...Donovan Sherman This essay reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a manifestation of early modern England’s anxiety over the soul. As something both essential and unrepresentable, the soul existed in the popular imagination as potentially monstrous or divine, distanced from both the body...

...Richard Sugg In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, human physiology was mediated by the vital spirits. These fine vapors of heated blood and air not only linked body and soul, but were central to processes and ideas of generation, sight, mind-body unity, muscle and nerve action, and emotion...

...Julie Paulson © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 a A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education...

...Nicholas McDowell Mortalism, the doctrine that the soul sleeps or dies with the death of the body to be reawakened or resurrected at the Last Judgment, was adopted by Luther but became a significant feature of the continental “radical Reformation” rather than of the Calvinist theology that shaped...

... of saints and the bodies of criminals, the bodies of the dying confessing on their deathbeds and the bodies of suicides choosing to be buried with their souls unprepared. A new frame of knowledge becomes possible when we familiarize ourselves with the face of death. The six essays presented in this special...

... standpoint body and soul maintained a bond after death, the relics of heretics must have seemed as frightening as those of the saints seemed blessed. The essay thus stresses the close relationship between saints and heretics through the exceptional characteristics attributed to their bodies. © 2015 by Duke...

... to enter into a long-standing conversation about how the physical environment potentially influenced the human will. A scalar logic of nature was embraced by some of these popular writers and rebuffed by others, depending on their view of how the soul was situated with respect to the material body...

... the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness...

... a key role in witchcraft cases. Through a close reading of a seventeenth-century trial of witchcraft from a history of emotions perspective, this article examines the ways in which the body, mind, and soul were interrogated in the heartland of early modern witch persecutions: the Holy Roman Empire. 2...

... is nonetheless imago Dei, spouse of the soul, potentially eternal. This sense even appears, as Joc- elyn Wogan-­Browne has shown, in certain passages of the Ancrene Wisse, a text often cited for its reviling of the flesh.9 To give one example of popular practice, in late medieval England...

... Fordham University Bronx, New York The medieval heart connected more than veins and arteries. Viewed as the dwelling place of the soul and the source of the body’s life, it was the privi- leged site of relationships between body and soul, affect and cognition, self...

... stresses the significance of almsgiving by enacting the final salvation or damnation of souls based on their charitable deeds. Locating Christ’s discussion of the works of mercy (Matt. 25) within the actual moment of the Last Judgment, the pageant places special emphasis on the absolute importance...

... or a dreamer, tradi- tional images of the naked soul, but a man defined by a particular institu- tional order: a prince. The prince’s tempters are not demonic irruptions from an infernal other-­realm but rather domestic conspirators, prancing dandies with silly clothes, worldly pretensions, and satirical...

... the relationship between physiognomy, the physical aspect of an individual as the object of artistic study, and physiognomics, the ancient science or technique grounded on the understanding that it was possible to read people's characters through their physical features, to know their souls through their bodies...

... of physical torture to describe this anguish: “You are my eternal Father, but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow...

... a mannys soule rst is cleensid from alle synnes and reformyd bi fulheed [fulness] of vertues to the ymage of Jhesu: and after whanne he is visited and is taken up from alle ear- theli and eisschli a ecciones, from veyn thoughtis and veyn ymaginacions of alle bodili...

... visible the feminine” in Christianity It may have been possible for a visionary to exert a kind of androgynous authority based on medieval assumptions that the soul itself was androgynous; that is, spiritual authority could quite logically be lived out in androgynous corpo- reality, as the body...

... of the chain of virtue in her work of mysticism, The Dialogue, written in the form of a dialogue between the Eternal Father and the human soul (Catherine’s own). There Catherine repeatedly describes the chain of virtue as a God-­given means for the bind- ing of Satan (whose destructive works are thereby...

... famous of the female visionaries who troubled the ecclesiasts and canon lawyers of the high and late Middle Ages. Although authenticated visions were respected, and could contribute to a case for canonization, the presumptively “natu- ral” porosity of female bodies and souls led to institutional...