Stasis and Ecstasy: Archaeologies of the early modern self

Contents

PART ONE

PROLOGUE ........................................................................................................ 7

I. Pre-texts ............................................................................................................ 7

1. Moria’s Mirror ............................................................................................................... 7

2. Classical and Grotesque ................................................................................................ 9

II. Tools ...............................................................................................................11

1. Procedures .....................................................................................................................11

2. Terms ............................................................................................................................ 13

3. Unitary Selves, Fragmented Selves ............................................................................. 18

III. Archaeologies: Husserl to Baudrillard ..................................................... 19

1. Immanence-in-Transcendence: Phenomenological Selves .......................................... 19

2. Mapping the Mind: The Self in Psychoanalysis .......................................................... 30

3. The Disjunctuive Synthesis: Deleuze and Guattari...................................................... 40

4. The Ecstasy of Communication: Jean Baudrilard ........................................................ 43

IV. Genealogies: Foucault To Reiss .................................................................. 46

1. Traversed by Power: Foucauldian Selves .................................................................... 46

2. Moral Topography: Charles Taylor .............................................................................. 51

3. Early Modern Selves: State of the Art ......................................................................... 53

V. Stasis and Ecstasy: The Space of Self ........................................................ 56

PART TWO

GENEALOGIES: PYTHAGORAS TO POMPONAZZI ............................. 60

I. Migrant Souls, Corporeal Souls: Pythagoras To The Hermetica .............. 60

1. The Soul’s Bodies: Pythagoras’s Metempsychosis ...................................................... 60

2. The Soul Alone: Plato’s Dialogues .............................................................................. 65

3. The Body’s Soul: Aristotle’s De Anima ....................................................................... 71

4. The Bodily Soul: Epicurus to Lucretius ....................................................................... 73

5. The Turn (in)to the Body: Stoicism to Galen ............................................................... 78

6. The Arche of Soul: Plotinus ......................................................................................... 87

7. The Body in the Mind: The Spheres’ Tiring House .................................................... 89

II. The Word Become Flesh: The Gospels to the Kabbalah .......................... 96

1. “Birth from Above’’: the Pauline Self.......................................................................... 97

2. “I, the soul”: St Augustine ......................................................................................... 102

3. Ravished out of Oneself: The Continental Mystics ................................................... 105

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4. Thomist Rapture ......................................................................................................... 107

5. The Fire of Love: The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century ...........................112

6. The Trance of the Letter: the Medieval Kabbalah .....................................................115

III. Mortal Soul, Immortal Soul: Early Modern Debates .......................... 131

1. “The Shape of the Soul”: Theologia Platonica ......................................................... 133

2. Pico’s Proteus: The Praise of Plasticity...................................................................... 140

3. Reformed Selves ....................................................................................................... 147

4. The Neo-Aristotelians ................................................................................................ 153

5. “Turned Shapes”: Golding’s Ovid ............................................................................. 155

6. The Metamorphoses of Frenzy ................................................................................. 160

7. Conversing with Angels: John Dee ............................................................................ 170

8. The Medical Agenda: Opening the Vesalian Body ................................................... 172

PART THREE

ARCHAEOLOGIES. SPENSER, MARLOWE, SHAKESPEARE ........... 176

I. The Self in Narrative Space ........................................................................ 177

1. Narcissus and Beyond: Guillaume to Langland ........................................................ 177

2. The Ecstasies of Redcrosse: The Faerie Queene, Book I .......................................... 196

3. The Stasis of Guyon: The Faerie Queene, Book II.................................................... 219

4. Britomart, or the Ecstasy of Self-Production: The Faerie Queene, Book III ............ 265

II. The Stage of Self ......................................................................................... 292

1. Stasis in the Castle of Perseverance .......................................................................... 293

2. The Ecstasies of Anima .............................................................................................. 298

3. “I Hold the Fates”: Tamburlaine the Great ................................................................ 303

4. “Nor Am I out of It”: Doctor Faustus ........................................................................ 331

III. The Sonnet Self ........................................................................................ 345

1. “Ecce deus fortior me”: Dante to Sidney .................................................................. 346

2. “O, That You Were Yourself”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets ............................................... 365

PART FOUR

EPILOGUE ..................................................................................................... 389

Post-texts ......................................................................................................... 417

Works Cited .................................................................................................... 420

Notes ................................................................................................................. 438