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

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.