Spirited flesh: The animation and hybridization of flesh in the early modern imaginary

Abstract

While early modern scholarship presupposes the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, such conclusions ignore the constitutive ambiguity of flesh in the early modern world. To illustrate this ambiguity, I turn to two major archives: Helikiah Crooke’s medical treatise Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615) and William Tyndale’s Prologue to the Romans in his translation of the New Testament (1534). These texts gesture toward the reality of ‘spirited’ flesh, a flesh that possesses a form of liveliness persisting beyond physical severance from the body or even biological death. This spirited flesh is radicalized further in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1602), as dead flesh exists in a synecdochical relationship with the spirit. Yet Marston’s characterization of flesh emerges not as an early modern quirk or an occasion of dramatic heresy but rather as one supported by contemporary discourses of science and religion.