Afterword

Early modern scholarship’s turn to the body in the 1990s was driven by powerful dissatisfaction with the universal models of autonomous selfhood and trans-historical emotion inherited from traditional intellectual history. Newer cultural histories of the body produced a foundational recognition of the early modern body’s porous openness and of an ecological self in continual interaction with its environment. In rich archival detail, the chapters in this volume refine the embodied self’s complex placement in its inspirited cosmos from the animated ground up. Together, they demonstrate that the geography of embodiment is fundamental to any properly constituted historical phenomenology because the early moderns believed that their passions were reflected everywhere—in meteorology, sleep, landscapes, sheepfolds, and foreign lands.