Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

Anne Sophie Haar Refskou,Laura Søvsø Thomasen

doi:10.15845/emco.v5i0.1291

Abstract

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

Highlights

Modern culture incorporated the human hand into a large number of different visual-textual contexts: in religious imagery, in scientific illustrations, in manuals of various disciplines, as manicules in manuscripts and printed books, and with several functional and/or figurative significances in the literature and drama of the period
We present an investigation of a selection of examples which span the dramatic writing of the period: from issues of the hand in two early Shakespearean tragedies, Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) and Romeo and Juliet (c. 1597), to Hamlet (c. 1602); to the medical sciences, William Harvery’s de Motu Cordis (1628); and to John Bulwer’s manuals on gesture, Chirologia and Chironomia (1644)
The process of obtaining knowledge was complexly, but distinctly described as embodied and physiological: as Bruce R. Smith puts it in The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture, “before Descartes, thinking color, like thinking anything else, was a whole-body experience” (3).[4]. In this Aristotelian influenced account, knowledge of the world was generally understood to be obtained by way of the five outward senses – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching – sending the acquired information to the inner ‘common sense’, which, as Robert Burton describes in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), was classified as “the judge and moderator of the rest” (101).[5]

Summary

Introduction

Modern culture incorporated the human hand into a large number of different visual-textual contexts: in religious imagery, in scientific illustrations, in manuals of various disciplines, as manicules in manuscripts and printed books, and with several functional and/or figurative significances in the literature and drama of the period. The sciences were developing rapidly and, in doing so, questioning the reliability of the senses in procuring knowledge and understanding, as we shall see when investigating the role of the hand in a series of illustrations from William Harvey’s treatise on blood circulation De Motu Codis.[9] In early modern scepticism and co-related issues of science, the act of doubting becomes an inevitable factor in the EMCO#5 ongoing separation of mind from body, which is fully embraced in Descartes’s understanding of the pursuit of knowledge.

Results

Conclusion