Occult knowledge, science, and gender on the Shakespearean stage

Abstract

Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, by Mary Floyd-Wilson. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 250. Hardcover. $99.00.Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with Mary Floyd-Wilson's first book, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003). That book shifted understanding of modern conceptions of race; it demonstrated the anachronism of modern ontological understandings of racial categories, revealing instead an earlier perception of race as humoral condition. Floyd-Wilson's new book, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, once again shifts paradigm. This time, however, Floyd-Wilson does not expose the fallacy of applying modern categories to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English culture. Rather, she reveals what has been missed by scholarly over-reliance on particular historically indigenous paradigm. For the past two decades, ever since Gail Kern Paster's landmark study The Body Embarrassed (Cornell, 1993), scholars have extensively researched how Galenic medical theory, with its emphasis on the fluctuation and balance of the four humors, shaped modern notions of the body, affect, emotions, and environment. Floyd-Wilson herself has played central role in this recovery, not only through the contribution of her monograph but in her co-edited major essay collections (Reading the Early Modern Passions, with Paster and Katherine Rowe; Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern England, with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.). But the Galenic paradigm, once ignored by literary critics or considered quirky historical footnote, has by now become dominant to degree that it can occlude other modes of modes of thought. Occult Knowledge addresses how the occult was also an important modern explanation for causation. While Floyd-Wilson is not here refuting the period's reliance on the Galenic model, in an exemplary gesture of intellectual flexibility she demonstrates what has been overlooked by field she helped shape.Occult Knowledge sets out to correct two explanatory scholarly paradigms. The first, as mentioned, is an overly emphatic or exclusionary Galenism; the second is Paracelsism, or at least Paracelsus as interpreted by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things. Foucault, working largely with Paracelsus' theever, ories, contended that early modern nature was configuration of analogies and similitudes revealed by its visible marks; modern cosmology was a system of visual resemblances (p. 2). Floyd-Wilson's book fundamentally refutes this Foucauldian episteme, showing time and again how moderns understood the world and its inhabitants to operate through an invisible system of sympathies and antipathies. This understanding was both experientially and intellectually fundamental, and has been woefully ignored, according to Floyd-Wilson. She writes, our critical tendency to misconstrue the discourse of sympathies and antipathies as merely metaphorical has obscured how pervasive belief in hidden operations shaped modern perceptions of nature, gender, passion, motivation, knowledge, and theatrical experiences (1).Occult Knowledge is, as its subject matter virtually requires, complex and multi-faceted book. It advances series of interconnected arguments: that moderns believed in an invisible system of sympathies and antipathies; that natural philosophy was in many ways driven by desire to make these invisible forces manifest; that the invisible forces of sympathy and antipathy held particularly strong relationship with the womb, and thus women inhabited charged position in relation to the occult; and that the modern stage, itself perceived as working through invisible sympathies and antipathies, was particularly amenable site for portraying and thinking through these forces. …