Roundtable: The Willful Body (RSA 2026)
This roundtable seeks to understand the ways in which early modern people conceived of the body as being willful. Early modern poets, playwrights, and prose writers represent the body as having (or almost as if having) a will of its own. For instance, in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the titular protagonist desires to sign a devilish contract with his blood, but his blood congeals, preventing that damning deed. Margaret Cavendish imagines in Poems and Fancies cognitive processes as being directed by vital matter she metaphorizes as faeries, whose markets, funerals, and marriages dictate the functioning of the brain.