Digestion and Emotion in Early Modern Medicine and Culture, c. 1580–c. 1740

This thesis presents an overview study of the relationship between digestion and emotion in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English medicine and culture between the approximate dates of 1580 and 1740. By placing a wide range of medical and non-medical writings side by side, this study aims to reconstruct a former way of being in the world which might be termed ‘embowelled emotion,’ in which affective states were perceived and at times explicitly described as having their origins in the digestive tract. It argues that the belly and bowels should be accorded a central role in accounts of early modern emotion, challenging recent trends in Renaissance studies which have sought instead to emphasise the ‘immaterial’ dimensions of affective experience. As such, it presents a contribution to a large and ever-growing body of work on embodiment in early modern England, furthering current interdisciplinary debates over the relationship between body and emotion in early modern culture.