This book may signal the emergence of a major new figure in the scholarship of early modern literatures in English – in his first book, Charalampous distils a vast array of textual sources in the service of a cohesive argument about the close connections between literature, philosophy, and medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These connections revolve around a principle of intelligent bodies, a view widely held among early modern thinkers, writers, and physicians that thought was a property shared by both body and soul. Informed readers may baulk at another book about the ‘mind–body relationship’ in the early modern period, as the academic publishing scene has produced more than enough works on this subject over the last two decades to make the ‘turn to the body’ a cliché. Such feelings will not be helped by the book’s title or by the first paragraph of the introductory essay – the book seems to assume that this mind–body relationship requires ‘rethinking’ and, as Charalampous states from the outset, that the ‘ways in which the body was theorised as an intelligent agent, with desires, appetites, and understanding independent of the mind’ is ‘a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period’ (1).
To say that a point of focus is ‘neglected’ is a risky strategy, and Charalampous used the same strategy at the beginning of his 2013 Intellectual History Review essay, which has been incorporated here almost unchanged (as indeed is his 2013 English Studies essay, which is included here as the first half of Chapter 5, on staging early modern tragedy). The interval between the first appearance of this material in print and its reproduction in this book might have provided an opportunity to ‘rethink’ this strategy of pleading neglect, in any case, as it soon becomes apparent to the reader that Charalampous is well aware of the dizzying amount of work that has been done on the early modern mind–body relationship. This book serves as a testament to its author’s erudition, which should render unnecessary the sort of gambit used to beg the readers’ interest here. If the reader can forgive the author his indulgence in the first lines of the book, there is much to be found of genuine interest in what follows, particularly for readers of early modern literature.
Charalampous is a literature scholar, first and foremost – after some excellent surveys of representation of, and arguments for, intelligent bodies in philosophy and medicine, there is a fascinating chapter on the centrality of corporeal thought in the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne; and then the remainder of the book covers the standards of literary scholarship: Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, and Milton. Readers with a bent toward intellectual history or histories of medicine might not find that the interpretative work undertaken in Chapters 3–6 provides much of a contribution to the agenda of rethinking mind and body, but this reviewer is confident that literature scholars and cultural historians will find that something original is being offered in these chapters, even in a field as saturated as body criticism. A consistent thread runs through these readings, established early in the discussion of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which the allegorical potential of literature is shown to be intrinsically linked in the early modern period to improvements of the body. This is because, as Charalampous shows, the ‘body of allegory’ is not simply a metaphor at a time when bodies and text were seen together as extensions of God’s work. Allegory functions with respect to the passions, as Torquato Tasso wrote in the sixteenth century, so it derives its particular rhetorical force from its capacity to convey the analogous link between thinking bodies and thinking souls. The bulk of the book is thus devoted to mapping the implications of that link for other English literary giants, in English, of the following century, and in this respect makes a valuable contribution to cultural and literary studies of the period.
The author possesses an easy style that guides the reader through the connections that he makes between literary, philosophical, and medical texts, and readers who are unfamiliar with any or all of these domains should still be able to follow his arguments. Yet there are a number of ways in which this book makes life difficult for readers – there are inconsistencies in citing historical works, so it is not always clear when the cited work was written; there are signs that some portions of the book have been moved or removed without cues being added to the breaks to assist readers (so, for example, a section begins ‘The most memorable idea in Johnson’s essay is …’ (76), but this is seven pages after Samuel Johnson is mentioned once, and no essay has been identified); and there are significant gaps in the index (so a search for Johnson, for example, to help resolve the last puzzle, comes up empty, as there is no entry for Samuel Johnson; nor is there an entry for Montaigne, who features regularly in the book). We might expect, and hope, to see more of Charalampous in future, at least in English studies; it is hoped that he will develop better openings and be more patient with those aspects of a text that even in our dualist world can, when not managed helpfully, make the reader feel bodily displeasure or ill-feeling.
