Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England

This book explores how 17th-century writing intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter, and how humans might reconfigure their place in a network of non-human relations. Snider recovers the material and body worlds of 17th-century culture as treated in poetry, natural philosophy, medical treatises, and prose fiction. Drawing on science studies and new materialism, the book considers writers including Milton, Cavendish, Robert Herrick, and Robert Boyle. Mining the interplay of human and non-human worlds, it will appeal to literary scholars, cultural historians, philosophers, and those studying ecocriticism or the history of the body.