Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture

Abstract

This interdisciplinary collection explores the sense of touch in early modern culture. Associated with science & medicine, with religious knowledge and artistic creativity, nevertheless touch was most frequently aligned with bodily pleasure and sensuality. 1. Introduction: The "Sense of All Senses" / Elizabeth D. Harvey -- 2. Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch / Margaret Healy -- 3. "Handling Soft the Hurts": Sexual Healing and Manual Contact in Orlando Furioso, The Faerie Queene, and All's Well That Ends Well / Sujata Iyengar -- 4. The Subject of Touch: Medical Authority in Early Modern Midwifery / Eve Keller -- 5. The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope / Elizabeth D. Harvey -- 6. As Long as a Swan's Neck? The Significance of the "Enlarged" Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy / Bettina Mathes -- 7. New World Contacts and the Trope of the "Naked Savage" / Scott Manning Stevens -- 8. Noli me tangere: Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England / Elizabeth Sauer and Lisa M. Smith -- 9. Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance / Carla Mazzio -- 10. Living in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure / Misty G. Anderson -- 11. Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Sensual Ethics of Architecture / Rebekah Smick -- 12. The Touch of the Blind Man: The Phenomenology of Vividness in Italian Renaissance Art / Jodi Cranston -- 13. Afterword: Touching Rhetoric / Lynn Enterline.