Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (review)

Keller proposes to draw lines of comparison between recent neuroscientific discoveries about the biological origins of subjecthood (the posthuman) and early modern, primarily Galenic conceptions (the premodern), arguing that these periods' constructions of the body and the self are united in their contrast to a humanist-era ethos of thought, the period which they both straddle. Similar to posthumanism's characteristic tenets of "embodiment, embeddedness, and distributed function" (20), Galenic science also construes the whole body (and the psyche) as essentially constituted by its environment and the discrete operations of its organs. As is frequently said of the humoral economy, if one truly is what one eats, then no clear delineation between self and environment exists, much the same way that boundaries between person and machine have begun to efface. The premodern model of physiology thus has "some level of continuity" (32) with what we might perceive as the more radical innovations of neuroscience and the related branch of neurophilosophy that explain personhood and mental capacities as "materially made, emerg[ing] from widely distributed neural networks, and function in fully embedded connection with their environments" (25): plus ça change.

Given Generating Bodies' publication in a series focused on science and culture, it explores predominantly early modern medical texts — anatomies, gynecological, obstetrical, and lay advice manuals — and often reads them for their literary content rather than consistently positioning them contextually alongside other literatures. Though the book could cover a bit more expansively and deeply the wealth of recent interdisciplinary literary-medical, historical criticism that touches very closely upon Keller's, many of her explorations of the nuances in medical texts' language written by Harvey, Culpeper, Crooke, and other Galenists are interesting and fruitful: while she does not take issue with Adelman's essay on Raynalde's sixteenth-century tract The Byrthe of Mankynde ("Making Defect Perfection"), for instance, Keller points out (as many have not) that this early medical text is, in fact, anomalous in its positive view of female physiology. The book emphasizes the implications of early modern science for gender (if less so for neurophilosophy): earlier texts consistently accord men stable subjecthood versus establishing women's subjection to their somatic whims. Citing Culpeper, Keller writes, "certainty about the relative inferiority of females makes it impossible . . . to write an autonomous female subjectivity in any sustained way" (89), and thus, women fail to become the possessors of a coherent, integrated sympathetic system that is also concomitant with agency.

A similar perspective is evinced in the later chapters. For instance, the focus on "mechanistic embryology" links the book's introductory discussions about modern constructions of identity to early modern anxieties about the uniquity of humanity: "the more man in his physiology resembles a machine or the product of a machine . . . the more it becomes necessary to ensure that he is known to be something other than a machine . . . from the moment of his conception, or even before" (155). Despite Harvey's innovations in embryology that dispel Aristotelian and Galenic theories, and thus would seem to accord a greater importance to the female's role in reproduction, Keller finds instead that the new status afforded to the embryo bestows upon it a novel form of masculine agency — a shift that is a precursor to the embryo's acquiring independent subjectivity. These conceptual shifts not only pinpoint a new facet of early modern sensibilities about identity, but also prefigure contemporary debates about the legal status of fetuses in American jurisprudence and politics. Prefigures is my term, but it is not always precisely clear how Keller intends the two facets of her discussion to align. For instance, she states in the introduction: "My point in noting these affinities is not to propose that the premodern in any way anticipates the posthuman; it is rather to suggest some level of continuity in the...