Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture by Karen Raber

Author:Karen Raber [Raber, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, General
ISBN: 9780812208597
Google: QdwAAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0812245369
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

Resting in his orchard, Hamlet Senior occupies a secluded “secure” space within the confines of the castle walls, his seat of rule; the architecture—porches, gates, alleys—of both his body and his nation are defended by the garden and castle walls, until breached by Claudius’s poison, which travels like an invading army through a city.

The analogies that link human microcosm (the body) and communal macrocosms (the castle, the city, the abstraction of the state) in this passage are commonplace in early modern writing; their most frequent expression naturalizes social relations by comparing a well-ordered political and social world to the harmonious and temperate body. Renaissance medicine marveled at the elegant plan of the body’s internal structures, so like the well-planned castle, estate, or town, appropriating them to describe the balances and attentive regulation necessary to maintain correct relations between the rational leadership and the unruly masses of the commonwealth. Literary works like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (in which Guyon is restored in Book 2 by a visit to the House of Alma), and medical self-help treatises like Thomas Elyot’s Castell of Health (1541), elaborate the analogy’s insistence on self-government in the interests of communal prosperity.²

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