The Purple Island and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy, and Theology

"This work of interdisciplinary criticism argues that The Purple Island (1633), more consistently than any other literary work of the English Renaissance, shares aesthetics, figurality, rationality, purpose, method, morals, and justifications with Renaissance anatomy. The contemporaneousness of the anatomy in the poem is not only congruous with the moral and religious allegory, but is dependent upon the ingenuity and inventiveness of the figurative design. Creatively developing the metaphor of "Man" as an island realm and as microchristus, Phineas Fletcher's anatomical "speaking picture" is prominent among works of the era in its development of the natural-philosophical and poetic concept of"ingenuity."" "The book argues for the provenance of much of the Purple Island anatomy in Vesalius, Colombo, and Banister. Previous discussions of cardiovascular anatomy in The Purple Island have tended anachronously to make questions of its modernity dependent upon whether it is consistent with William Harvey's discovery of systemic circulation. This study concludes that Harvey's Lumlein lectures and Fletcher's poem agree on a combination of physiological ideas that would otherwise be unique to either of them. As the allegory in The Purple Island responds inventively to anatomical discovery, it is apposite to describe the poem not as appropriating anatomy for an intellectually reactionary project, but as unfolding its implications and associations."--BOOK JACKET.