In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Frammento e anatomia: Rivoluzione scientifica ecreazione letteraria
  • Arielle Saiber
Louis Van Delft . Frammento e anatomia: Rivoluzione scientifica e creazione letteraria. Ed. Carmelina Imbroscio. Trans. Francesca Longo. Scorciatoie: Collana del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne dell' Università di Bologna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. 278 pp. + 26 b/w pls. index. append. illus. bibl. €22. ISBN: 88-15-09658-2.

This highly erudite and fascinating work of intellectual history speaks as lucidly and importantly to philosophers and literary scholars as it does to historians of culture, science, and the arts. It makes a particularly significant contribution to the growing area of "Literature and Science," complementing recent early modern studies, such as those on wonder (Park and Daston; Campbell), on memory [End Page 990] (Bolzoni), on theater and nature (Blair), and on the body — particularly the "body in parts" (Hillman and Mazzio) — and medicine. Frammento e anatomia offers further information as to the modes by which and the extent to which literary and scientific worlds in this period shared their methodologies, goals, images, metaphors, and language. While many parts of Van Delft's text have been previously published, these "fragments" work well in a single volume.

The operating term of Van Delft's study is what the author calls "moral anatomy," that is, the seventeenth-century investigations into human nature and character that sought to find the "wheres" and "whats" of the mind, heart, and soul. "Moral anatomy" concerns itself much less with "hows" (the how-does-it-work realm of physiology), although Van Delft by no means negates the significant progress many of the authors, anatomists, and artists of this period made in answering such questions. What the author asks us to do is to take note of the vast array of physicians, poets, philosophers, and artists alike who were doing more locating, identifying, mapping, naming, and cataloguing — more cutting and pasting — than explaining. This focus on the "fragment," he posits, emerged in a variety of theories: theories of the micro-/macrocosm (Donne, Scève, Du Laurens, Laurent van Haecht, etc.); of human vs. animal physiognomy (Della Porta, Le Brun), of melancholy (Burton); of methodology (Descartes); of politics (Hobbes); of majorem gloriam Dei (Gracián); of the soul (Saint-Paul); of the interior andthe anthropocentric (Montaigne); of "self-love" and the anthropologic (LaRochefoucauld); and of the utilitarian (Huarte). Such "anatomical" explorations are manifest in both the very language of these theories — with their particular uses of traditional rhetorical figures, forms, and poetics — and in the decentralizing of the method by which encyclopedic knowledge in the Renaissance was accumulated. Frammento e anatomia is about the seventeenth century's adaptation of formal, metaphoric, and iconographic "fragmentation" as the most suitable means to discovering and describing what it is to be human.

The first two of eight chapters of Frammento e anatomia move from a general discussion of the relationship between philosophical discourses, literature, and anatomy to specific examples of how early modern thinkers conceived of the human body as a "little world." This cosmographical model fused with that of the body as a theater of memory and as a theater of the world. The seventeenth-century body-world-theater-of-memory metaphor, however, was not the idealized, unified Platonic one of the earlier Renaissance. It was composed of bits and pieces, circumscribed gazes (microscopic or telescopic), and "short forms," that is, of maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, thoughts, sayings, citations, inscriptions, and memento mori, which were often rather ominous and paradoxical. This metaphor acted as the knife that performed incisions into human behavior to reveal the inner workings of the mind, heart, and soul, much as the anatomists' knives sectioned and sliced into the flesh to learn the cartography of the human body. Literature dissected itself, and the language of "short forms," Van Delft argues, were everywhere in the seventeenth century — from the arts and sciences to the social, political, and religious realms. [End Page 991]

Frammento e anatomia, replete with an impressive array of textual examples of "moral anatomy," is further enriched by extensive visual examples of the excised, splintered, magnified, and mapped: dissections, anatomical models, anatomy theaters, skeletons, emblems of death, and depictions of man-as-cosmos. The illustrations (woodcuts...

pdf

Share