Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin

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Reading Early Modern Skin In Skin: On Cultural Border Between Selfand World, Claudia Benthien offers a history of skin as the central metaphor for separateness; arguing that it is only at boundary of bodily integument that subjects are able to one (i). That skin is or been at various periods in Western history the where boundary negotiations take place is indisputable; what constitutes skin object and whether or not skin always been site of boundary negotiations between bodies is a matter of greater historical complexity (xi). Benthien follows Dither Anzieu's reasoning that since Renaissance, Western epistemology (modeled on penetration and uncovering of bodies in Vesalian anatomy) been predicated on notion that knowledge of what is essential means breaking through shells and walls in order to reach core that lies in innermost depths (7). According to Benthien, it is only recently, with development of modern psychoanalytic and medical discourse, that we have come to recognize skin's ontological destabilization of body's and out:' Echoing Anzieu, Benthien writes that neurophysiology has had to come to terms with paradox that even brain is a rind--and human 'center' is actually situated at periphery (7). While I am sympathetic to Benthien's project, I take issue with version of skin to which she compares post-Renaissance ontologies of body's surface. Benthien writes that in pre-modern period skin still constituted a structurally impenetrable boundary to invisible and mysterious inside (10). I aim to show that what Benthien regards as modern re/invention of skin as a porous ontological interface between bodies and subjects is forcefully present in early modern natural philosophy, medicine, and science. It goes, however, by different names and describes different functions than those we attribute to skin. The challenge of writing about skin, especially but not exclusively in early modern period, is that it requires study of representations of encounter and communication that pertain to a wide territory of body's surface sometimes referred to by word skin, or its synonyms, but very often is not. The fact that skin is not described as a concrete and stable object in early modern period indicates precisely how fluid early modern ideas of skin were. A relative dearth of references to skin proper in late Renaissance depictions of body compelled literary historians to look for skin in elsewhere of analogy, allegory and, of course, history of touch. (1) My approach to reading skin works in two ways. It works backward, approximating a meaning for earlier models of skin by looking in places we expect to find it, namely at border or boundary between bodies, and discovering something far more fluid in its place. Second, I study illocutionary as well as articulated representations of skin-like encounters and surfaces. I use these methods to offer a reading of two very different early modern writers, both of whom have been singled out by historians of body as iconic figures: one of anxious bodily indeterminacy and other of rationalist orientation of early scientific empiricism. My subjects are Robert Burton and Francis Bacon and texts that were published within four years of one another, Burton's The Anatovny of Melancholy and Bacon's posthumously published natural history Sylva Sylvaruvn and fictional utopia New Atlantis, to which it was appended. My interest in these texts is not in their named references to skin (of which there are far fewer than we might expect) but rather to their depictions of bodily encounter and intercorporeal influence, so that we might discover what role, if any, body's surface played in negotiating relationship between bodies. This investigation is centrally concerned with early modern representations of skin as a zone of encounter, not between opposed, solid, and impermeable but precisely between skins understood in early modern period as membranous conduits between an indeterminate and outside of body. …