The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology, and Religion in Early Modern England by Richard Sugg (review)

Sometime around the year 1600, the soul entered a period of crisis from which it has never recovered. Although philosophers had interrogated the nature of the soul for centuries, wondering where it resided, what is was made of, and whether it was really immortal, these questions became both more urgent and more pervasive in the late Elizabethan period. Or so Sugg would have us believe. In The Smoke of the Soul, he presents less an argument about the soul than an immense archive of writers and texts preoccupied with the subject. The central questions raised in these works, and that Sugg comes back to in most of his chapters, have to do with whether the soul was material and what its relationship was to the body. Readers will come away from this book with a very full account of the many debates that circled around the topic; Sugg is a fine historian of ideas, and he gives us a very comprehensive account of the early modern field of the soul. What is less convincing is his use of literary materials: why did so many poets and playwrights take up this question, which seems to belong more naturally to philosophy or theology? And what can literature do with the topic that the other disciplines cannot? These questions linger beyond the three hundred pages of Sugg’s text, and it may have been wiser for him to have chosen fewer texts and probed deeper. But he very convincingly establishes both that there was no consensus about what the soul actually was and that there was no end to the human desire to get to the bottom of its mystery.