Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul
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Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter charts how, through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson and Gibbon, ideas about medicine, politics, and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the Enlightenment (with its explosion of rational thinking and scientific invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) provided a lens through which we can best see the profound shift from the ethnocentric, otherworldly, Dark Ages to the modern, earthly, body-centered world we live in today. As man made in God's image gave way to the Enlightenments notion of the Self-made man, the body moved center stage. Porter writes brilliantly on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, tanned and dieted themselves: activities that we find familiar but that a Puritan drive would have considered satanic. And he explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blake, and Byron.
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