Untying the “Subtle Knot”: Anatomical Metaphor and the Case of the rete mirabile

Abstract

This essay seeks to “unperplex” the soul’s relationship to the body by reading the body’s book. Specifically, it examines responses to a small (albeit nonexistent) structure in the brain that seventeenth-century anatomists held to be the location where soul and body converged. The rete mirabile , or wonderful knot, found its utility both as a physical marker of the desire for a locatable soul and as a metaphor for the complex interaction between material and immaterial. I read John Donne’s “The Ecstasy” alongside anatomical texts to argue that the metaphor of the knot, as a response to deeper concerns about how bodies and souls are joined together, underwrites both poetic and anatomical discourse, and enables the translation between them.