Chapter 14 begins with a general discussion of how the affordances and constraints of media affect their adoption and use, and conversely how they affect social interaction, language use, culture, and social structure.It then discusses the particular affordances, constraints, and effects of classes of media, beginning with language itself.

The Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s central argument: that in post-Reformation England, when girls were expected to marry and turn their minds toward husbands, early moderns viewed the stage of girlhood between puberty and marriage as one of cognitive liberty and productivity. The Introduction explains how the brain’s anatomy and mental faculties were commonly perceived, and when and to what extent the brain came to be sexed. It traces the transmission of ancient and medieval depictions of pubertal change, and demonstrates how early modern English adaptations of these sources reveal a gendered shift in the cognitive vocabulary used to describe what happens to male and female body-minds when they experienced “the change of fourteen years.” It articulates the interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks that inform the study: theories of embodied cognition, studies of adolescence, work by historians of science on the early modern humoral body, and recent scholarship in Girls’ studies. Also included are discussions about constructing a feminist literary practice that analyzes depictions of embodied female experiences, and how early modern scholars largely have overlooked girls and failied to recognize the dynamic brainwork that Shakespeare and his contemporaries attributed to adolescent females, fictional and real.

The Conclusion provides a brief overview of the scientific, social, and economic trends described in the preceding chapters. It argues that attitudes to the altered body were widely varied, characterised by flexibility and heteroglossia. It draws parallels between early modern attitudes towards the altered body and modern endeavours in bodily restoration and augmentation, including transhumanism. Embedded or extended cognition may be an apt way in which to think about these development, and these philosophical trends have much in common with early modern models of selfhood.

Studies of depression indicate the existence of temporal abnormalities, particularly as related to the perspectival and agentive aspects of lived experience in persons who undergo depression. With reference to these anomalies, there is a long-standing view in phenomenological psychopathology, reinforced by empirical studies, that depression involves a disruption of “intrinsic temporality.” This view is widely incorporated into contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, which link such a disruption to disorders involving affect, affordances, and narrative aspects of experience. We argue that classical phenomenological accounts of temporal abnormalities in depression do not warrant the supposition of a disruption to “intrinsic temporality,” and that this term itself is ambiguous. Instead, we understand depressive experience primarily in terms of affectivity, which does indeed feedback into the experience of lived time. Our view demonstrates a deeper consensus between phenomenological psychopathology and “4E” approaches, including work on both Gibsonian affordances and narrative, than is typically recognized.