Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (review)

Abstract

Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modem England: Physiology andInwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, andMilton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 203 pp. $65 cloth; $22 paper. by Thomas Healy "A good digestion turneth all to health." If a reader of Herbert's "Church-porch" might be tempted to describe this as a sentiment of anodyne folk wisdom, Michael Schoenfeldt's compelling study of the body — what it ingests, digests, and expels — shows that the issues articulated in Herbert's line were much more complex for early modern readers. Schoenfeldt's task is to explore how bodily "inwardness" was conceived and explored in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He finds that the fundamental model writers turned to was Galenic humoral theory, using "its remarkable capacity to relate the body to its environment, and to explain the literal influences that flow into it from a universe composed of analogous elements." As he argues, the problem has been that most modern criticism of humoral psychology has opted to dwell on the reductive caricatures it can generate. Schoenfeldt's undertaking is to try to reclaim humoral theory's complexity and he succeeds with great aplomb. His book is one that early modern scholars will read with profit, Central to Schoenfeldt's task is to try to examine the early modern past on its own terms. While historicist criticism, both new and old, has frequently grappled with bodily issues and processes, most inquiry has been generated from a standpoint of modern agendas. For instance, speculation on the sketchy presentation of genitalia in Spenser's House of Alma episode in book two of The Faerie Queene has produced ingenious readings of repression and exclusion. What Schoenfeldt demonstrates is that according a primacy to genitalia is a feature of our culture and that the early modern world saw other forms of somatic activity, particularly those of the alimentary tract, as possessing the complex auras that help create identity Far more than sexual drive, it was the food we necessarily ingest that was perceived to exert a determining force on what we are. Could our bodies, our digestions, govern this invading substance and turn it to health? Are we necessarily a product of what we eat and, thus, must needs impose a strict sense of diet upon ourselves? For early modern England, these questions loom centrally over a construction of an individual's identity, over social relations, and over humanity's interactions with the divine. 74Book Reviews Trying to understand the early modern past from its own perspectives helps Schoenfeldt unlock how this era conceived of the healthy and unhealthy, the properly and improperly nourished, the fit and the unfit. As he demonstrates more fully and clearly than any previous commentator, the material bodily implications of these terms and their moral analogies are not separate categories but fully imbricated. Central to forging a perspective of human ideals was early modern culture's common belief in the importance of temperance. Control and repression become the means to discover identity rather than suppressing it. Instead of subjugating and inhibiting the self's development, bodily and spiritual fortification was viewed as the means through which the self is liberated. It is "self-control that authorizes individuality." Importantly, though, Bodies and Selves does not seek to force us to imagine a single response to these and other questions surrounding identity; one of the book's virtues is to show that the four writers Schoenfeldt focuses on — Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton — all employ varying perspectives when they examine bodily understanding. Creating a temperate self was not an easy task. Temperance, of course, is not about denial; it is about achieving a mean. Extreme forms of abstinence are not desired, whether illustrated by Spenser's Guyon collapsing from not eating following the encounter with Mammon in The Faerie Queene (Guyon easily resists Mammon's moral temptations while failing to realize that his bodily strength is wasting, and it is this which renders him vulnerable), or by Milton's celebration of the senses and of eating in Paradise Lost's Eden. Schoenfeldt demonstrates that trying to decide what temperance is and how to maintain it was perceived as an ongoing struggle. The...