This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the
complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early
modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the
body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the
frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and
beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism,
knowledge, and art. For the early moderns, touch was the earliest
and most fundamental sense. Frequently aligned with bodily pleasure
and sensuality, it was suspect; at the same time, it was associated
with the authoritative disciplines of science and medicine, and
even with religious knowledge and artistic creativity.The unifying
impulse of "Sensible Flesh" is both analytic and recuperative. It
attempts to chart the important history of the sense of touch at a
pivotal juncture and to understand how tactility has organized
knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The contributors examine
in theoretically sophisticated ways both the history of the
hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and
cultural consequences that derive from it.The essays consider such
topics as New World contact, the eroticism of Renaissance
architecture, the Enclosure Acts in England, plague, the clitoris
and anatomical authority, Pygmalion, and the language of tactility
in early modern theater. In exploring the often repudiated or
forgotten sense of touch, the essays insistently reveal both the
world of sensation that subtends early modern culture and the
corporeal foundations of language and subjectivity.
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