Abstract
Chapter 1 examines the “Competing Motions” of the corporeal and incorporeal souls in Waiter Charleton’s satirical narrative, The Ephesian Matron (1659), which features long interpolated digressions on Cartesian and Lucretian philosophies. The matron, mourning her husband, experiences intense lust for a soldier. Their encounter gives occasion for Charleton to draw on Lucretian atomism in De rerum natura to discuss the nature of the corporeal soul. In the text, Charleton revises Aristotle’s view of the tripartite soul and mind in De anima and Descartes’s separation of the body from the soul in Les Passions de L’Ame (1649). Charleton features a dual soul model, one immortal, also called one’s “rational” soul, and the other the corporeal, or “sensitive” soul.
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Notes
Riese, A History of Neurology, (New York: MD Publications, 1959), 50–60.
Steve Ridge, “‘Proper Motions, Actions and Uses’: Physiological Knowledge as the Only Means to Rational Politics in Restoration England,” Medical History: An International Journal for the History of Medicine and Related Sciences, 55.3(2011), 339–42.
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Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 38–46.
Liza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 140–1.
Nevenka Podgornik, “Depression — a socio-cultural way of manifesting women’s psychological crises,” Anthropological Notebooks, 18.2 (2012), 57.
See Petronius, Satyricon, trans. Michael Heseltine, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 235.
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© 2013 Laura Linker
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Linker, L. (2013). Competing Motions. In: Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399885_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399885_2
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