Description
Book SynopsisExamines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. This book looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds.
Trade Review"Keller's finely detailed investigation . . . . is a brilliant example of how early modern history can benefit from a thorough and sustained engagement with the best scholarship in the fields of cultural theory and science studies."
* Medical History *
"The scholarship is exemplary and exact, so this is a useful contribution to the history of literature and philosophy and the history of midwifery and medicine. Here is a sound topic honestly handled."
* Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance *
"Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves compellingly shows how medical writing took part in formulating emergent ideas about the self during the early modern period. Both in its larger thesis and in its readings of individual texts, Keller's book is a welcome addition to the study of early modern conceptions of medical knowledge, gender, and subjectivity."
* Early Modern Literary Studies *
"Keller's book offers a compelling series of close readings of selected texts, undertaking detailed analyses of their language to reveal implicit ways of thinking in early modern England. . . . Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves will thus be of most interest to literary scholars concerned with the emergence of the modern subject in written texts, but it should also appeal to historians of medicine as a companion to the historical accounts."
* ISIS *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. On Either Side of the Early Modern: Posthuman and Premodern Bodies and Selves
ANCIENT REVISIONS
2. Subjectified Parts and Supervenient Selves: Rewriting Galenism in Crooke's Microcosmographia
3. Fixing the Female: Books of Practical Physic for Women
MODERN MODULATIONS
4. Making Up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in Harvey's De generatione animalium
5. Embryonic Individuals: Mechanism, Embryology, and Modern Man
6. The Masculine Subject of Touch: Case Histories form the Birthing Room
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
