In The Five Senses, Michel Serres describes writing as the human activity poised on the precipice between the material and immaterial:

Such a passage could have been found in the pages of the early modern works I have considered in this study. Offering advice for the cultivation of Christian virtue at the turn of the seventeenth century, for example, the Calvinist future Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot urged attention to the interaction of the physical body and immaterial soul:

In the previous pages, I have explored this abiding early modern interest in immateriality as the necessary correlate to material experience. My focus has been on what Elizabeth Grosz has termed ‘extramateriality’, ‘the inherence of ideality, conceptuality, meaning, or orientation that persists in relation to and within materiality as its immaterial or incorporeal conditions’. Grosz argues that the material and immaterial need to be ‘thought together’, an enterprise undertaken by the English writers working in the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century that I have considered here.