’s “Dilucidation or Exposition of the Controuersies belonging to the Senses.” Whereas it was common practice in early modern anatomy and natural philosophy to account vision the “noblest sense,” […]