Allegories of Mastery: Sex, Science, and the Making of the Modern Body in Renaissance Utopias

This project argues that the seventeenth-century transition from the humoral body to the modern, anatomical body depended on constructions of gender/sex. I examine this process in The Faerie Queene Book 2, The Legend of Temperance (1596), Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (1633), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1655) to reveal its incompleteness and contradictions. In particular, the making of the modern body relied on the very humoral theory and cosmology of correspondence to which it is often opposed. This dissertation restores vital context---Galenic medicine's understanding of temperance, early modern models of spirits and matter---wholly ignored in critical reactions to these works, and contests the standard account of the modern body's emergence as the triumph of the empirical truth of anatomy. Analyzing instead how the modern body is constructed challenges usual assumptions that scientific discourse is distinct from the literary, that the modern subject depends on objectification, and that gender/sex is an add-on to both bodies and textual analysis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Koepke-Nelson, Yvette Michelle

Contributors dc:contributor

• Carol Thomas Neely

• Literature, English

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3101888

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81393