Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (review)

Touch, as this volume reminds us, is an exceedingly complex and amorphous subject. Unlike the other senses, touch is not easily localized in a single organ: it is associated with the hand, as an instrument of reason; with the genitals, as the basest part of our being; and with the skin, as most primary border between ourselves and the world, between inner and outer. More than the other senses, touch is reciprocal; as we touch things, they touch us. Both its protean nature and the fundamental importance of the sense in the experience of the self are attested to by the fact that the entry on taste for the oed is the longest, according to more than one of the contributors. The sense that depends upon metonymy has spawned the most metaphors.

In the Cartesian scheme of things, sight reigns supreme as the least physical of the senses and the one that most clearly installs a distance between the subject and the object sensed. As Misty Anderson points out in her essay on Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure, there are particular consequences of this Cartesian model of subjectivity for the gender most persistently associated with the body, which Cavendish herself well understood. It makes sense, then, that the majority of the essays in this collection are implicitly or explicitly feminist in orientation: 'To engage touch as a category of investigation,' writes Elizabeth Harvey in her introduction, 'is to reactivate the body's material, and often gendered relation to the world.' Indeed, one of the virtues of this collection is the way that it reanimates dead metaphors for us in ways that illuminate those relations in a whole range of discourses. Carla Mazzio's essay on an allegorical play about the senses, Lingua, reconstructs for us an earlier understanding of tact that saw it as a form of touch that extends beyond the body, an almost extrasensory perception that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment. In a somewhat related vein, Scott Manning Stevens investigates how the trope of the naked savage is connected to an argument about the adaptability of humans to their environment.

Reflecting the conceptual difficulty posed by touch to early modern thinkers, the essays in this collection cover a wide range of topics and approaches. Medical topics such as contagion, healing, midwifery, and anatomical dissection are explored from various perspectives. In both midwifery and dissection, the touch of the practitioner acquires a new dignity and importance. Eve Keller argues that in the midwifery manuals 'touch gets reconceptualized, to become newly aligned with the masculine attributes of reason and decorous action'; in these texts, observes Harvey, 'The role of the physician and anatomist is to harness the discerning, judging qualities of tactility to epistemological service.' Bettina Mathes points out that whereas earlier lecturers on anatomy left the distasteful job of dissection to the barber-surgeon, Andreas Vesalius insisted on the importance of the anatomist's hands for understanding the body. Aligning the hand with reason, however, produces a 'touch whereby the hand that touches remains itself untouched,' rendering the anatomist or physician pure subject, and the investigated body pure object.

Most satisfying and productive are those essays that centrally address the question of touch in the early modern period: Harvey's elegant introduction and her essay on the early modern representations of the skin, which takes up Didier Anzou's theory of the skin ego; Lynn Enterline's afterword, which considers the relation between touch and rhetoric, looking at the way bodies and language work in that favourite of early modern texts, Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Rebekah Smick's fascinating essay on the sensual appeal of architecture in a key renaissance text, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Tracing an understanding of the relation between touch and knowledge through Aristotle, Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, Smick shows how a puzzling narrative featuring an unseemly fascination with buildings is in fact an allegory for how sensual understanding is key to ethical behaviour...