Chapter 1 - Fiction, the Body and the State

Summary

This chapter explores the emergence of a new kind of anatomical knowledge in the early modern period, arguing that such anatomical knowledge inaugurates a new conception of the relation between the body and the state. This conception can be seen in the work of Hobbes, Descartes and Locke and is also bodied forth in the art and literature of the period. The chapter reads this emerging prosthetic imagination as it is pictured in Rembrandt’s images of anatomised bodies, and in the development of a novelistic account of interior being, as it imagined in More, Francis Bacon and Margaret Cavendish. The chapter ends with an exploration of the prosthetic imagination as it is given its fullest early modern expression in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.