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Reviews 237 Schoenfeldt, Michael C , Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. xii, 203 R.R.P. £40.00 (cloth), £14.95 (paper); ISBN 0521630738 (cloth), 0521669022 (paper). Most readers of Michael Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern Engl will bring to the book a basic understanding of humoral theory. A s Schoenfeldt reminds us, according to the prevailing doctrines, systematized through the work ofGalen, 'physical health and mental disposition were determined by the balance within the body of the four humoral fluids produced by the various stages of digestion - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile' (p. 2). But while w e may be familiar with the ways that this theory informs Renaissance drama, underpinning especially the humours comedies ofBen Jonson, Schoenfeldt is concerned rather with what he terms 'a poetics ofcorporeal experience' (p. 171). A study ofdiscourse concerned with the body thus becomes a study of inwardness; for Early M o d e m English writers, Schoenfeldt contends, examination of the self was typically articulated inrichlycorporeal terms. This informative and stimulating book thereby directs attention to the complex relationship between body and soul in Early Modem texts. Far from being conceived as separate realms, Schoenfeldt argues that 'bodily condition, subjective state, and psychological character are in this earlier regime fully imbricated' (p. 1). The book's substantial opening chapter develops this argument by examining medical and religious discourse. Critically, he challenges the Bakhtinian binary, influential in recent literary criticism, which sets the closed and impervious 'classical' body against the open and excessive 'camivalesque' body. Instead, he argues, English writers typically accepted the Galenic logic ofa porous body, and sought an ideal oforderly consumption and excretion rather corporeal containment. Consequently, digestion becomes crucial, and the stomach is situated 'at the center of a system demanding perpetual, anxious osmosis with the outside world' (p. 26). Indeed not the least significant achievement of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England is its consideration ofa corporeal site that was stripped ofmeaning in subsequent centuries; while Early M o d e m language ofthe heart remains opaque yet intelligible, the contemporaneous language ofthe gut definitely requires more commentary. Further, as Schoenfeldt demonstrates, within this bodily scheme temperance emerges as a pivotal virtue. For subjects engaged in quotidian projects of self-fashioning, codes of temperance fused intertwined goals of moral and physiological discrimination, conflating in the process bodily and spiritual health. 238 Reviews In his presentation of these arguments, Schoenfeldt confronts some widespread assumptions about Early Modern corporeality, and his book is constantly engaged in dialogue with literary critics such as Gail Kern Paster and Jonathan Sawday. Yet readers might well remain confused by the variant accounts of the Early Modern body now available. In part, perhaps, such confusion may be explained by a survey of the sources most frequently cited by these scholars. For his analysis ofEarly M o d e m corporeality, Schoenfeldt relies heavily on Juan Huarte, Levinus Lemnius, Thomas Venner and Thomas Wright; Paster leans rather on Jacques Guillemeau, Edward Jorden and Thomas Vicary; while Sawday turns to Rene Descartes, William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius. Only Galen and Robert Burton are universally accepted as essential reading; otherwise, this survey suggests scholarsfightingthe same battle on different patches ofground. Arguably, then, Early Modern knowledge of the body was more confused and contested than anyone today is fully prepared to admit. Hence Schoenfeldt's argument, though cogent and fascinating, also has an air of partiality and opportunism, as he prepares the way for his subsequent analysis of work by four major poets. Within the terms ofthis analytical framework, the second book of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene provides an obvious starting-point, given the poet's concern with temperance and his representation of the Castle of Alma as an allegory of healthy digestion. Spenser's stated goal, 'to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline', Schoenfeldt argues in an excellent chapter, involved rigorous and constant attention to the body and its diet. The subsequent chapter, concerned generally with Shakespeare's Sonnets, but more specifically with Sonnet 94, contends that a poem often...

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