Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader
- Part I THE MATERIAL TEXT
- Part 2 READING AS POLITICS
- Part 3 PRINT, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Part 4 READING PHYSIOLOGIES
- 7 Reading bodies
- 8 Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society
- Part 5 READING IN THE TIME
- Index
7 - Reading bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader
- Part I THE MATERIAL TEXT
- Part 2 READING AS POLITICS
- Part 3 PRINT, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Part 4 READING PHYSIOLOGIES
- 7 Reading bodies
- 8 Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society
- Part 5 READING IN THE TIME
- Index
Summary
We are oppressed with [books], our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
Robert BurtonThose who would apply the analysis of Revolutions to the Positive study of Society must pass through the logical training given by the simpler phenomena of Biology.
Auguste ComteReading initially seems like the most disembodied of processes. It requires a minimum of physical activity. The eyes move imperceptibly over the page, the hands turn pages; the body occasionally stretches and fidgets, but only to avoid the aches of inactivity. In the framework of early modern ethical physiology, however, reading entailed a profound intensification of the perpetual agon between disease and health, between passion and reason. A highly risky activity, reading imports into the self forces that may either improve or contaminate it. It can stir the emotions to virtue or to vice, but even the excitation to virtue is hazardous, since the emotional medium of such excitation is an inherently unruly and unhealthy arena, preternaturally subverting the precarious rule of reason. In this essay I want to think about what was imagined to happen in the embodied self of the reader. I also want to ask why the quiet hazards of reading were so frequently likened to the metabolic processes of digestion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England , pp. 215 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003