'Such wondrous science': Brain and metaphor in early modern English literature

The idea of metaphor, as a figure of connection, transportation, and communication, suggests an approach to a central intellectual problem in early modern England: how do we reconcile the fact of the mind's apparent intangibility with its very tangible control over the physical body? My dissertation argues that in the seventeenth century the burgeoning discipline of early modern neuroscience emerged by drawing on a field of metaphors shared by other intellectual domains, and, as importantly, that these metaphors were used in those other domains to describe the soul. At heart, the period was wrestling with the problem of how the immaterial soul could hold sway over the material body. While today we see this as a question of Cartesian duality, the quandary has an earlier origin: the pervasive efforts in the 1600s to bridge the divide between the body and the soul. By 1664, when Thomas Willis published his Cerebri anatomi---the first neuroanatomical text---the brain was broadly accepted as the locus of the rational soul. Yet how the brain came to be viewed as the organ in which the link between the material and the immaterial was forged depended, I argue, upon the scientific deployment of literary metaphors to describe that connection between soul and body. In its capacity for bridging the gap between spiritual substance and immaterial matter, metaphor renders the soul an object of empirical inquiry by tying it to the brain.