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Shaping Sense

The Paramaterial Phantasy

“Runne through [t]he[i]r vaynes”: Phantasies of Desire in Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe’s Sonnet 63 and Sestine 5

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Early Modern Senses Tagged Barnabe Barnes, early modern, history of senses, imagination, paramaterial, Phantasy, theories of love

“I know the place”: Locating the Woodcut in William Griffith’s 1570 Edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat

William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat remains shrouded in mystery. The bulk of the short fiction supposedly recreates an oration given by Gregory Streamer on December 28th of the preceding year. Streamer’s fantastic tale concerns an “experiment” he performed that allowed him to hear the language of cats. Streamer’s oration, split into three by the character […]

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Posted in Tangents, William Baldwin Tagged bestiaries, Beware the Cat, book history, early modern, sources, William Baldwin, woodcuts 3 Comments

Reuben’s Mandrakes

While writing my last post on Ambroise Paré’s monstrous Phantasy, I came across a reference to Genesis 30 that captured my own imagination. Having researched and written before on the passages from Paré and Montaigne I discussed there, I somehow overlooked the bizarre Biblical reference that appeared in each. In previously thinking about representations of […]

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Posted in Politics, Tangents Tagged Shakespeare, cultural criticism, gay marriage, Genesis, Herbals, mandrake, marriage equality, politics, religion 1 Comment

Monstrous Phantasies: Imagining the Fetus in Ambroise Paré’s “Of Monsters and Prodigies”

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Early Modern Senses Tagged senses, Ambroise Paré, anatomy, early modern, imagination, Michel de Montaigne, monsters, paramaterial, Phantasy, representations of the body

Something is Rotten in Helkiah Crooke’s Gendered Representation of the Nose

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,” […]

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Posted in Early Modern Senses, Shaping Sense Tagged anatomy, cultural studies, early modern, gender, Helkiah Crooke, history of science, Microcosmographia, nose, Sense of smell, senses 11 Comments

The “plague of phantasms”: Petrarch’s Secretum and the Paramaterial Objects of Sense in Human and Non-Human Animals

In Petrarch’s Secretum written somewhere between 1347 and 1353 and circulated posthumously, Petrarch shapes a dialogue between himself and a fictionalized Augustine. Augustine chastises and instructs Petrarch for favoring an attention to the world over devotion to God and spiritual things. Towards the end of book one of this dialogue, Augustine reveals the tensions inherent […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense Tagged imagination, ontology, Albertus Magnus, optics, animal studies, paramaterial, cultural studies, Petrarch, early modern, Phantasy, epistemology, renaissance, Francesco Petrarcha, Secretum, history of he mind, senses, history of science, history of the senses 1 Comment

Reason’s “uneven mirror”: Idols of the Mind and Francis Bacon’s Phantasy

In Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, Bacon claims that four “idols” corrupt the understanding and block science from developing a proper understanding of nature. Bacon offers that “there are four kinds of idols besetting human minds,” and gives them names, saying, “I call the first, Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense Tagged early modern, fiction, Francis Bacon, Idols, imagination, New Atlantis, Novum Organum, paramaterial, Philip Sidney, senses, The Advancement of Learning

Albertus, the “Aprecocke,” and the Fantasia.

I have recently been working on an interactive Flash meta-mind map animation to help explain the features and functions assigned to the faculties within various models of the mind. For my first post, I have embedded the “fantasia” portion of my Flash meta-mind map. It represents one portion in a longer interactive map designed to […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense Tagged early modern, imagination, internal senses, models of mind, paramaterial, psychology, senses

“True minds,” Untrue Minds, and “Eyes untrue”: The External and Internal Senses in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 113

My last post sketched out how the paramaterial mind emerges towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will have more to say about deceiving the external and internal senses in that play in a later post, but I first want to focus on a much shorter and less complex poem to develop […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense Tagged sonnets, vision, early modern, epistemology, history of the senses, imagination, paramaterial, Phantasy, Shakespeare, skepticism, sonnet 113

“Such shaping fantasies”: Shakespeare’s Paramaterial Phantasy

      portion of my last post’s title comes from the fifth act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Hippolyta and Theseus discuss the strange alterations of love they have just witnessed in the forest. Hippolyta declares the speeches delivered by the lovers as “strange,” prompting The Duke’s declaration of the vulnerability […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, William Shakespeare Tagged A Midsummer Night's Dream, early modern, epistemology, history of the senses, imagination, Phantasy, senses, Shakespeare
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