@article{1438133,
      recid = {1438133},
      author = {Davies, Abe,},
      title = {Imagining the soul in premodern literature /},
      pages = {1 online resource (1 volume) :},
      abstract = {This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in  literature spanning the tenth century and the age of  Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne,  constantly beleeve that they have an immortal soul. But he  also reflects that in fact there is nothing so well  established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul  is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a  soul. In understanding the question of man's disembodied  part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he  was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in  Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet  uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary  forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome  medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten  bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, Rene Descartes,  Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of  sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and  travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking  about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore:  these chapters range across all this and more, offering a  rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of  premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars,  students and the general reader alike. Abe Davies is a  Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, UK.  Focused principally on the literature of the Renaissance,  he is also interested in premodern literature more broadly  and in thinking beyond conventional historiographies of the  medieval and early modern periods. His work has appeared in  journals including Essays in Criticism and Modern Language  Review.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1438133},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66333-9},
}