ABSTRACT
Like most of us today, people living in the early modern period thought of their bodies in highly material terms. The materiality of the body was at once similar to and considerably different from the many kinds of material culture discussed within this research companion. It was different in the sense that it was animate and thus living, meaning that it was infused with an ‘anima’ or soul not found in inorganic objects. But it was similar in the sense that the material elements or ‘matter’ thought to make up the body were highly related to those found in the wider natural world. Like material objects external to the body, the material elements inherent in the body could be manipulated in ways that helped shape and ideally improve a person’s experience of that world. And while such precepts might not strike us as particularly surprising, similar as they are to a modern Western understanding of the body, the early modern medical and scientific theories used to understand and explain this materiality are very likely far less familiar. This chapter outlines the central medical and scientific theories about the materiality of the body present in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European culture, as well as the ways in which these theories were applied in daily life and medical practice. Understanding such thinking helps us appreciate how early modern people experienced the materiality of the world from the inside out, not only in terms of bodily sickness and health but also in terms of the essential materiality shared across the body, mind and natural world.
