This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed 'kinesic intelligence', a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation. Through analyses of authors including Petrarch, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, the book explores how embodied cognition, historical context, and literary style interact to generate and shape responses to texts. It suggests that what was reborn in the Renaissance was partly a critical sense of the capacities and complexities of bodily movement. The linguistic ingenuity of humanism set bodies in motion in complex and paradoxical ways. Writers engaged anew with the embodied grounding of language, prompting readers to deploy sensorimotor attunement. Actors shaped their bodies according to kinesic intelligence molded by theatrical experience and skill, provoking audiences to respond to their most subtle movements. An approach grounded in kinesic intelligence enables us to re-examine metaphor, rhetoric, ethics, gender, and violence. The book will appeal to scholars and students of English, French, and Italian Renaissance literature and to researchers in the cognitive humanities, cognitive sciences, and theatre studies.

The notion of « exposure underlies much modern thinking about identity, representation, ethics, desire and sexuality. This provocative notion is explored in a collection of essay selected form, and inspired by, the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge in 2002. The authors engage with exposure as both object and mode of representation in a range of cultural media: literature, critical theory, visual art and film. They analyse a variety of works from the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods, examining not only canonical texts such as Montaigne's Essais but also lesser-studied works such as the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, the photomontage self-portraits of Claude Cahun, and the novel La Nouvelle Pornographie by Marie Nimier. This volume thus both illustrates and, more importantly, interrogates the richness of the term « exposure, in a way that is stimulating for students and researchers alike.

This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed 'kinesic intelligence', a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation. Through analyses of authors including Petrarch, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, the book explores how embodied cognition, historical context, and literary style interact to generate and shape responses to texts. It suggests that what was reborn in the Renaissance was partly a critical sense of the capacities and complexities of bodily movement. The linguistic ingenuity of humanism set bodies in motion in complex and paradoxical ways. Writers engaged anew with the embodied grounding of language, prompting readers to deploy sensorimotor attunement. Actors shaped their bodies according to kinesic intelligence molded by theatrical experience and skill, provoking audiences to respond to their most subtle movements. An approach grounded in kinesic intelligence enables us to re-examine metaphor, rhetoric, ethics, gender, and violence. The book will appeal to scholars and students of English, French, and Italian Renaissance literature and to researchers in the cognitive humanities, cognitive sciences, and theatre studies.