Our panel aims to explore the philosophical and methodological questions facing early modern feminist studies today, with a particular emphasis on the role of the body and its liminal status as a material object and a metaphorical site. In differing ways, our panelists will explore what it means to restore the biological or physical body to a definition of sexual difference as we understand it in early modern texts.

Each paper will be shorter than usual—14 minutes—and the respondent will have 15 minutes. 18 mins are reserved for discussion.

Over four decades of feminist criticism, early modern studies been through a series of phases tethered largely to trends in feminist theory at large—and today we find ourselves in the scene of several impasses. First is what Wendy Brown cites as feminism’s success in entering the cultural mainstream and the ensuing loss of the injury it needs to survive (1997); and second is what Melissa Sanchez and Ania Loomba cite as the conflict between a newer anti-essentialist queer and intersectional work and what is perceived as the outdated essentialisms of second-wave feminism (2017). While we think these are persuasive, we also want to propose another. One casualty of new historicism’s tendency towards political allegory and queer theory’s emphasis on performativity has been the biological, fleshly body. Thus, this panel represents an effort to find a new, non-essentializing language of the early modern body as represented in literature.

Recently feminism’s antibiological foundation has been named by several important critics working in the intersection between science and the humanities (Elizabeth A. Wilson; Denise Riley; Luciana Parisi), who take the origins of this tendency as a defense against anti-feminist arguments that sustain inequality through reductive myths about “natural” difference. It is perhaps a sign of feminism’s overall health that we can begin to productively challenge these foundational assertions. In terms of our specific field, we think that central early modern conceptions of the body, such as depictions of the humors, illness, and physiognomic differences, are frequently treated more as metaphors than as literal structures of experience. The cost of this has been a neglect of the relationship between words and bodies, especially as they are modulated by the abstracting frameworks of theology, politics, and allegory; and the literalizing effects of extreme sensory experiences like pleasure, pain, and forms of disease.

In its origins this panel is informed by the humoral work of Gail Kern Paster, Elaine Scarry’s work on embodiment, and Mary Crane’s engagements with neuroscience in Shakespeare’s Brain (2001). In more recent years, we have been energized by the deep and various methodological engagements offered by Valerie Traub’s recent edited volume The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), and by Melissa Sanchez and Ania Loomba’s Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies (2017). Our panel advances work on the early modern body by interrogating the relationship between words and flesh in the context of this sharp methodological restaging.

As part of an ongoing project, Kathryn Schwarz interrogates depictions of plague and contamination as they relate to the feminine quality of virtue. Where feminine virtue is traditionally regarded as an implacable, immaterial quality, Schwarz finds that early modern texts curiously present virtue in the language of disease and bodily finitude. Why, Schwarz asks, is the cataclysmic imaginary of plague writing populated with simultaneously virtuous and virulent virgins, mothers, and wives? Reading the Madonna of Misericordia in Italian painting, and Thomas Dekker’s story of a plague-addled bride, Schwarz explores the ways in which contagion cross-couples thought and flesh, language and matter, arguing that the “plague of virtue” has the paradoxical power to chastise and purify the social body as a whole through “epidemics” of propagated moral examples.

Coming out of her current book project on early modern race and gender, Kimberly Coles’s paper responds to a paradox in which early modern scholarship’s tendency to overlook the biologically sexed body comes at the same time that our political moment is fixated alternately on its authenticity and flexibility. In the background of Coles’s argument is an impasse in which feminist studies and gender studies have stopped talking about sex in mutually intelligible ways: where gender studies disregards biological sex in favor of linguistic categories, traditional feminist scholarship has been both essentializing and homogenizing. Offering readings of Spenser’s Epithalamion and Donne’s “Epithalamion at Lincoln’s Inn,” Coles resituates the biological body in debates about politics, corporeality, and spirit in the metamorphic violence of the marriage bed.

Connie Scozzaro looks at representations of love potions in early modern literature, asking questions about consent, medicine, and sexual violence. Looking to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Scozzaro argues that in lieu of superior physical powers, love drugs were used by female characters to engender states of simulated love or total docility in resistant male objects. With reference to John Gerard’s widely-read Herball (1597) Scozzaro asks: how did practical botany alter physical bodies and help early modern women level the playing field in matters of sexuality? Are love potions instruments of rape—and if so, how does this challenge the figure of the male rapist as defined in the period?

Claire Waters will respond to the panelists from a perspective adjacent to early modern studies—her work on medieval cultures of virginity and sainthood make Waters well-placed to offer a wider view on premodern representations of bodies both biological and spiritual, material and metaphorical. Waters’s work on medieval death as a scene of “conversion and change” (Translating ““Clergie””, 68) will frame our discussion with the Christian telos that demands the ultimate supersession of the material body. Her current project on materiality, metaphoricity, and embodiment explores the rosary on the cusp of the late medieval and early modern periods. Reflecting on the pitfalls of presentism facing the feminist critic of historical literature, Waters will consider the pressures of secularization on discourses of the body in the approach of the Enlightenment and beyond.