ABSTRACT
Some humoralist frameworks traded in notions of stability, especially when identified with typologies of personality traits, the humoralist body was always marked by a contextual dependency on time and place that gave it the resources to undermine or consume this fixity. This chapter analyses humoralism not so much as a system of medicine but as an ontology of the body, through which the impressionable nature of ancient and early modern biology is assessed. The permeable and malleable body of humoralism has both resemblances to and differences from the modernistic perception of corporeal plasticity. According to a persistent Scholastic and Renaissance tradition, humours and other bodily aspects could also be moved “spiritually”. This cultural context, in which matter was shaped and excited by the internal sense of imagination, can explain the pervasiveness of the doctrine of maternal imagination. However, with early modern embryological debates the doctrine of maternal imagination broadened in scope.
