Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies David Parry Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature. By Abe Davies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. xiv+ 244 pp. £109.99. ISBN 978–3–030–66332–2 (pbk 978–3–030–66335–3). Abe Davies's Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature is an ambitiously wide- ranging and earnestly but often delightfully quirky study of the literary representation of the soul. The definition of 'soul' is a vexed question to which this study repeatedly returns, but Davies has a persuasive working definition: 'the soul is the privileged part of the human that transcends embodiment, and […] represents and guarantees the integrity of selfhood' (p. 5). He suggests that the persistence of this idea over time across varied human cultures is due to the fact that it 'represents] a self […] that is separable from the body and its death' (pp. 14–15). However, this core definition of the soul leaves and to some extent, Davies argues, generates numerous ambiguities. Much of Davies's study is dominated by the teasing out of these ambiguities as they manifest themselves in literary texts. Despite the title gesturing towards a broader premodernity, the texts analysed are primarily from the early modern period. Although his opening introductory chapter offers a broad survey of the history of the soul in classical, biblical, and medieval sources, the one medieval text Davies treats at length is the Old English Soul and Body from the Exeter Book, which Chapter 2 of the book pairs with Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body' as early and late examples of [End Page 608] the body/soul debate genre. Another provocative pairing is found in Chapter 3, which pairs Donne's Anniversary poems with Descartes's Discourse on Method as 'travelogues' of the soul, both using the subjective inner experience of the soul as a reassuring anchor to restore meaning to a cosmos threatened by the 'spatial turn', in which bodies with a fixed place in the order of things had been replaced by bodies with no fixed boundaries extending into an infinite space. Chapter 4 explores the address to the soul in didactic religious writing through the lens of a close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'), structuring its discussion around the sonnet's images of the soul as military rebel, painted harlot, and prodigal son. Shakespeare is also the key focus of Chapter 5, which develops an innovative argument linking the 'nothingness' of the ghost of Old Hamlet to scientific debates around atomism in which the universe is made up mostly of void space. A brief concluding chapter notes how premodern debates around the body and soul relationship persist into present-day debates surrounding the nature of human consciousness. Davies highlights the early modern period as a transitional one in which classical and Christian notions of a soul that transcends materiality and mortality coexist with emerging challenges from materialist philosophy and physiology. However, he challenges neat periodization in either chronological direction. On the one hand, 'it proves impossible to think of the early modern soul without being drawn back into the ancient and medieval traditions from which it issues' (p. 17). On the other hand, citing Katherine Steele Brokaw and Jay Zysk, 'premodernity can look far from innocent itself of the "reasoned, sophisticated, and secularizing" forces' associated with materialist modernity (p. 19). Although it is not cited in this book, I was reminded of Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1991; trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993)). Davies seems to be suggesting rather that we have always been modern, although the net result of collapsing periodization with regard to the perennial debates around body and soul is arguably much the same. This book is packed full of creative connections and provocative new perspectives, some of which Davies acknowledges are 'more speculative than conclusive' (p. 214). Davies is at his most persuasive in showing how the texts he discusses struggle to separate body from soul, with the supposedly immaterial soul constantly described in bodily material terms (such as Joseph Hall's reproof of 'thy painted soul' (cited...