Brain-ache: Anne Bradstreet on Sensing

This essay examines the physiology of sensing across Anne Bradstreet’s poetry and considers the implications of her material emphasis on the brain to the mental processes of thinking and reading. For Bradstreet, I argue, the brain is thinking insofar as it is constituted by thoughts and sensations it generates within itself. In analyzing how thought, sensation, and organ converge, I compare Bradstreet’s theory of the brain to those of Phineas Fletcher, Helkiah Crooke, and John Cotton. Ultimately, I suggest, this concept of material thinking--which pervades the self instead of being produced by it--is key to Bradstreet’s enigmatic originality.