Lianne Habinek, The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2018), 283 pp. $55 CAD Hb. ISBN: 9780773553187
Could it be like a book, a box, a womb, an engine, a maze, or a palace? Early modern writers experimented with multiple metaphors for the brain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the outset, Lianne Habinek states her goal is to understand ‘lines of continuity’ between early modern and contemporary ideas and metaphors for thinking about the brain (4). Moving away from C. P. Snow’s conception of the ‘two cultures’ of modern academia – the sciences and the humanities – Habinek urges readers to embrace a ‘kind of culturelessness’ to truly grapple with the exchanges and interactions between scientists, artists, and artist-scientists to appreciate the history of the mind and brain in literature. Along the way, one goal of the book is to track how early modern artists and writers like Margaret Cavendish prefigured the 4E cognition framework that is popular among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind today (referring to approaches to cognitive processes as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended through the body, movement or action, environment, and technology). The book achieves its objective of providing an early modern history of the brain, cognition, and the mind, and makes a real contribution to the field of neurohumanities and the neuroscientific turn, to borrow from the title of an edited collection by Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell M. Johnson.
Anatomists and natural philosophers hypothesized the existence of a rete mirabile, or wonderful net, thought to be ‘a network of miniscule arteries ostensibly located at the base of the human brain’ (37). Philosophers and theologians, including the Cambridge Platonists, conceived of the rete mirabile as a possible nexus of the immortal, rational soul housed in the mortal body. In her analysis of the rete mirabile presented in the book’s first chapter, Habinek likens this proposed component to what Katherine Eggert terms ‘disknowledge’, a concept that refers to ‘an affinity for holding onto ideas that had been empirically proven incorrect’ but retained a degree of epistemological status due to its explanatory value (37). For early modern neuroscientists like Thomas Willis and Christopher Wren, the rete mirabile functioned as an anatomical metaphor capable of explaining the connection between corporeal matter and immaterial spirit. Habinek carefully explicates how the rete mirabile linked the anatomical studies of Andreas Vesalius and the poetry of John Donne, particularly ‘The Ecstasy’, 1633.
William Shakespeare’s plays involved ongoing discussions of head trauma, brain damage, and the nature of memory. The second chapter queries Hamlet in particular to claim that in the play ‘the violence of a willed oblivion inaugurates investigations that seek to reconstruct perceived damage to memory, to self, to brain, and to state, in order to understand the nature of such damage and how a healthy or normally functioning system would operate’ (69). Engaging texts like John Willis’s Mnemonica; Or, The Art of Memory, 1621, and Franciscus Arceus’s 1588 head wound treatise, Habinek shows how early moderns prefigured techniques that later evolved into lesion studies. In a lesion study, the objective for the cognitive scientist is to identify the connection between damage or disease to a specific region of the brain – such as the medial temporal lobe – and the decline in function of cognitive processes like memory, emotional regulation, or navigation (73). Here Habinek persuasively argues that Hamlet explores the potential dysfunction to memory caused by traumatic brain injury. Further, this section closes with a shorter analysis of discussions of the brain and memory in Macbeth.
Conception is taken for granted as a metaphor for thinking. Yet, its semantic connection to labor, generation, and childbirth are drawn out in a chapter examining the English physician William Harvey. In the third chapter, Habinek queries how the metaphor of the brain-as-womb and womb-as-brain reflects shared histories of conception and imagination that developed through anatomy and literature (92). Adding to this objective, the chapter further investigates how these metaphors shaped perceptions of women’s bodies as especially provocative and dangerous spaces for generating ideas (92). Harvey’s anatomy strikingly compared the brain and the uterus as visually analogous subjects, both defined by similar looking ventricles. Moreover, Harvey stresses the laboring characteristics of both, comparing the labor of thought and the labor of childbirth. Comparisons between sexual organs and parts of brain appeared as well in the work of the anatomist Helkiah Crooke, who described the pineal gland – thought by René Descartes to be the principal bridge between the physical mind and the immortal soul – in his Mikrokosmographia, 1615, as the ‘Glandula Pinealis [brain phallus]: some have resembled it to the end of the Virile member, and therefore call it penis Cerebri, the yarde of the brain’ (105).
Margaret Cavendish likened writing to a ‘disease of wit’, and this comparison invites readers to consider the neuroanatomical metaphors implanted in the Duchess of Newcastle’s natural philosophical texts (124). Chapter four takes up Cavendish’s metaphor of the brain as a ‘writing machine’ (122) to examine her uniquely non-dualist philosophy of mind. Habinek explains that Cavendish’s philosophy of mind differs from Cartesian dualism by positing that ‘matter itself is both self-moving and self-knowing’ (124). Given this chapter’s excellent analysis of both her romance, The Blazing World, and her vitalist-inflected Observations upon Natural Philosophy, both from 1666, it is perhaps surprising that Habinek does not take this opportunity to consider Cavendish’s work within the history of panpsychism. If Cavendish held that the ‘entirety of the material world can think’ (124), it seems that her positions could be understood alongside other canonical thinkers like Baruch Spinoza.
Not unlike pop-ups or tunnel books, flap anatomies are textbooks designed to include flaps or interactive elements that readers can lift to reveal additional layers or details of anatomical structures. A final chapter considers the translation and production of the neuroanatomical flap books of Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum by John Ireton and published by the English printing house of Joseph Moxton in 1670. Flap anatomies are a pivotal kind of book for Habinek. In the flap anatomy textbook, she argues, ‘the body became something of a mise en abyme of the structure in which it was house, a microcosm not simply of the universe but more particularly of the book itself’ (162). With its interactive qualities and multiple layers of visualization, the flap anatomy, for Habinek, is a precursor to the computed axial tomography scan and functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques for visualizing the brain.
Habinek concludes the book with a coda on Rembrandt’s 1656 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman and similar artworks of anatomical investigation. The painting’s focus on the brain as an organ of cognition invites viewers into the scene. Overall, the book is successful in challenging the two cultures thesis, which is still held as an unspoken truth in the academy. However, one might argue that in its central focus on the brain itself the book overlooks the nervous system and the senses in cognition, which is an unfortunate tendency given the book’s aim of engaging with 4E cognition in the early modern era. Nevertheless, The Subtle Knot provides an intriguing account of how early moderns made efforts to imagine and image the brain and will certainly be a landmark text in the burgeoning field of neurohumanities.
Chris Blakley, Irvine Valley College
