Susan Wiseman

At the borders of the human : beasts, bodies and natural philosophy in the early modern period

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy apparently established boundaries between the human and its others, but paradoxically, also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying and pornography). Essays focus on literary, cultural and scientific texts from the mid-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century.

Martyrdom in a Merchant World: Law and Martyrdom in the Restoration Memoirs of Elizabeth Jekyll and Mary Love

‘Something is branded in, so that it stays in the memory’, a philosopher observes, ‘only that which hurts incessantly is remembered’.1 In Restoration nonconformist political and religious memory martyrdom is the dominant figure for the ceaseless pain of the past, and its meanings in the present. Yet, for a memory to operate as a prompt to political action in the present it must be freed of some of its ties to the past — a branding in of memory involves, inevitably, a burning out of some details of the original event. Here I explore the legacy of an event from 1651, the treason trial and execution of the Presbyterian Christopher Love. My central texts are the narratives of two women, Elizabeth Jekyll and Mary Love. These texts, which I examine in some detail, seem to have had at least limited circulation after the Restoration. They offer a case study that we can use to consider, even re-evaluate, three interconnected issues: the place of the feminine voice in narrative produced by women in building Restoration nonconformist culture, the relationship between religious radicalism before and after the Restoration, and, more abstractly, the interconnection of law and narrative.

Abolishing Romance: Representing Rape in Oroonoko

In historical and literary critical writing on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), a text which stands on the threshold of modernity, a tension exists concerning whether it should be seen as fully participant in the concerns and genres of modernity or whether it is crucially bound to earlier ways of thinking and writing. In general, readings that emphasize the modernity of Behn’s text emphasize novelistic features and see various kinds of plantation slavery as a key context; those that seek to link the text to earlier features emphasize romance and the politics of the moment of production or setting.1 At stake in this concern is the durability versus the provisional nature of the categories by which Anglo-American late modernity experiences its pasts. That, at times, for critics Oroonoko stands in an allegorical and didactic relationship to late modernity is suggested by its framing in relation to studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery in North America. The deployment of such contexts arguably illuminates our desires for the text to perform ideological work in late modernity as much as, or more than, the categories it explores itself.2 Sometimes described as an ‘imperialist’ text, Oroonoko is so, indeed, in the wake of subsequent historical trajectories.

Introduction: the Dislocation of the Human

What is, what was, the ‘human’? This was the question we began with. At stake in such a question is what the history of the human can mean at a moment when, arguably, the active status of the category ‘human’ has lapsed under analysis from philosophy and the history of science, and been challenged by practices such as modifications of the body using prosthetics, robotics and artificial intelligence. The project of this book is to examine the categories and dynamics constituting the fragile category of the ‘human’ in the Renaissance to Enlightenment period, and to do so bearing in mind some of the critical reconsiderations of the term ‘human’ and its analogues — humanism, humanity, humane — made in the mid- to late twentieth century.

Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson

The concept of ‘refashioning’ is a loaded one in the context of the study of early modern literature. The title of this collection deliberately acknowledges the influence of that founding moment of New Historicist studies of the period, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning,1 and yet it is necessary to observe that Greenblatt’s text studiously avoided the self-avowedly paradoxical figure of Benjamin Jonson in its considerations of other literary, social and political shapings and fashioners of the Renaissance.