The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience by Lianne Habinek

Reviewed by: The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience by Lianne Habinek Jonathan Sawday Lianne Habinek. The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. xvi + 283 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978–0–7735–5318–7). The main phrase in the title of Lianne Habinek’s thoughtful book is derived from John Donne’s late sixteenth-century poem “The Extasie”—a meditation on the union of the human soul and the body, mediated by the transforming power of love: As our blood labours to begetSpirits, as like soules as it can,Because such fingers need to knitThat subtile knot, which makes us man: But “The Extasie” is also a brilliant exercise in self-consciously sophistic reasoning, in which all of Donne’s considerable learning and rhetorical wit are deployed in order to gain access to somebody else’s (female) body. It is a poem of seduction but one that also offers us a window into what Habinek describes as a “cultural milieu that has shaped our modern understanding of the brain” (p. 16). And thus, the second element of Habinek’s title that (Donne-like) seems to link together two entirely heterogeneous entities: early modern English literature and what Habinek terms the “birth” of neuroscience. This might raise eyebrows amongst modern scientifically orientated readers. After all, the term “neuroscience” (the OED informs us) doesn’t really enter the lexicon until well into the twentieth century, though the suffix “neuro,” meaning of or connected to the nervous system is ancient, and does indeed begin to appear in revitalized forms in the early modern period, though often in contexts [End Page 117] which are likely to puzzle the twenty-first-century reader: who now is familiar with “neurospasts”—a term once used to describe puppets or marionettes moved by strings? Neurospasts make no appearance in Habinek’s book, which is a pity, since they take us to the heart of the debate she is exploring: the link between a seemingly autonomous creature and the physical world in which it lives and moves, and of which it is very much a part. This is territory which has been well traversed in recent years, particularly among historians of philosophy and science. Habinek’s endeavor is to straddle scientific and literary culture, to bridge that divide, the foundations of which she (in common with many others) attributes to C. P. Snow’s infamous “two cultures” argument of the late 1950s. But Habinek is also (I think rightly) critical of many “third-culture” writers (figures such as Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and the late Oliver Sacks) who write from the scientific side of the gulf, and for whom a picture or a poem is all too easily stripped away from its social, cultural, and historical context in order to probe a more biologically rooted explanation for its existence or even for its reception.1 Habinek herself can’t entirely escape from this dualistic habit of thought, though she makes a brave case for the idea for “reintegration” based on contemporary neuroscience as a “translational discipline” in which key methods and theories become “transferable—sometimes problematically” to other disciplines (p. 65). So, in her five closely reasoned chapters she takes us on a tour of a landscape that (at least in its main outlines) will be familiar to historians of science and medicine in the early modern period: the many claims and errors surrounding that infamous anatomical organ of appearance and reappearance, the rete mirabile2; the case of Hamlet and memory; William Harvey and his explorations of conception and generation in the mid-seventeenth century; the writings of Margaret Cavendish, with the stress on her somewhat hazy ideas concerning “intellectual conception” (p. 133) together with the form and function of the brain; and, finally, the representation of cranial structures in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing and anatomical illustrations. On each of these topics, Habinek writes clearly and persuasively and with real insight. And yet, the book as a whole cannot quite escape from that stand-off between literature and science, so forcefully enunciated by a British scientist turned novelist...

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