Allegories of Mastery: Sex, Science, and the Making of the Modern Body in Renaissance Utopias
Koepke-Nelson, Yvette Michelle
This item is only available for download by members of the University of Illinois community. Students, faculty, and staff at the U of I may log in with your NetID and password to view the item. If you are trying to access an Illinois-restricted dissertation or thesis, you can request a copy through your library's Inter-Library Loan office or purchase a copy directly from ProQuest.
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81393
Description
Title
Allegories of Mastery: Sex, Science, and the Making of the Modern Body in Renaissance Utopias
Author(s)
Koepke-Nelson, Yvette Michelle
Issue Date
2003
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Carol Thomas Neely
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, English
Language
eng
Abstract
This project argues that the seventeenth-century transition from the humoral body to the modern, anatomical body depended on constructions of gender/sex. I examine this process in The Faerie Queene Book 2, The Legend of Temperance (1596), Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (1633), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1655) to reveal its incompleteness and contradictions. In particular, the making of the modern body relied on the very humoral theory and cosmology of correspondence to which it is often opposed. This dissertation restores vital context---Galenic medicine's understanding of temperance, early modern models of spirits and matter---wholly ignored in critical reactions to these works, and contests the standard account of the modern body's emergence as the triumph of the empirical truth of anatomy. Analyzing instead how the modern body is constructed challenges usual assumptions that scientific discourse is distinct from the literary, that the modern subject depends on objectification, and that gender/sex is an add-on to both bodies and textual analysis.
Use this login method if you
don't
have an
@illinois.edu
email address.
(Oops, I do have one)
IDEALS migrated to a new platform on June 23, 2022. If you created
your account prior to this date, you will have to reset your password
using the forgot-password link below.
