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Shaping Sense

The Paramaterial Phantasy

“Double bewitchment”: Love-Beams, the Mutual Gaze, and the Interpenetrating Visions of Marsilio Ficino’s De Amore

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Scholarship, Early Modern Senses Tagged love beams, early modern, homoeroticism, imagination, De Amore, paramaterial, Love, Phantasy, theories of love, vision, history of vision, early modern senses, Marsilio Ficino

“Their phantasies differ”: The Phantasy in Raleigh’s translation of Sextus Empiricus

The “Sceptick,” first published in 1651 and attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, offers one of the first known English translations, albeit unacknowledged, of portions of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines. While it is not a pure translation, and while it only offers an expurgated version of Sextus’ classical skeptical work, it is undoubtedly based on portions of […]

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Posted in Scholarship, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged history of senses, paramaterial, phantasms, Phantasy, philosophical skepticism, Sextus Empiricus, skepticism, early modern senses, Raleigh, early modern

“In my mind’s eye”: Species, Phantasms, Skepticism, and the Phantasy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in Early Modern Theater

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,” […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Scholarship, William Shakespeare, Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism Tagged Phantasy, William Shakespeare, delusions, philosophical skepticism, early modern senses, cultural studies, Rene Descartes, renaissance, perimaterial, Descartes, Raleigh, senses, ghosts, early modern, Ralegh, Shakespeare, spirits, epistemology, supernatural, skepticism, drama, history of science, Galenic humoralism, vision, Johann Weyer, history of the senses, accounts of demons and witchcraft, Reginald Scot, imagination, Hamlet, optics, Robert Burton, Malleus Maleficarum, paramaterial, history of vision, witches

“Vegetable Love”: Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Herrick’s “The Vine,” and the Attraction of Plants

In his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell’s speaker begins by imagining a scenario in which he and his lover have all the time in the world to love one another without a fear of death. During the course of his musings, the lover makes an odd metaphor for the growth of his love […]

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Posted in Silly Things, Tangents, #WoodcutWednesday Tagged Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress, Vegetable Love, English Renaissance, Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, early modern, Herrick, imagination, The Vine, Phantasy, dendrophilia, woodcuts 2 Comments

“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.

I. “The Arbaian trees their medicinable gum”: Othello’s Weeping Trees During Othello’s suicide speech, he makes several references that have attracted the attention of modern editors and scholars. The most famous concerns the textual variations between the Quarto and Folio versions of the line “Like a base Indian, threw a pearl away.” Whereas the Quarto […]

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Posted in Scholarship, Shaping Sense, William Shakespeare, Tangents Tagged jealousy, Herbals, Iago, history of the senses, seeing as, imagination, Gerard, Petrarch, Phantasy, Shakespeare, vision, Othello, early modern

“A mere Phantasm or Imagination”: Philosophical Skepticism and Joseph Mede’s Crisis of Sense

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 […]

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Posted in Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged paramaterial, phantasms, Phantasy, Descartes, philosophical skepticism, early modern, senses, history of ideas, Sextus Empiricus, history of philosophy, skepticism, history of science, species, imagination, Joseph Mede, Montaigne 4 Comments

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

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

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

“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
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