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Movement in
Renaissance Literature
Exploring Kinesic Intelligence
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Edited by Kathryn Banks
and Timothy Chesters
Series editors
Bruce McConachie
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Blakey Vermeule
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, USA
This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception,
emotions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities
that constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and
embodied performances.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14903
Kathryn Banks • Timothy Chesters
Editors
Movement in
Renaissance Literature
Exploring Kinesic Intelligence
Editors
Kathryn Banks Timothy Chesters
Durham University Cambridge University
Durham, United Kingdom Cambridge, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-3-319-69199-2 ISBN 978-3-319-69200-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963054
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
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Printed on acid-free paper
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generous support of
Terence Cave’s project, “Thinking with Literature,” funded by the Balzan
Foundation and St John’s College, Oxford. To Terence Cave and those
institutions go our warmest thanks. Our interest in kinesic intelligence
developed through the exchanges and discussions afforded by the Balzan
project (from 2010), on which we both held positions as Research
Lecturers. The present volume took shape in a workshop held at Clare
College, Cambridge (25–27 September 2014). We are grateful to the par-
ticipants in the workshop, as well as those in other project events which
preceded it.
K.B. and T.C.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters
2 Chiastic Cognition: Kinesic Intelligence Between

the Reflective and the Pre-reflective in Montaigne
and Scève 13
Terence Cave
3 Turning Toward the Beloved (Virgil, Petrarch, Scève) 31

Ullrich Langer
4 Scève’s Denominal Verbs 55

Timothy Chesters
5 Metaphor, Lexicography, and Rabelais’s Prologue

to Gargantua 81
Kathryn Banks
6 The Gunpowder Revolution in Literature:

Early Modern Wounds in Folengo and Rabelais 109
Guillemette Bolens
vii
viii Contents
7 The Finger in the Eye: Jacques Duval’s Traité des

Hermaphrodits (1612) 133
Dominique Brancher
8 Exchanging Hands in Titus Andronicus 155

Laura Seymour
9 “Cabin’d, Cribb’ed, Confin’d”: Images of Thwarted

Motion in Macbeth 171
Mary Thomas Crane
10 Shakespeare’s Vital Signs 189

Raphael Lyne
11 Kinesic Intelligence on the Early Modern English Stage 213

Evelyn Tribble
12 How Do Audiences Act? 225

Ellen Spolsky
Index241
List of Contributors
Kathryn Banks is Associate Professor in French at Durham University.

She is the author of Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance (2008) and has
published essays on Rabelais, sixteenth-century poets, apocalyptic writing,
Chrétien de Troyes, and cognitive approaches to literature. She was
awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2013 for research into the specifici-
ties of literary thinking.
Guillemette Bolens is Professor of Medieval English Literature and
Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. She is the author of
La Logique du corps articulaire (2000), The Style of Gestures: Embodiment
and Cognition in Literary Narrative (2012; French edition 2008), and
L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire
du lecteur (2016). She has published on embodiment, gestures, and kine-
sic analysis in Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, Chrétien de Troyes, Layamon, the
Gawain Poet, Chaucer, Beryn, Cervantes, Sterne, Proust, Joyce, Chaplin,
Keaton, Tati, and Eddie Izzard.
Dominique Brancher is Associate Professor in Humanities (French sec-
tion) at Basel University. Her research focuses on the interactions between
literature and knowledge in the Renaissance (medicine, philosophy, natu-
ral philosophy, botany). She is the author of ‘Deshonnestes’ pudeurs. La
fabrique équivoque d’une passion à la Renaissance and Quand l’esprit vient
aux plantes: botanique sensible et subversion libertine (both 2015).
ix
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature in the University

of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. His
publications in Renaissance studies include The Cornucopian Text: Problems
of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979; French translation 1997),
Pré-histoires: textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (1999), Pré-histoires II:
langues étrangères et troubles économiques au XVIe siècle (2001), and How
to Read Montaigne (2007). As the winner of the 2009 Balzan Prize for
literature since 1500, he directed a three-year project designed to explore
cognitive approaches to literature. His book Thinking with Literature:
Towards a Cognitive Criticism was published in 2016.
Timothy Chesters is University Lecturer in Sixteenth-Century French
Studies and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He is the author of
Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France: Walking by Night (2011). He has
also published on Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, nineteenth-century
responses to Renaissance writing (with an emphasis on Flaubert), and on
cognitive approaches to literature.
Mary T. Crane is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English at Boston
College, where she is also director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts. She
is the author of Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England
(1993); Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2000), and
Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-
Century England (2014).
Ullrich Langer is Alfred Glauser Professor of French at the University of
Wisconsin—Madison. His recent publications include Lyric in the
Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (2015) and Penser les formes lit-
téraires du plaisir à la Renaissance (2009). He is working currently on the
“remonstrance” in the French Ancien Régime and on movement and the
poetry of lamentation in the Renaissance.
Raphael Lyne is a Reader in Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of
English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College.
His publications include Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses,
1567–1632 (2001), Shakespeare’s Late Work (2007), Shakespeare, Rhetoric
and Cognition (2011), and Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance
Literature (2016). He has also written several articles on cognitive literary
theory, and a blog entitled ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’
(http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/cogblog/).
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
xi
Laura Seymour is an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University. She com-

pleted her PhD on Shakespeare and cognition at the University of London in
2015. She is currently researching enactive cognition in seventeenth-century
non-conformist communities thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust.
Her other book chapters are contained in T he Cognitive Humanities:
Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (ed. Peter Garratt, 2016) and
Theatre, Performance and Cognition (ed. Amy Cook and Rhonda Blair,
2016).
Ellen Spolsky is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Bar-
Ilan University in Israel, and a literary theorist with interests centring on
the cognitive/epistemological aspects of interpretation and on the
embodiment of knowing in language texts and in pictures, as these are
manifest in their cultural and historical contexts.
Evelyn Tribble is Professor and Donald Collie Chair of English at the
University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. She is the author of Margins and
Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1993), Writing
Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age (with Anne Trubek, 2003),
Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering (with Nicholas Keene,
2011), and Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s
Theatre (2011). Her book Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre:
Thinking with the Body will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.
List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem,

Basel, Oporinus, 1543. Universitätsbibliothek Basel,
UBH AN I 15 137
Fig. 12.1 The Sleeping Hermaphroditus, a Roman copy of a Greek 2nd c.
statue, on a mattress sculpted by Bernini, 1620. Louvre, Paris 233
Fig. 12.2 Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, Susanna and the Elders,
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland 235
Fig. 12.3 Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas (1602–1603),
Sanssouci, Potsdam236
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters
Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.
—Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell,
ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), 84
When the speaker of Marvell’s poem addresses these (almost) closing

words to his “coy mistress,” exactly what has he communicated? A power-
ful sense of urgency, certainly, in keeping with the general thrust of the
poem as sexual invitation. But just what are readers supposed to see? If we
look more closely, this “image” appears a perfect instance of what
Christopher Ricks calls Marvell’s tendency to transcend the visualizable.1
The rolled-up ball of strength and sweetness in the first couplet is evidently
We are very grateful to contributors to this volume for their valuable comments
on a draft of this Introduction.
K. Banks (*)
Durham University, Durham, UK
T. Chesters
Clare College, Cambridge, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. Banks, T. Chesters (eds.), Movement in Renaissance Literature,
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_1
2 K. BANKS AND T. CHESTERS
connected to the “tearing through” of the second. But how? Is the ball
the thing tearing or the thing torn? “Tear through … the iron gates” is
unclear too. “With rough strife” could imply the resistance of a closed
grill, the pleasures forcibly dragged between its bars. But the gates might
equally be open, with a ball-couple tearing along a path through them.
Or, perhaps, we might picture the lovers propelling a ball at speed. This
faint suggestion is prolonged in the subsequent and final lines of the poem,
where we find “one ball” suddenly scaled up to become “our sun” driven
along by the poet and his mistress:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run. (84)
And yet all these things the lover’s words make visible only obscurely, and
possibly not at all.
What does seem certain is that the image engages the body as well as
the eye: the action verbs “roll … up” and “tear” prompt a powerful sense
of force first gathered then unleashed. Sound and rhythm contribute: in
the fricative violence of line 3, and as the pace slows in the spondaic “rough
strife” only to rattle through the subsequent line. But acknowledging the
centrality of embodiment to the image does not make it any more straight-
forward. That the poet’s mistress might struggle to make global sense of
it, for all its embodied immediacy, may not much matter to him. After all
immediacy, and not good sense, is precisely what the poet urges: “let’s do
this violent, constraint-defying thing,” he seems to say, “and not worry
about the details.” The position of the engaged reader or critic, to whom
the details do matter, is a little different, however. He or she likewise has
no choice but to be struck by the physical shock of Marvell’s lines. But this
does not mean that the full potential import of the image is experienced
with immediacy. What begins as a pre-conscious response is likely to be
expanded into a series of more deliberate rehearsals, as we model in more
reflective and conscious ways a wide variety of candidate movements to
which the verse appears to gesture, such as forcefully pressing through an
iron grill or rolling a ball at speed. Thematically speaking, “To His Coy
Mistress” pits spontaneity against deliberation, and hopes the first will
win. But, cognitively speaking, the poem calls on a mixture of both from
careful readers. It calls on what, drawing on work in the cognitive sciences
and cognitive humanities, we propose to call their “kinesic intelligence.”
INTRODUCTION 3
Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, the cognitive revolution
has transformed disciplines as diverse as linguistics, artificial intelligence,
psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. “Cognitive” should
not be understood here as restricted to so-called higher-order ratiocinative
modes of thinking. As philosopher Ray Jackendoff puts it, “cognition”
means “an organism’s understanding or grasp of the world and its ability
to formulate and execute actions in the world.”2 In other words, the cog-
nitive sciences understand mental processing to be geared towards action,
and include within the “cognitive” the non-rational, bodily or emotional.
Thus the psychologist Raymond Gibbs warns that “we must not assume
cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembod-
ied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought
are inextricably shaped by embodied action.”3 Indeed, as the philosopher
Shaun Gallagher puts it, “the broad argument about the importance of
embodiment for understanding cognition has already been made in
numerous ways, and there is a growing consensus across a variety of disci-
plines that this basic fact is inescapable.”4
We cite Gibbs, Gallagher and Jackendoff to give our readers a sense of
the importance of the embodied paradigm in general rather than to align
ourselves with any version of it in particular. Conceptions of embodied
cognition take diverse forms, and have contributed to diverse cognitive
literary research. Particularly influential in the so-called “first wave” of
literary cognitivism was work by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark
Turner, which argued that language derived metaphorically from our cor-
poreal and spatially oriented life.5 More recently, theories of extended
mind or distributed cognition (often grouped together as “4E cognition”)
have come to the fore.6 Theorists of Extended Mind (EM) understand the
cognitive system to include not only the brain but also the body and the
world. In common with other second-wave cognitive literary approaches,
and our own, Extended Mind presents cognition as a combination of both
universal and historical features, emphasizing neural plasticity and the
“extension” of human cognition into language and culture. For instance,
literary scholars have employed EM to explain how early modern playing
companies dealt with the mnemonic burden of performing up to six plays
per week, or brought it into dialogue with Renaissance conceptions of
cognition and subjectivity as similarly “extended” or “distributed.”7
Our own approach is grounded in the combination of immediacy and
complexity, which we identified in our response to Marvell’s “ball.” The
cognitive sciences focus on mental processing that is too swift to be fully
registered in our awareness. Hence Daniel Kahnemann’s bestselling

Thinking, Fast and Slow draws attention to how much of our cognition is
extremely rapid. But literary authors and readers, we suggest, engage in a
special task, which is to think both fast and slow. They do this by deploying
their “kinesic intelligence.”
The term “kinesic intelligence” was first introduced to the critical lexi-
con by Ellen Spolsky in 1996, borrowed from psychology and neurology.8
As well as shining a spotlight on our cognitive responses to movement in
literature and visual art, Spolsky argued that, especially where art and lit-
erature are concerned, embodied knowledge “is not especially privileged
in being less ambiguous than other kinds of knowledge.”9 Complexity
arose, Spolsky suggested, in the form of conflicts or clashes between bodily
knowledge and other forms. Thus Spolsky raised important questions
about the degree to which kinesic intelligence was direct or intuitive, and
how it related to other modes of knowledge.
Then, armed with insights from more recent scientific work, Guillemette
Bolens suggested some new answers to Spolsky’s questions.10 A growing
body of research into “motor resonance”—or kinesis—indicates that when
we observe the action of another, we access our embodied kinaesthetic
memory in order to retrieve a simulation of that action, and so our brains
respond in a way similar to when we ourselves execute the movement
observed (the phenomenon of so-called “mirror neurons”). Furthermore,
motor resonance functions not only when we witness movement but also
when we imagine seeing movement, or remember seeing movement, or
when we look at visual images of movement, or even when we read a ver-
bal description. Bolens mobilized these insights to argue that “kinesic
intelligence in literature is the faculty that enables us to produce and use
perceptual simulations in order to understand narrated movements or ges-
tures.” Kinesic then, is not a synonym for kinetic: kinesis refers not to
movement but rather to the perception or understanding of movement.11
But literature does not just invite motor simulations in the same way as
other visual or linguistic experiences do. Some verbal descriptions are
more powerful than others in eliciting sensorimotor responses, and liter-
ary texts are often particularly rich in these. For example, Kafka invites
sensorimotor responses through strategies of “cognitive realism,” as Emily
Troscianko has shown.12 More generally, a broad range of literary texts
produce “unpredicted sensorimotor configurations,” as Bolens demon-
strates.13 Thus kinesic analysis has as its primary goal “to perceive more
keenly and with greater accuracy the potential complexity and subtlety of
INTRODUCTION 5
movements.”14 Complexity, then, is not limited to conflicts between

embodied cognition and other kinds, as in Spolsky’s earlier work, but
emerges in the perception of movements themselves.
Bolens’ discussion of complexity also implies that spontaneous pre-
reflective simulations might exist on a continuum with the more reflective
employment of them. This seems to us a powerful suggestion, potentially
rich for literary criticism, and worthy of further exploration. The bodily
immediacy of Marvell’s images, for example, tips over into—and works
together with—a reflective examination of their embodied import. We do
not mean to suggest here a definite “tipping point” at which all readers
move from immediate pre-reflective response to conscious reflection.
Theories of embodied cognition precisely indicate that so-called “higher
order” cognitive modes are grounded in bodily ones, so it seems more
plausible to speak, as Terence Cave has done, of a gradient between the
pre-reflective and the reflective.15 Nor do we wish to suggest that immedi-
ate bodily responses pre-determine the precise meanings we ascribe to
texts. However, it seems to us that sense-making and embodied responses
should not be considered in isolation from each other but might work
together within some kind of feedback loop. Immediate responses might
prompt us to reflect at more length on movements such as tearing through
a grille and rolling a ball. At the same time, reflecting on a passage might
affect its impact on our body on a subsequent reading. But precisely how
embodied cognition interacts with conscious reflection remains an open
question. The essays in this book are a series of soundings in this combina-
tion of thinking fast and slow, in how literature can make kinesis shade
into kinesic intelligence.
Claiming an integral role for body, movement and action in the inter-
pretation of literary minds is not new. In the middle of the last century
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “motor intentionality” informed the
work of the so-called Geneva-School critics—notably Jean Rousset, Jean-
Pierre Richard and Jean Starobinski. This “criticism of consciousness”
took for granted Merleau-Ponty’s assumption that “my body is my point
of view on the world,” that my grip on others’ intentional states just is an
attunement to the movements, gestures, and postures of their body.16
Starobinski’s Montaigne in Motion, a model of this approach, remains a
landmark of French Renaissance studies; and one might also consider
Bolens, a more recent Geneva critic, as belonging broadly in this tradition
while extending it in new directions.17 Merleau-Ponty’s insights have
recently gained new traction in the work of Alva Noë and Shaun Gallagher,
whose phenomenologically inflected cognitive philosophy has found an

enthusiastic following among literary scholars with an interest in social
cognition and empathy. Gallagher’s phenomenology has led him to be
cautious of the motor resonance system, whose “subpersonal” routines
are not present to our awareness; others have regarded the echoic traces it
produces as the neural correlate of what Merleau-Ponty termed entrelacs—
the chiasmic intertwining of self, other and world.
The concept of “kinesic intelligence,” as applied to literary texts, both
builds on this work and moves beyond it. A key assumption of phenome-
nological criticism is that the intentions of others are always already imma-
nent to us in experience, that their bodies are easily legible to us. We claim
that while this may ring true for many of our everyday interactions, the
“unpredicted sensorimotor configurations” described by Bolens as charac-
teristic of literature pose a special kind of problem. One feature not unique
to literary communication, but certainly amplified in it, is the degree to
which it requires a heightened attunement to kinesic effects. These can feel
overpoweringly immediate (“Pray you undo this button,”) and so accessi-
ble to a more unreflective mode of kinesic intelligence.18 But often this
immediacy combines with degrees of kinesic opacity and complexity, like
those of Marvell’s “ball.” Such opacity calls for a more reflective response—
even the exercise of criticism.
A preoccupation with opaque or complex movement also distinguishes
our approach from some of the work being done under the banner of cogni-
tive linguistics. For Lakoff, Johnson and Turner, our conceptual architec-
ture is so comprehensively grounded in embodiment that even the most
abstruse linguistic formulations reflect a limited set of metaphor kernels, or
“metaphors we live by.” On this view the closing lines of Marvell’s “To His
Coy Mistress” might be analysed as a blend of LOVE-IS-A-FORCE and
LIFE-IS-A-JOURNEY, for example. While this undoubtedly imparts some-
thing about the general conceptual grounding of Marvell’s verses, the more
interesting challenge, to our minds, is to capture the specific force of the
images as they are developed in these particular lines. This would include
accounting for the fact that, lacking the simplicity of the Lakoffian X-is-Y
structure, the spatio-visual content of Marvell’s metaphors remains so tricky
to pin down. Such messiness is not at all atypical of literary utterances; rather
than tidy it away, reading with kinesic intelligence means accepting and ana-
lysing cognitive effort, frustration, even failure.19
Moreover, insofar as conceptual metaphor approaches focus on the
level of the “underlying” metaphor, they pay scant attention to history
INTRODUCTION 7
and context. Therefore, like other cognitive literary studies, which foreground
apparently universal aspects of cognition, some conceptual metaphor stud-
ies draw accusations of a fundamental incompatibility between the cogni-
tive sciences and literary studies. However, these disciplines have much to
learn from each other precisely because “literary utterances reflect in espe-
cially rich ways the situatedness of cognition itself,” as Terence Cave puts
it.20 Bolens demonstrates the “situatedness” of specifically kinesic intelli-
gence with reference to the very particular nineteenth-century world of
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mr Darcy arrives back at Pemberley
where, to his great astonishment, he finds Elizabeth Bennett. The narrator
states: “He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immoveable
from surprise.” Though Austen supplies the word “surprise” here, it is
hard to see how this word could ever fix—semanticize—the complex tug
of contradictory kineses prompted by the sentence as a whole. What kind
of intentionality can we attribute to an absolute starting—that is, a motion
both fully formed and incipient, vigorous and withheld at one and the
same time? Bolens shows that the only way to proceed here is to contextu-
alize Darcy’s movement, both within that character’s overall kinesic style,
and within the social conventions of expression and restraint that gov-
erned Austen’s world.21 Movement arises within a cognitive ecology, and
history, context and style are central to the complex cognitive ecologies of
literary texts.
But how might an approach grounded in kinesic intelligence be perti-
nent to the Renaissance in particular? The image on the cover of this book
points to one answer. This image—a fresco from the wall of Cosimo de’
Medici’s Palazzo Vecchio in Florence—is, if nothing else, one of bodies in
movement. It reworks one version of the well-known iconography of the
popular Renaissance proverb “Festina lente,” variously a butterfly atop a
crab, a tortoise with sail as here, or Aldus Manutius’s dolphin-encircled
anchor. The “festina lente”—employed to indicate, among other things,
the governor’s combination of incisiveness and prudence—bore the author-
ity of doxa, the wisdom of the ages. But how did it earn this status? What
special quality ensured its success? Erasmus, who discourses at length on
the motto in his Adages, finds in the proverb a “charming riddle,” owing
its “gem-like grace” to its “apt and absolute brevity” and its applicability to
“every activity of life.” But Cosimo’s fresco hints at another possible reason
for the proverb’s success.
The fresco heeds “festina lente” not only as an ethical command but also
as a complex injunction to bodies called upon to perform an impossible
movement. The five putti introduced into the usually static juxtaposition of
tortoise and sail give rise to a combination of pulling, pushing and prompt-
ing; the tautness of ropes and tendons set against the billowing sail invite
viewers to feel the contrary pressure of upward flight and countervailing
gravity. The fresco thus foregrounds a contradiction at the heart of the
festina lente, present in the words of the proverb but dulled by its familiar-
ity: the impossibility of the imperative addressed to a body with an acute
sense of its inability to “hasten slowly.” In other words, the fresco offers
an example of Renaissance culture revivifying the embodied. It suggests
that Renaissance humanism was not just about renewing linguistic forms,
where language is conceived in a non-material sense, or renewing ethics,
conceived as doxa frozen in language. Instead, what was reborn in the
Renaissance was, in part, a critical sense of the capacities and complexities
of bodily movement. Like Cosimo’s fresco, we suggest, literary texts
engage anew with kinesic intelligence.
A striking instance of this is provided by Rabelais who, as Kathryn Banks
shows, stimulates kinesic intelligence by infusing the proverbial with new life.
Rabelais’s oft-noted shifts between the “metaphorical” and the “literal”—
and, more broadly, between the more embodied or the more abstract—invite
corresponding switches in readers’ cognitive responses; those responses were
further shaped by humanism and its notion of a “seamless web” of language.
In Scève’s poetry, too, the linguistic ingenuity characteristic of Renaissance
humanism called for acute sensorimotor attunement from its readers, as
Timothy Chesters demonstrates. Chesters draws attention to the denominal
verbs coined by Scève, arguing that readers understand these by inferring
complex movements from minimal verbal cues. But language mediates sen-
sorimotor responses through syntax as well as lexis, as Terence Cave shows in
his analysis of chiasmus as a kinesic figure in Montaigne’s essays and Scève’s
poetry. Ullrich Langer examines gestures that are archetypal in the Western
tradition—Orpheus turning back to look at his wife, Eurydice, and Eurydice
reaching out to her husband. Lyric by Petrarch and subsequent French poets
reimagines these gestures, thereby showing that the physical movements
underlying figurative ones can appeal powerfully to kinesic intelligence, and,
in this case, with extensive implications for ethics.
Kinesic intelligence can also be embodied in the theatre. The “skill” of
the early modern actor shaped his body, as Evelyn Tribble demonstrates
with reference to “age transvestism” in Shakespeare and John Marston.
Raphael Lyne shows how Shakespearean actors who “play dead” engage
the kinesic intelligence of their audience through vital signs—senses of
INTRODUCTION 9
weight, warmth, pulse, breath and muscular tension—which explore what

it feels like to be alive. In Laura Seymour’s study of “exchanging hands”
in Titus Andronicus, actions embodied on stage bear a complex relation to
figurative actions. Imagery is also Mary Crane’s focus, specifically the met-
aphorical choking, suffocation and balked movement of Macbeth.
Finally, kinesic intelligence casts new light on established critical preoc-
cupations concerning the body—gender, sexuality and violence. How does
gender inflect kinesic response? Dominique Brancher investigates this by
examining movement inflicted on somebody who defies gender categories,
as presented in Jacques Duval’s 1612 Traité des hermaphrodits. And vio-
lence takes centre stage in Guillemette Bolens’ analysis of the crucifix
deployed as weapon in Folengo and Rabelais, which Bolens assesses in rela-
tion to Renaissance developments in artillery.
Thus this volume explores kinesic intelligence at work across a rich
array of Renaissance experience. Readers are invited to trace their own
paths through an assortment of Renaissance movements: the order of
chapters in Movement in Renaissance Literature is not intended to mirror
every reader’s trajectory. We ask of our readers only that they both register
the embodied responses described here and also engage with them criti-
cally—that is, that they think both fast and slow.
Notes
1. The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 41.
2. Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3.
3. Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 9.
4. How The Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.
5. For a recent example of an approach to renaissance literature inspired by
cognitive linguistics, see Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating
the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
6. 4E is a mnemonic referring to embodied, embedded, enactive and extended
accounts of cognition—overlapping theories of cognition as extended
across brain, body and world.
7. Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s
Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Miranda Anderson, The
Renaissance Extended Mind (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also
Evelyn Tribble and Nicholas Keene, Cognitive Ecologies and the History of
Remembering: Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s
Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
8. “Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures,” Poetics Today 17
(1996): 157–80. Spolsky’s Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in
the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) brings the notion of a
“sympathetic kinaesthetic sense” to bear on literature as well as art. The
concept of kinesic intelligence was deployed by Oliver Sacks, and by
Howard Gardner in his account of multiple intelligences.
9. “Elaborated Knowledge,” 168.
10. Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire (Lausanne:
BHMS, 2008). English version: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and
Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012).
11. Why do we refer to both the “kinaesthetic” and the “kinesic” here?
“Kinaesthesis” means our sense or perception of our bodies moving (http://
www.oed.com/view/Entry/103437?redirectedFrom=kinaesthetic#
eid40177097). So kinaesthetic memory or kinaesthetic knowledge denote
our memory or knowledge of how it feels to perform a movement or hold a
bodily posture. By contrast, by “kinesis” we mean our perception and simula-
tion of the movement of other humans or animals or things, including as it is
portrayed on the stage or in language. And “kinesic intelligence,” as we shall
explain more fully, refers to our capacity to discern and to interpret bodily
movements and postures, and operates on a continuum from the pre-reflective
to the reflective. “Kinetic” has, of course, a more general sense, referring
simply to any kind of motion.
12. Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (New York: Routledge, 2014).
13. Style of Gestures, 17.
14. Style of Gestures, 9.
15. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 21–4, 40–2.
16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge, 2002), 81. Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential
Structures of Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1968).
17. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985).
18. On vivid imagery and the special role played by motion, see G. Gabrielle
Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2015), 81–100; id, “Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and
Doubly Directed States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary
INTRODUCTION 11
Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),
246–68; Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux, 1999).
19. On literature and failures of cognition, see Ellen Spolsky, The Contracts of
Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community (New York: Oxford University Press,
2015), 130–154; and Spolsky, “An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in
Macbeth,” Poetics Today 2011 (32): 489–520.
20. Terence Cave, “Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive,” in Poetics
Today 38 (2017): 235–53. See also Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs,
eds, Cognition, Literature, and History (New York: Routledge, 2014).
21. Bolens, Style of Gestures, 28–33.
Bibliography
Anderson, Miranda. The Renaissance Extended Mind. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015.
Bolens, Guillemette. Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire.
Lausanne: BHMS, 2008.
———. The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Bruhn, Mark J., and Donald R. Wehrs, eds. Cognition, Literature, and History.
New York: Routledge, 2014.
Cave, Terence. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
———. Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive. Poetics Today 38 (2017):
235–53.
Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts
and Performance Through Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010.
Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Gibbs, Raymond. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Jackendoff, Ray. Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Lawall, Sarah. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Edited by Nigel Smith. Harlow:
Pearson, 2007.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith.
London: Routledge, 2002.
Ricks, Christopher. The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999.
Spolsky, Ellen. Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures. Poetics Today
17 (1996): 157–80.
———. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
———. An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in Macbeth. Poetics Today 32
(2011): 489–520.
———. The Contracts of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015.
Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Starr, G. Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015a.
———. Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States. In The
Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine,
246–68. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015b.
Tribble, Evelyn. Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s
Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Tribble, Evelyn, and Nicholas Keene. Cognitive Ecologies and the History of
Remembering: Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Troscianko, Emily. Kafka’s Cognitive Realism. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Wilder, Lina Perkins. Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and
Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
CHAPTER 2
Chiastic Cognition: Kinesic Intelligence

Between the Reflective and the Pre-reflective
in Montaigne and Scève
Terence Cave
The value of the notions of kinesis and kinesic intelligence is that they offer
a particularly focused variant of so-called second-generation cognitive stud-
ies. They address the problem of embodied mind in a way that is flexible,
avoiding the ontological extravagance of some philosophical approaches,
while making salient the fine details of particular modes of mind–body
interaction. For these reasons, they are especially well suited to literary
analysis in a cognitive perspective, as well as to studies in the visual arts, film
and related media: it is no accident that Guillemette Bolens uses Chardin’s
painting of the boy with a top as a frontispiece for Le Style des gestes and
speaks of the body in action in case-studies of Tati, Chaplin and Keaton.1
These terms also have the advantage that they are flexible: defining them
is not a question of setting boundaries and insisting on rigorous exclusions.
A working definition of kinesis, valid for my present purposes but open to
eventual modification, might run as follows: “the mutual reading of bodily
movement and gesture, grounded in motor resonance.” What is meant by
“motor resonance” is that the observer of a salient physical action, gesture
or bodily posture will experience an echoic trace of that action in their own
T. Cave (*)
St John’s College, Oxford, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_2
14 T. CAVE
body via the automatic activation of their motor neurons. The word
“observer” here evokes a typical scene: I see a student in an examination
hall, biting his nails over a difficult question, and feel an uncomfortable and
mildly distressing echo of the tension in his hands, his face, his whole pos-
ture. The feeling is automatic, unreflective. Crucially for present purposes,
however, research in this area has widely shown that physical presence is
not essential. An appropriate description of the same phenomenon can
trigger the same effects. Language—not only lexical items, but also syntac-
tical markers—is saturated with bodily inputs, not least because it is nor-
mally acquired situationally; it has strong sensorimotor connections. The
nail-biting I have described is already producing its resonance in my body
and perhaps in yours, too, if you allow it to become salient for you. In other
words, language (whether oral or written) can successfully mediate motor
resonance, even enhance it, while inserting it into the whole network of
cultural and conceptual resources that individual humans have at their dis-
posal. It is important to emphasize that we are not talking here about top-
down symbolic representation of the body; this is bottom-up reading,
which brings to the reflective surface traces of the reader’s pre-reflective
sensorimotor response. We should also note here already that, in order for
this to happen, a high degree of kinesic intelligence must be pre-supposed
on the side of the writer: kinesis is always at least potentially a reciprocal
activity.
The first part of this paper will consist of a close kinesic reading of the
opening page of Montaigne’s chapter “De l’institution des enfans” (Essais
I.26), designed to establish that “bottom-up” mode.2 I shall then look at
some instances of chiasmus as a cognitive (and more specifically kinesic)
figure, both in Montaigne’s Essais and in one of the dizains from Maurice
Scève’s Délie. This development will in turn lead to some remarks on the
question of the primacy or otherwise of cultural and historical specificity in
what is essentially a cognitive methodology, and on the relation between the
reflective and the pre-reflective in the reading process, taken here to include
what is presumed to be the writer’s degree of awareness of such effects.
The Movement of Thought: Montaigne’s

Gestural Style
Here is Montaigne’s initial sketch, at the opening of “De l’institution des
enfans,” of his response to formal education, no doubt with nail-biting
memories of his youth:
CHIASTIC COGNITION: KINESIC INTELLIGENCE… 15
[E]n somme, je sçay qu’il y a une Medecine, une Jurisprudence, quatre

parties en la Mathematique, et grossierement ce à quoy elles visent. Mais,
d’y enfoncer plus avant, de m’estre rongé les ongles à l’estude d’Aristote, ou
opiniastré après quelque science, je ne l’ay jamais faict.3
[Briefly put, I know that there’s something called Medicine, and
Jurisprudence, and four types of Mathematics, and very roughly what
they’re supposed to be for. But to delve more deeply into them, to have
chewed my nails to the quick over the study of Aristotle, or to go in dogged
pursuit of some area of knowledge, I’ve never done that.]
The second sentence of this passage is full of friction, resistance, tension.

The kinesic verb “enfoncer” triggers a muscular sense of pushing against
an obstacle, breaking through a resistant surface; nail-biting delivers a
variant of that response,4 coupled with a tense position of the hand, arm
and face; “opiniastré” echoes the same tension, a mental stance rooted in
a bodily one (obstinacy is immediately visible in the body and face). These
tensions are negated (“Je ne l’ay jamais faict”), but after the event, so that
the sentence reads like an instance of praeteritio. The motor resonance is
evoked before it is cancelled. More generally, however, the tension is
framed by the informal, everyday syntax and the (self)-irony: the whole
sequence is neatly balanced between tension and relaxation.
In the ensuing sentences, the kinesic mode—bodily posture, attitude,
expressive tonus5 reified in language—shifts between those two poles,
which, as Ellen Spolsky has pointed out, are fundamental to our senso-
rimotor understanding of human movement and agency.6 First there is a
palpable relaxation, a sigh of relief, as we shift to the subjects Montaigne
professes to prefer:
L’Histoire, c’est plus mon gibier, ou la poësie, que j’ayme d’une particuliere
inclination.
[History is more my cup of tea, or poetry, for which I have a special
fondness.]
The implicatures7 of “gibier” (literally “quarry”) might include something

better than nails to chew on; but hunting, unlike sitting indoors poring
over Aristotle, is also one of the outdoor pursuits of the gentry. Such
implicatures harmonize with the tension-releasing diction, phrased in the
mode of oral speech (the subject thrown out first, then confirmed with a
demonstrative pronoun). What is immediately evident here is that the barely
detectable kinesic effect of “gibier” (implying a readiness for pursuit, the
16 T. CAVE
open air) is rapidly overtaken by the gestural rhythm of the sentence. That
rhythm includes the scalar expression “plus”: it gently guides the reader
towards an opening possibility, a more comfortable path. By the time we
arrive at “ou,” the body is already relaxed, at ease with itself.
So now let us focus for a moment on that little word. As used here,
“ou” is not a logical operator; like the scalar “plus,” it is a procedural
expression, in other words, a linguistic feature that guides the reader’s (or
interlocutor’s) interpretation of the propositional content of the utter-
ance.8 It communicates the speaker’s attitude and even his posture: try
reading Montaigne’s sentence aloud and you’ll find yourself performing
the permissive gesture, the opening to new possibilities, which it implies.
In other words, this tiny conjunction has a kinesic function: it is easy to
assume that kinesis is delivered mainly by verbs and adverbs, but in fact
any element of language, including the movement of a sentence, can give
rise to kinesic effects. At the same time, the procedural “ou” is also the
marker of an improvisational shift of topic or interest. Montaigne is think-
ing on the wing.9 The second of the two items proposed becomes the
subject of the next sentence; history is left behind for now:
Car, comme disoit Cleantes, tout ainsi que la voix, contrainte dans l’étroit
canal d’une trompette, sort plus aiguë et plus forte, ainsi me semble il que la
sentence, pressée aux pieds nombreux de la poësie, s’eslance bien plus
brusquement et me fiert d’une plus vive secousse.
[For, as Cleanthes used to say, just as the voice, when forced through the
narrow passage of a trumpet, sounds sharper and louder when it comes out,
so too, it seems to me, a thought, when constrained by the rhythmic feet of
poetry, comes across more powerfully and strikes me a livelier blow.]
What is immediately remarkable about that sentence is its tightly con-

strained energy, its tension. The energy is embodied both in its syntax and
rhythm, and in the figurative equivalence it proposes: a formal and highly
symmetrical simile, the phrases taut but pliably balanced, definitely not the
kind of sentence you improvise.
The key conceptual item in this equivalence is the word “sentence”
(thought): what is demonstrated here is the way in which the acoustic kine-
sis of poetry delivers a conceptual payload that is bound to its embodied
form. Its effect becomes palpable in the kinesic final phrase “me fiert d’une
plus vive secousse.” The writer’s body here is in passive mode, receiving a
sharp blow, “me fiert”: the slightly anachronistic verb carries implicatures
of epic and romance battles. Phenomenally, the blow is registered as a

shock: the body is shaken by the impact. The shock or impact of poetry is
palpable throughout the Essais, and we shall return to it later. But here
Montaigne rebounds from it to another level, the relaxed level of his own
discourse:
Quant aux facultez naturelles qui sont en moy, dequoy c’est icy l’essay, je les
sens flechir sous la charge.
[As for my own natural faculties, which I’m putting to the test here, I feel
them giving way under that pressure.]
From “me fiert” to “flechir,” the tension shifts markedly. “I feel them giving
way” makes the phenomenal perspective even more salient, but the shock
has been replaced by an accommodating response of the body to pressure:
“flechir” resonates with an evasive movement, designed to cushion the
impact, reduce the shock. The rebound, the relaxation of tension, also (auto-
matically, without reflection) colours the conceptual payload: while the
body is foregrounded here, the nominal subject is the “mind,” the cognitive
faculties. The kinesic is bound to the conceptual and vice versa.
From the unspecified particular sententia of the poetry sentence via the
collective designation of cognitive faculties located within the writer (“[les]
facultez naturelles qui sont en moy”), we come then to a third formulation
of the conceptual payload, articulated by a further set of kinesic gestures:
Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marche qu’à tastons, chancelant,

bronchant et chopant ; et, quand je suis allé le plus avant que je puis, si ne
me suis-je aucunement satisfaict; je voy encore du païs au delà, mais d’une
veuë trouble et en nuage, que je ne puis desmeler.
[My conceptions and my judgement can only grope their way forward, stag-
gering, stumbling and tripping; and when I have gone as far as I am able, I
am still in no way satisfied; I can see further terrain in the distance, but with
a murky, cloudy vision which I’m unable to resolve.]
Let us begin here with the triad “chancelant, bronchant et chopant.” This
is a classic kinesic sequence of quasi-synonymous verbs. They calibrate simi-
lar but significantly different kinds of movement. Guillemette Bolens points
out that English is especially rich in these, but Montaigne’s sixteenth-
century French was rich in them too, and no one knew better how to select
them than he did: that is precisely what is meant by kinesic intelligence as a
18 T. CAVE
faculty of the writer. It is no doubt worth mentioning that, although k inesic

effect is not dependent on devices such as onomatopoeia, sound-values do
count in this domain (think of the English cluster slide-slither-slip-skid),
and the swishing, shifting “ch” sound is a salient, audible feature of the
overall kinesic effect. The articulated voice is not just a vehicle of motor
resonance, but is itself a kinesic stimulus.
Secondly: the walking body that becomes palpable in this sentence has
a habitus, a characteristic gait: it can only walk gropingly (“ne marche
qu’à tastons”). The gait is constitutionally uncertain, unpredictable,
improvised. At the same time, this uncertain gait is given a special kinesic
turn by the etymology of “taster”: to touch, to feel, to try out by touch-
ing; “à tastons” is a haptic expression, as indeed were the verbs of stag-
gering, tripping and stumbling. As Hugo Friedrich pointed out long ago,
“taster” is semantically connected with “essayer,” so the kinesic thread
that connects this and the previous sentence becomes more complex, car-
ries more implicatures, as it proceeds.
Thirdly: the subject “mes conceptions et mon jugement” echoes the
“facultez naturelles” of the previous sentence. It is an abstract subject,
delivering the conceptual payload; and it is also a plural subject for a sin-
gular verb (“marche”). You might say that a singular body (which does
the “walking”) unifies the writer’s collective “mental faculties.” We are
talking here, then, about a cognitive apparatus that is embodied from the
outset; the conceptual is yet again folded into the kinesic, delivered kinesi-
cally. Is this a metaphor? Well, in a sense, yes. But I want to insist here that
this isn’t just a question of Montaigne’s preference for metaphor, as if
metaphor were purely instrumental and operated at a less ontologically
privileged level. These metaphors are literal, in the sense that the thinking
body isn’t a fiction, an ad hoc invention. There is nothing but a body that
does the thinking. There is no purely conceptual level of meaning.10
***
It may be helpful here to review what has happened to the thread of argu-
ment that began with “L’histoire, c’est plus mon gibier, ou ….” From
history (not further discussed) it takes us provisionally to poetry as a kine-
sic vector of thought (one sentence). So far, so good. Poetry delivers a
certain kind of cognitive shock, registered in first-person mode (“me
fiert”). The shock is prolonged in the kinesic gesture of yielding to pres-
sure, articulated as a feeling (“je les sens fleschir sous la charge”). But is
this still the pressure of poetic thought and form? Grammatically, that is
what must be inferred. But the first person has by now become the whole
ground of cognitive experience (“Quant aux facultez naturelles qui sont
en moy”), and Montaigne speaks of his own writing, “dequoy c’est icy
l’essay.” In that light, one has to revise one’s inference. Montaigne can’t
do poetry, or indeed formal prose of the kind the poetry sentence has
exemplified; he can only do essays, with their suite of kinesic articulations.
And he is no longer speaking of the occasional experience of reading
poetry; he is speaking of a whole way of thinking. Poetry is a mode of
thought Montaigne admires (and integrates into his text) but cannot
emulate; the “essaying” mode offers instead its slacker, more accommo-
dating gestures, made salient by the rebound effect. And so we grope our
way forward again towards an even longer, less symmetrical sentence, this
time about thinking with the Ancients, and specifically with Plutarch on
the imagination.11 The coherence and directedness of the thread seems
almost accidental.
Chiasmus as Kinesis
The movement of the passage we have so far been looking at shifts, then,
between poetry and the mode of the “essay” on the one hand, between the
kinesic and the conceptual on the other. As it moves, it binds these topics,
fusing them in a single sustained reflection on the way thought can be
articulated beyond the constraints of Aristotelian or mathematical logic, or
of thought as officially encoded knowledge. A few years later, Montaigne
returns to this nexus in “Sur des vers de Virgile” (Essais, III.5) via the lines
of erotic Latin verse referred to in the title, together with a parallel passage
from Lucretius. As in I.26, these extraordinary (and richly kinesic) passages
become a paradigm of poetry as a mode of thought that ostensibly puts to
shame the feeble vernacular writing of Montaigne’s own day; but here
again, as in I.26, the movement of contrast is overlaid by the palpable ener-
gies of Montaigne’s own kinesic style as he meditates on what it is that
makes such writing come uniquely alive. As I show elsewhere,12 the key
move is the addition of two words to a tiny fragment from Juvenal quoted
immediately after the eponymous lines from Virgil: “Et versus digitos
habet” (“[A line of poetry too] has fingers”) (849). Montaigne reads the
kinesis of Virgil’s poetry as haptic; also, one might note, as communicative,
reaching out, not to grope in this case, but to caress the reader. These
stroking fingers, heavily laden with erotic implicatures, create the kinesic
20 T. CAVE
impetus for a complex development that stretches across many pages of the
chapter.
A critical point in that development is reached with a striking chiasmus.
It is located just after the commentary on the parallel erotic passage from
Lucretius, and it expresses the reciprocal relation between poetic language
and thought:
Quand je voy ces braves formes de s’expliquer, si vifves, si profondes, je ne

dicts pas que c’est bien dire, je dicts que c’est bien penser. C’est la gaillardise
de l’imagination qui esleve et enfle les parolles. [C] “Pectus est quod disertum
facit” [B] Nos gens appellent jugement, langage; et beaux mots, les plaines
conceptions. (873)
[When I see those bold forms of communication,13 so alive, so profound, I
don’t say “That’s well said,” I say “That’s well thought.” It is the joyful
vigour of the imagination that raises and swells the words. [C] ‘It is intu-
ition that makes the speaker eloquent.’ [B] People nowadays call judgement
“language”; and “fine words,” full conceptions.14]
The claim that poetic language is a way of thinking could hardly be put
more explicitly or more strongly. Here, once again, are the “conceptions”
and the “jugement” of I.26, together with the poetic sentence that delivers
its kinesic payload as a shock or blow. This time, however, thought takes
on the colour of “imagination,” a word Montaigne often uses in the
broadened sense of something like an embodied concept. Embodied
enough, clearly, to be explicitly erotic, even sexual: “c’est la gaillardise de
l’imagination qui esleve et enfle les paroles” takes its upwardly mobile
kinesic cues from sexual arousal.15 Yet the crossing-over or exchange
required to achieve authentic embodiment works in exactly the same way
as in I.26. The language enacts the sexual body, which becomes identified
reciprocally with thought, “les plaines conceptions.”
So now to the cross-over step performed by the chiasmus. A word is
needed first, perhaps, to raise a question about how Montaigne means us
to read it. Who are “Nos gens”? Are they his French contemporaries whose
vernacular lacks the sinews of classical Latin? Is he being ironic? The sense
would then be that we/they debase “jugement” and “les plaines concep-
tions” by identifying them as mere rhetoric. I have gestured towards that
possible sense by translating “Nos gens” as “People nowadays,” a version
that is in accord with a number of modern commentaries and translations.
But “nos gens” could also mean “our servants,” “the people who work for
us”: ordinary people who, although uneducated, have a firm sense of

realities. Such a meaning is present on the next page of this same chapter
when Montaigne says that his page-boy can make love (in the older sense
of that expression) and understand it; if you read Leone Ebreo and Marsilio
Ficino to him, he will be none the wiser (874). The context here is differ-
ent, but I think it is possible that Montaigne is pointing to a speech habit
of ordinary people, who identify high-flying thought, without irony, as
“fine words.”
Whoever “nos gens” may be, and however ironic the phrase, the chias-
mus works in the same way. It identifies thought (imagination) with lan-
guage, and more specifically the heightened language of poetry. The
trumpet blast of I.26 and the reaching fingers of III.5 are cognitive affor-
dances fashioned by remarkably talented wordsmiths and available to any-
one with the kinesic intelligence to read them. Montaigne’s prose may
give way under the pressure, but it has resources of its own. It is capable,
for example, of fashioning an affordance (the chiasmus) that displays the
reciprocal duality of poetry-as-thought, like the duck that is also, when
inverted, a rabbit.
One way of defining chiasmus is to think of it as a sequential mode of
binding or merging. You take one step forward, then reverse the move-
ment: that turn locks the two elements together, like a turn of the wrist.
Chiasmus is thereby also, of course, a kinesic figure: a dance step, or a
figure of eight, or perhaps a running knot, which binds things together in
a mobile rather than a static way, allowing for further shifts down the line
(in that sense, it is unlike the formulaic closure of an epigram or conceit).
Here is another instance, this time wholly unequivocal, from the final
pages of Montaigne’s book:
Mais moy, d’une condition mixte, grossier … me laisse tout lourdement

aller aux plaisirs presents … intellectuellement sensibles, sensiblement
intellectuels.16
[But as for me, being of a mixed and coarse condition … I let myself be car-
ried lumpishly away by the pleasures of the present moment … [pleasures
which are] intellectually palpable, palpably intellectual.]
The chiasmus requires no extended commentary here. Clearly, it is a way

of imagining the mind–body relation as a unity rather than a duality, and
it seems to me that this cognitive figure is essential to everything Montaigne
does—everything that he thinks and writes—in the Essais.
22 T. CAVE
Chiastic Kinesis in Maurice Scève’s Délie

When Montaigne speaks of the kinesic force of poetry as a way of thinking,
he means of course Latin poetry. The French poets, one has to infer, suffer
from the slackness of the vernacular that he speaks of in “Sur des vers de
Virgile.” We know that he was familiar with their work, however, since he
occasionally quotes Ronsard and Du Bellay. And although he never men-
tions Maurice Scève, he must at least have known of the Délie, given that
it was still a major point of reference for Thomas Sébillet and others when
Montaigne was a teenager. Scève’s taut little dizains, with their Latinate
vocabulary and word-order, were and are capable of delivering the very
“secousse” Montaigne speaks of in the poetry sentence of I.26, and a
single example will show that crossings-over of mind and body could also
be imagined nearly a half-century before the chiastic formulations I have
quoted above. Here is the whole dizain, one of the best-known and most
frequently discussed examples of Scève’s “metaphysical” mode of poetic
thinking17:
Asses plus long, qu’un Siecle Platonique

Me fut le mois, que sans toy suis esté:
Mais quand ton front je revis pacifique,
Sejour treshault de toute honnesteté,
Ou l’empire est du conseil arresté,
Mes songes lors je creus estre devins.
Car en mon corps: mon Ame tu revins,
Sentant ses mains, mains celestement blanches,
Avec leurs bras mortellement divins,
L’un coronner mon col, l’aultre mes hanches.18
[Far longer than a Platonic Year has been the month during which I have
been without you: but when I saw again your pacifying brow, in which the
empire of judgement is established, I believed then that my dreams were
prophetic. For into my body, my Soul, you returned, feeling her hands,
hands celestially white, with their arms mortally divine, one crowning my
neck, the other my hips.]
Like Montaigne’s formulation of the relation between mind and body,

Scève’s is articulated through adjectives qualified by adverbs. This grammati-
cal patterning is, however, not in itself chiastic, as it is, for example, in the
sentence “He stood there with a smile on his face, and in his hand, a rose,”
or indeed in the earlier quotation from Montaigne on the relation between
thought and language, where the order “noun subject + complement” is

inverted. In both cases, the crossing-over is effected at the semantic rather
than grammatical level. However, Montaigne’s “intellectuellement sensibles,
sensiblement intellectuels” makes the chiasmus immediately palpable by fus-
ing semantic inversion with lexical repetition, while Scève requires the reader,
characteristically enough, to carry out inferential work in order to see that
mortality is a property of the body, and thus that “mortellement” corre-
sponds to “blanches” as “celestement” to “divins.”
In Scève’s dizain, however, the chiasmus of lines 8–9 is only one formal
step within a chiastic dance performed by the last four lines, and more
broadly by the poem as a whole. To speak of this movement as a dance is
perhaps permissible because the embrace described in the concluding lines
is similar to that of dancing partners: it has erotic implicatures, but it is also
polite, elegant, stately. Line 7 already anticipates the embrace in a manner
that gestures towards the chiastic: “Car en mon corps: mon Ame, tu revins.”
The return of soul to body enacts kinesis as a quickening, a reawakening to
life, and the binding of body to soul is done by the sheer collocation of
“mon corps: mon Ame.” Although “mon Ame” is grammatically vocative,
it affords the insertion of the noun pair “body+soul” into the centre of the
line that realizes the poem’s volta. What emerges then is something like the
chiastic figure [a1] b1 b2 [a2], where [a] is grammatical wrapping rather than
a semantic or lexical constant.19
This sounds formalistic when it is spelt out reflectively, but in the pre-
reflective act of reading, it emerges as an overdetermined motor reso-
nance: the complex act of returning, which is also a turning, the body
towards the soul and the soul towards the body (they end up, in the
embrace, face to face).20 A key factor in the overdetermination is the
implied shift in the function of the second person, which in the first six
lines refers unequivocally to Délie but now, in the seventh, refers to the
speaker’s soul (in the eighth, “you” correspondingly becomes “she”): the
whole point of the dance is that Délie is both herself (a woman with a
body) and the speaker’s animating spirit, his “mind.” These two cross
over, embrace, become a chiasmus in movement: the arm round his shoul-
ders and the arm round his hips describe a helix, the reconciliation of the
closed figure of a circle with open-ended linear motion. And since the
turning of the spheres through complex circular and helical figures is
resolved in a “Platonic year,” the dizain from its opening affords a per-
spective in which the microcosmic chiasmus of the last four lines is embed-
ded in a macrocosmic conceptual frame.
24 T. CAVE
Scève’s figurative metaphysics, as a way of thinking, is far removed from

the tangible, this-wordly kinesis of Montaigne’s prose. Yet the dizain
works just as Montaigne will later say that poetry works: its sententia,
turning on Délie’s imagined “conseil” (consilium, jugement), is likewise
conjoined with a sensible body in order to deliver a “secousse” that is not
merely aesthetic (although it is of course that too) but fully cognitive. Like
Montaigne’s, Scève’s is a kind of thinking that is pertinent to life as it is
lived, and more particularly to the sense of life: that kinesic quickening
you feel as mind turns to body and vice versa.
Kinesic Intelligence: How to Read Poetry,

How to Read Montaigne
One of my objectives in juxtaposing Scève’s poem with Montaigne’s prose
is to make a broad point about the relation of cognitive criticism to his-
torical and cultural specificities. There is, it seems to me, no real problem
here, no loss of the historical particular in some atemporal cognitive uni-
versal.21 Human cognition is always apparent through the particular forms
it adopts: the drive to inventiveness, flexibility, adaptation, just is its spe-
cialty. To which one may add the cognitive principle that any interpreta-
tion of a communicative act must, if it wants to avoid pure contingency,
take account of relevant context, the changing meanings of words, possi-
ble frames of cultural reference, and so on. It follows that one could regard
these two fragments as items in a virtual archive of ways of imagining the
body–mind relation in the pre-Cartesian era, with the proviso, of course,
that things weren’t suddenly transformed by the advent of Descartes or
anyone else.22 That archive would belong to a cognitive project, not to a
history of ideas or of philosophy as such: it would be made possible by the
instruments of analysis that a cognitive perspective affords.
Yet our interest in reading Scève or Montaigne cannot be purely histori-
cal, as if their works were simply documents providing evidence of an early
modern thought-world. They elicit both unreflective responses, whether
kinesic, sensorimotor, affective, or indeed inferential, and reflective reread-
ings, higher-order analyses, evaluations, that give every appearance of being
worthwhile: they reward extended consideration. That is no doubt a truism,
and no one could write an essay such as this one without making some such
assumption. The question, again within the cognitive perspective, lies in the
particular kinds of relation between the unreflective and the reflective that
these works exhibit, and more particularly in the virtually undecidable but
always fascinating crossings-over between those two apparently different

modes. For there is of course a critical difference at the extremes, the differ-
ence we think of as that between mind and body, body and mind; but it is
essential to resist the temptation to turn the two ends of a scale or gradient
into an antithesis with an excluded middle. In cognition, there is no excluded
middle. The middle is the very ground on which human cognition (unlike
computer cognition, for example) operates.
How, then, according to this cognitive methodology, do we read Montaigne’s

embodied mind, or Scève’s? What kinds and degrees of kinesic intelligence
may we infer from the writers’ way with language, and how much of it is
required to read such texts? It seems evident, to begin with, that a high
degree of kinesic intelligence must be imputed to Scève, to Montaigne, and
to the Latin poets Montaigne reads in “Sur des vers de Virgile.” Kinesic
intelligence is defined in that perspective as a highly developed feel for the
kinds of language that will elicit motor responses, for the configurations of
verse or prose that have “fingers.” It is important to note here that kinesis
gives no priority to visual representation: you may in some sense “see” the
embrace described by Scève, or Montaigne’s groping movement through a
misty landscape, but in both instances seeing is surely only marginal, an
epiphenomenon. What is essential is the motor trajectory itself, the gait, the
things you can do with arms, shoulders, legs, fingers and the sensations
those movements afford. Furthermore, the skills in question don’t them-
selves belong to some privileged aesthetic category. Montaigne’s prose, and
even the rarefied poetic language of Scève, use everyday kinaesthetic pro-
cesses and responses with optimal relevance, although the everyday motions
of language are raised to a high level of intensity and (with Montaigne)
a deceptively self-effacing control.
The notion of kinesic intelligence is helpful in such cases precisely
because it doesn’t pre-suppose a second-order awareness of the kind that
characterizes early modern theories of the mind or soul, let alone modern
cognitive science. Montaigne thought a lot about style and about lan-
guage, and the special variety of prose that he wrote was in general the
outcome of choices and preferences established at the earliest stages of
composition of the Essais. But many of these were certainly what we would
call “intuitive,” where intuition is defined as a way of describing the pre-
reflective mode: they emerged, one assumes, as a habitus formed by pro-
cedural memories of reading and of conversation.
26 T. CAVE
The prefix “pre-” as I have been using it is designed primarily to refer

to processes that do not exhibit higher-order reflection but are in some
sense necessary precursors of such reflection. Such a model is complicated
by the feedback loops that are a primary feature of human cognition: pro-
cedural memories based on earlier reflective episodes of the kind afforded
by education are one obvious example. A whole model of how the brain
marshals materials for use at a given moment of engagement with the
world is involved here, and this is not the place to explore it further, but it
is essential to bear in mind that the economy of cognition is fundamentally
temporal, and that reminder is usefully provided by the prefix “pre-.”23
In short, then, I would propose a definition of kinesic intelligence that
avoids assigning any kind of necessarily reflective awareness to “intelli-
gence.” The phrase would of course not be appropriate to describe a pro-
grammed motor response of the kind exhibited in the behaviour of flocks
of birds, shoals of fish, and some football crowds (the Mexican wave, for
example): “kinesis” on its own is adequate there. But as soon as the motor
response enters into a network of other kinds of response, especially (in
our context) linguistic ones, variable skills of discrimination and interpre-
tation begin to manifest themselves, whether pre-reflectively or reflec-
tively. Kinesic intelligence is, from the bottom up, a way of thinking with
the body.
It goes without saying that these remarks are equally valid for the attribu-
tion of kinesic intelligence to the reader. Motor resonance is typically, after
all, a shared experience, although not, in most cases, a reciprocal one (which
is one of the reasons why the expression “mirror neurons” can be mislead-
ing). Montaigne’s kinesic intelligence provides him with a powerful instru-
ment for creating effects in the reader, but if we, as readers, are to experience
those effects, we need not only the primary resources of motor resonance
but also the linguistic knowledge, skills and experience that mediate the
resonance.
That means, in turn, that allowance needs to be made for considerable
readerly variation. Over the centuries, many people have read the opening
pages of “De l’institution des enfans”: it was from the outset one of the
most popular chapters of the Essais. Were they all conscious of the effects
we have been addressing here? Certainly not. Have they all felt them
unconsciously (unreflectively or pre-reflectively)? Arguably they must have
at some level, even if the spectrum of cognitive preferences and responses
to language varies very widely. I want to propose that, for any close reader,
they would have been significantly operative at the pre-reflective level:
they would have affected the way the meaning was grasped. No doubt for
many other readers they have been purely residual, and if someone pointed
them out, they would say that the kinesis was only a trivial side-effect.
I would be inclined to say that in that case the cognitive preferences (or
cultural habits) of the reader would have acted to close down the
responses, regard them as irrelevant, but that it would be impossible to
read the passage at all if they were absent. How could they be absent? The
language can’t do its work without them.
The handful of texts we have been considering here are explicitly about
cognition across its whole range, from the inflections of intelligent thought
and language, via imagination, to the habitual gait of the body or the sen-
sorimotor reach required in order to perform an embrace, and back again.
That is in itself hardly surprising: both Montaigne and Scève are known to
be writers who actively and explicitly engage the cognitive imagination of
the reader in their very different ways. The Délie and the Essais are in their
entirety about cognition, its modalities, its constraints, its deficiencies, its
opportunities, its habits. And they are both mobile works, crossing over
ceaselessly between the mind and the body, the reflective and the senso-
rimotor modes, the intellectuel and the sensible. The mind, in both cases, is
embodied, but through language, the body becomes a palpable mind
(clearly nobody is going to say that Montaigne or Scève is just an unthink-
ing body). The feedback loop between the reflective, the pre-reflective, and
the unreflective in these texts has precisely the structure of a chiasmus.
Notes
1. See Guillemette Bolens, Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit
littéraire (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008; English version: The Style of
Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Bolens acknowledges the impor-
tance of Ellen Spolsky’s founding article, “Elaborated knowledge: reading
kinesis in pictures,” Poetics Today 17 (1996): 157–80.
2. I offer a less explicitly cognitive reading of this same passage, and of pas-
sages from Essais III.5 (“Sur des vers de Virgile”), in my essay “The Transit
of Venus: Feeling Your Way Forward,” in Montaigne in Transit: Essays in
Honour of Ian Maclean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar and Wes Williams
(Oxford: Legenda, 2016), 9–18. The two readings are designed to com-
plement one another.
3. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-Louis Saulnier
(Paris: PUF, 1965), 146 (I.26); this reference is valid for the whole of the
28 T. CAVE
passage discussed here. For the purposes of this discussion, I cite the 1580
text without the later additions in order to recover the initial dynamic of
the text, and also to avoid complications and deviations into issues that are
not essential here. All translations in this essay are my own.
4. It is customary to gloss Montaigne’s mention of nail-biting with a refer-
ence to Horace’s Satires I, x; but the point here must be that, even if
Montaigne reflectively remembered that literary instance and meant to
echo it, it is only meaningful to him and to the reader if the sensorimotor
echo is triggered. In other words, the sensorimotor trumps what used to
be referred to as the “intertextual.”
5. For a detailed account of “tonus” and its role in literary works, see Guillemette
Bolens, L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le
rire du lecteur (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016). The term
(more common in French than in English) refers to muscle tone, or, more
specifically, a normal state of continuous slight tension in muscle tissue that
facilitates its response to stimulation.
6. Spolsky, “Elaborated Knowledge,” 159.
7. “Implicature” is an implication that the speaker intends the interlocutor to
derive. This term, like “procedural expression” used below, is adapted
broadly speaking from relevance theory, a theory of communication that
insists on the dynamic character of communicative utterances, and on the
extent to which they elicit from the interlocutor a reciprocal activity. See
my study Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), especially 24–6 and chs 3 and 6.
8. For a technical account of the conceptual/procedural distinction (pro-
posed by Diane Blakemore), see Robyn Carston, Thoughts and Utterances:
The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002),
160–4.
9. “Thinking on the wing” is an expression designed to capture the dynamic
character of language in use, in other words the way in which relevance
theory thinks about language.
10. On rethinking the “metaphorical” and the “literal” in response to embod-
ied cognition, see Kathryn Banks in this volume.
11. “Et, entreprenant de parler …” (146).
12. “The Transit of Venus,” 11–13.
13. I have wanted to avoid “self-expression” as a rendering of “s’expliquer” for
reasons that will perhaps be obvious: Montaigne is not talking about the
personal, confessional mode here; “s’expliquer” has the sense of “getting
across one’s meaning,” “making oneself clear.” Communication of thoughts
is what is at issue here, not the expression of feelings, etc.
14. I have added quotation marks simply in order to make the structure of the
chiasmus immediately apparent.
15. The imagination is already, in the sixteenth century, associated with a

quasi-Platonic ascent whereby the corporality of material things is “raised
up” towards conceptual understanding. In later ages, this upwards move-
ment will become associated with balloon flight: see Thinking with
Literature, chs 3 and 5.
16. Essais, III.13 (“De l’experience”), 1107.
17. The ascription of Scève’s poetry to the category of the metaphysical (in the
sense used for the poetry of John Donne and others) was first made, as far
as I am aware, by Odette de Mourgues in her study Metaphysical, Baroque
and Précieux Poetry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953), 110–25; for her
analysis of the dizain I discuss here, see 21–2. The dizain has been revisited
many times since; this is not the place to provide a bibliographical review.
18. The “Délie” of Maurice Scève, ed. I.D. McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966), 320 (dizain 367).
19. On the possibilities offered by the dizain form, see my article “Rime et
structure du dizain dans la Délie de Maurice Scève,” in Les Fruits de la
saison. Mélanges de Littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles offerts au Professeur
André Gendre, ed. Philippe Terrier, Loris Petris, Marie-Jeanne Liengme
Bessire (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 49–57 (56–7 for a discussion of the chiastic
figures in dizain 367).
20. See Ullrich Langer’s essay in this volume on Virgil’s lovers turning towards
each other, and on more or less embodied versions of this scenario in later
poets including Scève.
21. This objection continues to be made, despite rebuttals and counter-
examples in a number of recent publications; these include Alan Richardson,
The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 2010), Introduction; Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs,
eds, Cognition, Literature, and History (New York: Routledge, 2014); and
my essay “Situated cognition: the literary archive,” in Poetics Today 38
(2017): 235–53. See also the Introduction to this volume, pp.1–12
22. Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden,” probably composed in the 1660s
in a different country and a different language, is another item for the
archive: see my brief discussion of two stanzas from the poem in “Far
Other Worlds and Other Seas”: Thinking with Literature in the Twenty-First
Century, the sixth annual lecture of the International Balzan Foundation
(Milan: Olschki, 2015), also in “Situated cognition” (see above, n. 21),
pp. 248–50). Cf also John Donne’s “The Ecstasy.”
23. The point is valid also within the macro-perspective of evolution, where a
gradual emergence of human reflective capacity from mental processes
anticipating or affording that capacity (providing a platform for it) needs
to be assumed. Early hominin cognition in general, one might say, was
characterized by pre-reflective processes. For a more extended discussion
of the relation between pre-reflective and reflective cognition, see Thinking
with Literature, especially 21–4, 40–2.
30 T. CAVE
Bibliography
Bolens, Guillemette. Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire.
Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008. Translated as: The Style of Gestures:
Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
———. L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire
du lecteur. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016.
Bruhn, Mark J., and Donald R. Wehrs, eds, Cognition, Literature, and History.
New York: Routledge, 2014.
Carston, Robyn. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit
Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Cave, Terence. Rime et structure du dizain dans la Délie de Maurice Scève. In Les
Fruits de la saison. Mélanges de Littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles offerts au
Professeur André Gendre, edited by Philippe Terrier, Loris Petris, Marie-Jeanne
Liengme Bessire, 49–57. Geneva: Droz, 2000.
———.“Far Other Worlds and Other Seas”: Thinking with Literature in the Twenty-
First Century. The Sixth Annual Lecture of the International Balzan Foundation.
Milan: Olschki, 2015.
———.Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016a.
———. The Transit of Venus: Feeling Your Way Forward. In Montaigne in
Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, edited by Neil Kenny, Richard
Scholar and Wes Williams, 9–18. Oxford: Legenda, 2016b.
———. Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive. In Poetics Today 38 (2017):
235–53.
de Montaigne, Michel. Les Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey and Verdun-Louis
Saulnier. Paris: PUF, 1965.
de Mourgues, Odette. Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry. Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1953.
Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Scève, Maurice. The “Délie.” Edited by I. D. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge
Spolsky, Ellen. Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures. Poetics Today
17 (1996): 157–80.
CHAPTER 3
Turning Toward the Beloved

(Virgil, Petrarch, Scève)
Ullrich Langer
Three poems—a section of Virgil’s fourth Georgic, a sonnet by Petrarch,

and a dizain by Maurice Scève—will constitute my brief demonstration of
kinesic intelligence at the heart of one of the most enduring scenarios in
early modern lyric poetry. Although they are in a chronological sequence,
and the later authors knew the earlier poems, neither Petrarch’s sonnet
nor Scève’s dizain are a discernible reading of the earlier poem or poems.
It is more my contention that the physical scenario in Virgil is a powerful
archetypal incarnation of the gestures underlying and conveying the des-
ignation of the beloved, and I understand the later poems to be versions
of this designation. Read on the background of the Virgil fragment,
Petrarch’s and Scève’s poems are also demonstrations of how these ges-
tures become absorbed into other, less directly physical, levels of literary
representation. Even in the Virgilian scenario itself, it is impossible to seg-
regate physical movement from the various meanings derived from its rep-
resentation, and that integration of the physical into the semantically
complex makes it no less powerful.
Indeed, the representation of physical gesture in these samples—the
turning of Orpheus to Eurydice, and her stretching out toward him—is
U. Langer (*)
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_3
32 U. LANGER
hardly distinguishable from other layers in the “discourse” of (lyric)

poetry, and particularly figures of rhetoric, such as the apostrophe, and the
shift from a universal cause to an individual cause. Gesture seems to be the
physical origin, as it were, of these discursive phenomena, as if gesture
echoed in various ways throughout the representation. The intentionality
of the initial gesture is reinforced by the successive literary correlations to
the physical gesture, both in the Virgilian passage itself and in the later
poems. Although each of these is further removed from the physical move-
ment as such and from its direct perception in the diegesis by the beloved
(Eurydice or Orpheus), the intentions that the movement manifested are
absorbed into, and made explicit, by various features of the later literary
representations.
My more specific claims are the following: the turning toward an object
of love is a gesture of designation or intention, in accordance with love’s
idealization of the beloved.1 The movement toward the beloved is also a
sign of life2; it confirms (and, ironically, ruins) the presumed victory over
death. The turn toward the beloved provokes an empathic movement on
the part of the reader/listener. This empathic movement is central to an
implicit conceptual argument made, at least in the Virgil segment: it
undergirds the plea for equity, in the form of pardon, on the background
of a harsh law. However, the language used to represent the response of
the beloved complicates—both strengthening and weakening—the
implicit legal case. In the poems by Petrarch and Scève, the gesture of
turning-toward resonates as a shift from universal to particular address. A
similar implicit case for equity (in the form of pardon) can be made, with
similarly predictable tragic results.
Iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis,

redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras,
pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem),
cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem,
ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes:
restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa
immemor heu ! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis
effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni
foedera, terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis.
illa ‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu,
quis tantus furor ? en iterum crudelia retro
fata vocant conditque natantia lumina somnus.
iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte
TURNING TOWARD THE BELOVED (VIRGIL, PETRARCH, SCÈVE) 33
invalidasque tibi tendens, heu ! non tua, palmas.’3

(Georgics, IV, 485–499)
[And now, as he retraced his steps, he had avoided all accident, and the
returned Eurydice was nearing the upper air, following behind (for
Proserpina had given that law), when a sudden madness seized the impru-
dent lover, to be pardoned, indeed, if the shades knew how to pardon: he
halted, and on the very verge of light, forgetful, alas, and his mind van-
quished, he looked back at his Eurydice. In that instant all the labour was
spilled and the pacts of the savage tyrant were broken, and three times a peal
of thunder was heard among the pools of Avernus. She cried, “who has
ruined me, woeful, and you, Orpheus, what immense frenzy? look, again the
cruel fates call [me] back, and sleep seals my swimming eyes. And now
farewell: I am borne away, surrounded by a vast night, and stretching my
strengthless palms to you—alas, not yours.”]4
The final, tragic encounter of Orpheus and Eurydice consists of move-

ments, at the core of which are two specific gestures.5 Orpheus stops and
turns around to look at Eurydice. Eurydice stretches her arms toward her
husband before she is pulled back into Hades. Especially at the outset Virgil
fills these lines with indications of movement—pedem referens, evaserat,
veniebat, sequens, restitit, respixit—referring to the lovers. But other expres-
sions are also (originally) indications of movement, and function as a cata-
chresis: most notably reddita Eurydice, Eurydice given back, as Proserpina
had given the law, dederat legem.6 Frenzy overtaking Orpheus is worded as
“frenzy seized him,” dementia cepit. The scenario and the negotiations that
allowed this to happen are all suffused with taking and giving humans and
things. All aspects of this scene are meant to provoke the response of empa-
thy that kinesic intelligence insists upon. We know Orpheus and Eurydice
because their gestures toward each other are the result of other such ges-
tures, taking them away and giving them back. Our empathic imitation of
their final failed tending toward each other is all the deeper since it can rely
on layers of such movement, a kind of kinesic memory.7
***
Virgil waters down the final indications of movement: effusus, natantia,

feror, circumdata. Spilled, swimming, born away, surrounded. In the
midst of these, surrounded by these weaker evocations of movement
(although circumdata is an ironic reminder of the earlier reddita and
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ambition, the senseless privations of asceticism, the bloody and
turbulent spirit of monastic bigotry, were, by the prudence and
foresight of its founder, excluded from its system. Imposing a
moderate contribution upon all those in its dominions who declined
to abjure the faith of their ancestors, it, upon the other hand, refused
to the ministers of other religions, its vassals, the privilege of taxing
the members of their congregations without their consent. It
impressed upon youth, of whatever rank or station, the obligations of
polite and courteous behavior and the unremitting exercise of filial
piety. It accorded to every seeker after truth the inestimable privilege
of private interpretation and individual opinion,—an inherent right of
man refused by Christianity until the time of Luther, who, on account
of his advocacy of this innovation, was himself denounced as a
Mohammedan; and in certain countries of Europe, not asserted until
the seventeenth century, except in secret, and under the threatening
shadows of the stake and the scaffold. Unlike other religions, it did
not refuse salvation to those who rejected its dogmas. In the
presence of the allurements of the seraglio, it still represented
continence as the most precious jewel of a believer; but, perceiving
the vices provoked by the unnatural restraints of monastic life, it
prohibited celibacy, and, for two centuries after the death of the
Prophet, the faquir, the santon, and the dervish were unknown. By
adopting to a certain extent the primitive code of antiquity,
eliminating the evil and retaining the good it contained, it appealed
strongly to religious sentiment and national pride, rendered still more
binding the virtues of public faith and private hospitality, and, by its
repudiation of idolatry in all its forms, concentrated the mind of the
devotee upon the compassion, the justice, the infinite grandeur and
majesty of God.
A marked peculiarity of Islam is the absence of the female
element from its ritual. Even now, in the days of its degeneracy,
women have no place in the calendar of its saints; and yet we are
aware that among all former, and many contemporaneous, religions
the employment of priestesses was common, and female deities
were favorite objects of adoration. The Virgin of the Koran—though
her immaculate conception was conceded seven hundred and sixty-
one years in advance of the decision of the Council of Basel—is, in
all other respects, an ordinary mortal, and is far from possessing the
dignity and importance of the famous Isis, that fascinating goddess
who, banished from the banks of the Nile, was exalted, crowned with
her starry emblems, in equal majesty and superior beauty, upon a
more gorgeous throne in the imperial city of Catholic Rome.
Mohammed was not exempt from the prejudices entertained by
his countrymen towards the sex. The sentimental gallantry and
respectful homage tendered its members by Western nations is
unknown to the suspicious and sarcastic Oriental. The Prophet
declared that the majority of persons he saw in hell during his
nocturnal journey were women. But if the power of woman to act
directly upon the fortunes of Islam was disdained, her indirect
influence in that direction was enormous and undeniable. The
harems of the polygamous conquerors at once absorbed the noblest
and fairest maidens of the households of the vanquished. The
children of these mothers became, without exception, Moslems; and,
after the lapse of a generation, the lingering traces of other beliefs
disappeared, and nothing but a reconquest and a fresh immigration,
or a miraculous interposition of Providence, could have restored the
land, so recently subjugated, to its pristine faith.
In religion, as in politics, success is the generally recognized
criterion of truth; of the multitude, few have time or inclination for the
solution of abstruse theological questions; but substantial results are
unmistakable, and even the most credulous are subject to the
contagion of example. The successive and dazzling victories of
Islam were, in the eyes of its superstitious adversaries, the most
convincing argument of the divinity of its origin.
The doctrine of compulsion subsequently associated with Islam
was, as already stated, not an original or essential part of its dogma.
Mohammed did not advise recourse to the sword until all means of
peaceable persuasion had been exhausted, and then only during the
continuance of active hostilities. The moral impulse which Islam
received as soon as its first victories were won was remarkable and
suggestive. It was but the manifestation of the reverence for Force, a
feeling which is never eradicated from human nature even in the
mostly highly civilized communities. The Roman empire was founded
upon this principle, of which it subsequently became the practical
embodiment and representative. The successors of the Cæsars, the
Khalifs, well aware of its power over the masses, retained and
perpetuated its influence, and the scimetar and the Koran usurped
the place and dignity of the deposed deities Mars and Hercules. And
even in our day we see the evidence of the survival of this sentiment
—as old as man himself—in the ceremonies relating to marriage by
force among barbarous nations; in the proverbial, yet unconscious,
admiration of both sexes—and especially of women—for the soldier;
in the applause that greets the espada in the bull-ring; and in the
homage and hero-worship accorded to the successful athlete and
pugilist.
The mountain region of the Hedjaz, the rocky and barren valleys
of Palestine, are insignificant in extent, destitute of natural resources,
and without political importance in the eyes of the conquerors and
rulers of nations. Yet within their contracted limits were promulgated
the three religions which have exercised a predominant influence
over the destinies of the most diverse and widely separated races of
the globe. The unsocial and repellent character of the institutions of
Moses which discouraged proselytism did not prevent the power of
Hebrew genius from being felt in every country in which the detested
sectaries of Israel established themselves. Christianity and
Mohammedanism have by turns disputed the empire of the civilized
world. The Khalifs, the spiritual heads of Islam, were long the
exponents of intellectual culture, the masters of the fairest regions of
Europe and Asia, the discerning patrons of art and letters. The most
renowned of the Cæsars, the greatest of modern potentates, were
alike inferior in rank and public consideration to the Supreme
Pontiffs, who inherited the throne ennobled by the traditions of
Roman glory, and whose dignity was confirmed by the omnipotent
authority of God. No secular government, worthy of mention in
history, has ever been instituted in a region so dreary and
inhospitable as that from whence the most powerful and practical
forms of faith that have ever enthralled humanity deduce their origin.
The changes which all of the latter, in turn, have undergone, present
a suggestive commentary on the perishable character of religious
systems. The influence of the Babylonian captivity upon Judaism is
apparent in every book of the Old Testament and in many of those of
the New. We may safely conjecture that Christianity was something
very different in the time of Tiberius from what it was in the time of
Constantine, and we know what radical changes were made in its
canons and ritual by Gregory the Great and Luther. The ancient
manuscripts of the Gospels—perhaps destroyed for sinister reasons
—have left no data for speculation as to their contents; but it is not
unreasonable to at least surmise that the originals did not offer the
glaring examples of inelegant diction and barbaric idioms that deform
the modern versions. Nor has Islam escaped the fate of its
predecessors, the result of the vicissitudes of time, and of the
prejudices, weaknesses, and ambition of their votaries. Its distinctive
peculiarity was its positive disclaimer of supernatural powers; yet the
miracles attributed to Mohammed compose a considerable portion of
its sacred literature, which is also oppressed and discredited by a
vast mass of preposterous fables, treasured up for centuries in the
voluminous body of Islamitic tradition. The simplicity of its creed
would seem to effectually preclude all attempts at sectarian division;
yet seventy-three sects exist, whose members lose no opportunity to
persecute each other with acrimonious hostility. Mohammed
execrated idolatry and the arts of the diviner, and denied the merit of
works of supererogation; and now relics are suspended in the
mosques; omens are sought in the Koran; intercession of saints is
daily implored; the Persians worship the Imams; and the Omanites,
instead of recognizing the Kaaba, render their obeisance to the
Kiblah of their Sabean ancestors, the pole-star of the heavens.
In the Prophet’s attempts to secure the improvement of public
morals, his attention was particularly drawn to Mecca as the central
point of Islam, whither the believer turns in his daily devotions, and
towards which his sightless eyes are directed when his body is
deposited in the tomb. But the effects of his salutary admonitions
died with him; and the Meccans, relieved from restraint, again
became notorious for the excesses which had formerly made the
Holy City a reproach even to heathen Arabia. It is a deplorable fact,
and one which unhappily affords but too much excuse for the gibes
of the profane, that those seats of piety which public opinion has
invested with the sacred prestige of celestial influence are the very
ones whose population is the most blasphemous, vile, and
degraded. The worst Mussulmans of the world are the Arabs of the
Hedjaz, as the Italian populace has ever been the scoffer at papal
infallibility and the relentless enemy of the Vicar of God. The three
cities of the world whose inhabitants early acquired, and have since
maintained, the most unenviable reputation for depravity and
licentiousness are Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome.
Unlike most theological systems to which men, in all ages, have
rendered their obedient and pious homage, no mystery obscures the
origin and foundation of Islam. The purity and simplicity of its
principles have undergone no change. Its history has been
preserved by the diligence of innumerable writers. The life and
characteristics of its Prophet, even to the smallest detail, are
accessible to the curiosity of every enterprising scholar.
The austere character of a faith which, at its inception, exacts a
rigid compliance with the minutest formalities of its ritual, naturally
becomes relaxed and modified after that system has attained to
worldly importance and imperial authority; or, in the language of one
of the greatest of modern writers, “a dominant religion is never
ascetic.” It is strange that Islam, which, in this respect, as in many
others, has conformed to the general law of humanity, and now
acknowledges tenets and allows practices that would have struck the
subjects of Abu-Bekr and Omar with amazement, has been able to
preserve in such perfection the observance of its ceremonial;
especially when it had no organized sacerdotal power to sustain it.
The absence of an ecclesiastical order which could dictate the policy
of the throne, and humble the pride of the ermine and purple with the
dust in the presence of some audacious zealot, also left
untrammelled the way for scientific investigation and research, and,
more than all else, contributed to dispel the darkness of mediæval
times. The doctrine of toleration enunciated by Mohammed gave no
encouragement to that system of repression whose activity has
exhausted every means of checking the growth of philosophical
knowledge, by imposing the most direful spiritual and temporal
penalties upon every teacher who ventures to publicly explain its
principles; and it is a matter of far deeper import to the civilization of
the twentieth century, than is implied by the mere performance of an
act of devotion, when the Temple of Mecca—the seat of a time-
honored faith, from whose shrine emanated the spirit of learning that
redeemed degraded Europe—is saluted five times every day by the
reverent homage of concentric circles of believers, one hundred and
fifty million in number, from Tangier to Pekin, from the borders of
Siberia to the Equinoctial Line.
We may well consider with admiration the rapid progress and
enduring effects of this extraordinary religion which everywhere
brought order, wealth, and happiness in its train; which, in destroying
the deities of the Kaaba, swept away the traditions of thirty centuries;
which adopted those pagan rites that it could not abolish; which
seized and retained the birthplace of Christianity; which dispersed
over so wide a territory alike the theocracy of the Jews and the ritual
of Rome; which drove the Magi from the blazing altars of Persia;
which usurped the throne and sceptre of the Byzantine Church;
which supplanted the fetichism of the African desert; which trampled
upon the mysteries of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, and revealed to the
wondering Egyptians the secret of the Most High God; which
invaded the Councils of Catholicism, and suggested a fundamental
article of its belief; which fashioned the graceful arches of our most
famous cathedrals; which placed its seal upon the earth in the
measurement of a degree, and inscribed its characters in living light
amidst the glittering constellations of the heavens; which has left its
traces in the most familiar terms of the languages of Europe; which
affords daily proof of its beneficent offices in the garments that we
wear, in the books that we read, in the grains of our harvests, in the
fruits of our orchards, in the flowers of our gardens; and which gave
rise to successive dynasties of sovereigns, whose supreme ambition
seemed to be to exalt the character of their subjects, to transmit
unimpaired to posterity the inestimable treasures of knowledge, and
to extend and perpetuate the intellectual empire of man. These
signal and unparallelled results were effected by the inflexible
constancy, the lofty genius, the political sagacity, of an Arabian
shepherd, deficient in the very rudiments of learning, reared among
a barbarous people divided into tribes whose mutual hostility had
been intensified by centuries of warfare, who had no organized
system of government, who considered the mechanical and
mercantile arts degrading, who recognized no law but that of force,
and knew no gods but a herd of grotesque and monstrous idols.
Robbery was their profession, murder their pastime. Except within
the precincts of their camp, no friend, unless connected by the
sacred ties of blood, was secure. They devoured the flesh of
enemies slain in battle. Deceit always excepted, cruelty was their
most prominent national characteristic. Their offensive arrogance,
relentless enmity, and obstinate tenacity of purpose were, in a direct
ratio to their ignorance and their brutalizing superstition, confirmed
by the prodigies, the omens, and the legends of ages.
To undertake the radical amelioration of such political and social
conditions was a task of appalling, of apparently insuperable
difficulty. Its fortunate accomplishment may not indicate the active
interposition of Divine authority. The glories which invest the history
of Islam may be entirely derived from the valor, the virtue, the
intelligence, the genius, of man. If this be conceded, the largest
measure of credit is due to him who conceived its plan, promoted its
impulse, and formulated the rules which insured its success. In any
event, if the object of religion be the inculcation of morals, the
diminution of evil, the promotion of human happiness, the expansion
of the human intellect; if the performance of good works will avail in
that great day when mankind shall be summoned to its final
reckoning, it is neither irreverent nor unreasonable to admit that
Mohammed was indeed an Apostle of God.
CHAPTER III
THE CONQUEST OF AL-MAGHREB
647–707
General Disorder following the Death of Mohammed—Regulations of

Islam—Progress of the Moslem Arms—Northern Africa, the Land
of the Evening—Its Fertility—Its Population—Expedition of
Abdallah—Defeat of the Greeks—Invasion of Okbah—
Foundation of Kairoan—March of Hassan—Ancient Carthage—
Its Influence on Europe—Its Splendid Civilization—Its Maritime
Power, its Colonies, its Resources—Description of the City—Its
Architectural Grandeur—Its Harbors, Temples, and Public
Edifices—Roman Carthage—Its Luxury and Depravity—Its
Destruction by the Moslems—Wars with the Berbers—Musa
appointed General—His Romantic History—His Character—He
subdues Al-Maghreb—Africa incapable of Permanent Civilization.
The dissensions excited by the fierce hordes of Arabia, whose
intolerance of authority and aversion to tribute had been with
difficulty controlled by the mysterious influence of Mohammed, at his
death broke forth with redoubled violence, and seriously threatened,
for a time, not only the integrity of the Moslem empire, but even the
existence and perpetuity of the recently established faith. With the
exception of a few tribes which the ties of blood or considerations of
personal interest, joined to their intimate commercial relations with
the inhabitants of the Holy Cities, retained in a precarious allegiance,
the whole population of the Peninsula rose at once in arms. Each
petty chieftain, jealous of the central power, and endowed with an
extravagant opinion of his own abilities as ruler and legislator,
arrogated to himself divine authority, and aspired to the title and the
prerogatives of a prophet of God. The populace, half idolatrous and
half infidel at heart, and which had received the injunctions of the
Koran with apparent enthusiasm and inward contempt, welcomed
with joy each new revelation, as affording a prospective state of war
and discord so thoroughly in consonance with its predatory instincts
and turbulent character.
With this condition of affairs, whose gravity might well have
appalled the mind of an experienced statesman, the executive ability
and diplomatic tact of the first Khalif, a man bred to mercantile
pursuits, yet admirably fitted by nature for the arduous duties of his
exalted position, were found fully competent to deal. The insurgent
armies were annihilated; the false prophets killed, driven into exile,
or compelled to renounce their claims; the rebellious tribes were
decimated, and their property seized as the legal spoils of war. With
keen insight into the character of his countrymen, Abu-Bekr
employed their fiery and indomitable spirit in the extension of Islam
and the settlement and consolidation of its hitherto ill-defined and
uncertain jurisdiction. The policy partially developed under his wise
management was finally established and perfected by the iron will
and martial genius of Omar. The latter realized thoroughly the
paramount importance of preserving unimpaired the unity and
prestige of his nation, whose victories, in brilliancy and political
effect, had already surpassed those of any preceding conqueror, and
bade fair to make the dominion of Islam coextensive with the world.
In pursuance of this design, the spoils of conquest, the tribute of
subjugated nations, the enormous rental of the plains of Asia Minor
and Mesopotamia, the rich harvests of the Valley of the Nile, the
magnificent gifts of distant sovereigns—hoping to escape a visitation
from the swarthy horsemen of the Desert—were all placed in a
common fund, from which was pensioned every individual belonging
to the Arab race, in regular gradation, the stipend increasing with
years, dignity, and value of military service. No one was too
insignificant to have his name inscribed upon the official registers at
Medina; and even slaves, women, and newly-born infants were, as
well as the most renowned warriors, regularly paid their stated
allowance. In the various countries reduced by the prowess of the
Moslems, the lands, though confiscated to the uses of the state,
remained by special provision inalienable, and, while forming a part
of the public domain, could not be acquired by those who had
conquered them, and continued to be occupied and tilled by their
former proprietors. By these regulations, also, the legal residence of
the Arab was established and made perpetual in the Peninsula.
Everywhere else, no matter what his rank or employment, he was
but a sojourner, liable at any moment, without warning, to be
summoned to battle with the infidel; and even viceroys of the Khalif
could not purchase a foot of ground in the cities which they ruled
with all but absolute power. While in the case of female captives, the
most unbounded license was permitted and encouraged, the
believer was particularly enjoined to select for his wives the
daughters of some Arab clan; and his children, without exception,
were early taught to assert their assumed superiority of birth, and to
look down upon all foreigners, however illustrious they might be by
descent, wealth, military distinction, or literary attainments.
The comprehensive and exacting laws of Omar, which arbitrarily
determined questions of legislation and finance, the marshalling of
armies, the adjustment of territorial disputes, the arrangement of the
household, and the offices of religion, laid the foundation for the
future greatness of Islam. By his edict the date of the Hegira was
fixed. His inflexible sense of justice inflicted the humiliating
punishment of the lash, prescribed by law for drunkenness, upon
beggar and noble alike. The Code which bears his name is
remarkable, even in an age of fanaticism, for the severe restrictions
it imposed on the personal liberty of Jews and Christians, the only
sectaries to whom Moslem clemency permitted the practice of their
rites and customs.
The assassination of Omar in the prime of manhood, and before
his great designs had been fully matured, was the signal for feuds,
conspiracies, and every form of domestic convulsion, fomented by
tribal jealousy, ancient prejudice, and disappointed ambition;
disturbances which the weak and vacillating spirit of his successor
was unable to repress. Yet, despite the disadvantages arising from
the intellectual impotence of Othman, the constitution of the
Mussulman theocracy possessed sufficient vitality to retard
dissolution for a considerable time. The glorious traditions of a
decade of uninterrupted victory were not easily forgotten. The
trophies wrested from the despised and hated foe were displayed in
every city and village; his banners drooped in the courts of every
mosque; the harem, the street, the bazaar, swarmed with captives
from the most distant climes; while the annual distribution from the
public treasury evidenced at once the wealth and weakness of the
infidel and the paternal generosity of the conqueror. The Persian
monarchy which had successfully withstood the attacks of consul,
dictator, and emperor, supported by the discipline and inexhaustible
resources of Roman power, had fallen, after two great battles, before
the impetuous valor of the Moslem hosts. Palestine, with its hallowed
associations, its memories of all that is most sacred in the annals of
Christianity, its scenes of divine miracle and mystery, of privation,
suffering, and triumphant glory, was in the hands of the Mussulman,
whose sacrilegious footsteps daily defiled the precincts of
Gethsemane and Golgotha, and whose call to prayer arose from a
magnificent shrine erected upon the site of the ruined temple of
Solomon. The Greek Emperor, after a reign of extraordinary
vicissitudes which had, in some degree, retrieved the vanished
prestige of the Roman arms deprived in rapid succession of the
choicest realms of his empire, was now virtually a prisoner, protected
only by the Bosphorus and the impregnable walls of his capital.
Egypt, the depository of traditions of incalculable antiquity, had
submitted, after a brief and determined struggle, to the common fate
of nations, and the banners of Islam floated in triumph from the
towers of Alexandria and Memphis. It was with a feeling of awe and
wonder that the fierce, untutored Arab gazed upon the monuments
of this strange and, to him, enchanted land. Before him were the
Pyramids, rising in massive grandeur upon the borders of the Desert;
the stupendous temples; the mural paintings, whose brilliant coloring
was unimpaired after the lapse of fifty centuries; the groups of
ponderous sphinxes, imposing even in their mutilation; the speaking
statues, which, facing the East, with the first ray of light saluted the
coming day; the obelisks, sculptured upon shaft and pedestal with
the eternal records of long extinguished dynasties; the vast
subterranean tombs, whose every sarcophagus was a gigantic
monolith; and the effigies of the old Egyptian kings, personifications
of dignity and power, holding in their hands the symbols of time and
eternity, or grasping, in lieu of the sceptre, that emblematic staff,
which, more potent than the wand of the mightiest magician, has
controlled the destinies of millions of men, and which became in turn
the wand of the Grecian hierophant in the mysteries of Eleusis, the
lituus of the Roman augur, and the crosier of the Catholic
archbishop. At his feet rolled the turbid flood of the mysterious river,
to whose periodical inundation was due the civilization of that
venerable country. The anticipation of this phenomenon had
necessitated the study of astronomy; its overflow had developed a
perfect system of irrigation, and a complicated body of laws, which
regulated the distribution of its fertilizing waters; its subsidence had
required a thorough acquaintance with the rules of geometry and
mensuration; and the noxious vapors arising from its steaming
deposits demanded the speedy disinfection and embalming of all
putrescent animal matter, a precaution which was rigidly enforced by
established custom and the inexorable precepts of religion. The
initiations of the priesthood, the jealously treasured maxims of its
occult knowledge, the attributes of its innumerable deities, all bore
an intimate relation to the waters of the Nile, whose recurring and
invariable changes also indicated the seasons of the Egyptian year,
which were measured by the harvests. The influence produced by
the sight of these marvels upon the destiny of the simple Arab,
whose horizon had hitherto been defined by the shifting sands and
quivering vapors of the Desert, by whom the grandeur and symmetry
of architectural design were undreamt of, and whose ideas of
decoration were limited to the barbaric tracery of an earthen jar or
the coarse patterns of the primitive loom, was incalculable. As every
civilization is but an adaptation to new conditions of elements more
or less perceptible in those which have preceded it, so it was with
that of the Arabs. Their architecture, mainly indebted for its beauty to
the selection of designs from the vegetable world and the skilful
combination of geometrical forms, may in this respect justly lay claim
to originality. Nevertheless, in the groundwork of its finest edifices,
the practised eye can easily detect the foreign influence by which the
efforts of its artisans have been inspired; and the characteristics of
Persian, Egyptian, Carthaginian, and Byzantine are prominent in the
solid walls, the graceful curves, and the sparkling mosaics of the
builders’ masterpieces which adorn the widely-separated provinces
of the Mohammedan empire.
It was during the reign of Othman that the attention of the
Moslems was first seriously directed to the northern coast of Africa, a
region which, extending from the Nile to the Atlantic, comprised a
territory of one thousand miles in length by five hundred in breadth in
its largest diameter. In its approaches, which were made over
burning sands, it exhibited the familiar phenomena of the Desert.
The greater portion of its vast area was susceptible of cultivation,
and contiguous plantations and gardens marked, with an unbroken
line of verdure, the possessions of the once magnificent and still
important cities which in the days of her glory acknowledged the
authority and claimed the protection of the imperial metropolis of
Carthage. Here the most abundant harvests, the most luscious fruits,
rewarded, with but trifling exertion, the industry of the husbandman.
Luxuriant pastures, through which meandered sparkling brooks fed
by perennial springs, sustained large numbers of cattle and sheep.
The date flourished in such variety that it was only by its shape and
stone that its species could be determined. The soil was favorable to
the olive, and oil formed an important article of export. It was indeed
a land of promise, renowned in history, celebrated in myth and
legend; the Ophir of Holy Writ; the scene of the sufferings of Marius,
Regulus, and Cato; where originated many of the most charming
fictions of classic mythology; the home of Danaus, Antæus, and
Atlas; for centuries the abode of Tyrian civilization; the seat
successively of Punic splendor, Roman luxury, Vandal license, and
Christian faith. In its capital Hamilcar had prepared for the descent
upon Sicily which had secured the mastery of the Mediterranean,
and Hannibal had planned the campaign which humbled the pride of
the Eternal City; the land which had received in its bosom refugees
from Palestine and Arabia, the founders and supporters of a new
and glorious empire; the see of St. Augustine; the enchanted
Garden, where dwelt the beautiful daughters of Erebus and Night;
where the gigantic portal marked by the two famous columns pointed
out to the Phœnician mariner the way to the Cassiterides—
“Abyla atque Calpe.”
Carthaginian enterprise for ages bartered its manufactures for the

tin of Britain and the luxuries of Syria; under the Romans, for four
centuries, its agricultural products maintained in profligate idleness
the degenerate inhabitants of Italy.
The further extremity of this region, which the poetic nomenclature
of the Oriental had designated by the name of Al-Maghreb, “The
Land of the Evening,” was the wealthier and more productive; but its
storm-swept coast had subordinated its trade to the superior
commercial advantages of the eastern half, now Tunis and Tripoli,
which was known as Ifrikiyah. A prefect appointed by the court of
Constantinople administered the government of these colonies, in
the name of the Emperor, but his jurisdiction was confined to a
narrow belt of territory, beyond which roamed at will bands of
ferocious and hardy barbarians, some of whom had no settled
habitation; while a considerable number dwelt in the slopes and
defiles of the Atlas Mountains, eking out a miserable subsistence by
a superficial cultivation of the soil and a precarious traffic with their
scarcely less civilized neighbors. The population of this province
was, owing to repeated immigration and invasion, and the
consequent admixture of races, of the most heterogeneous
character. Along the coast, the elegance of the Grecian type,
occasionally modified by the dignified features and martial bearing of
the Roman, whose physical traits had been partially preserved by
the frequent renewal of garrisons and the importation of colonists
from Italy and Constantinople, largely predominated. Further inland
appeared, in the swarthy complexions, blue eyes, and auburn locks,
the cross between Vandal and Mauritanian, side by side with the
unmistakable lineaments of the Syrian and the Jew. But most
numerous of all, the most formidable in war, the most perfidious in
peace, were the Berbers, whose origin tradition has variously
assigned to Europe, Assyria, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Palestine.
Whatever may have been the home of this undoubtedly Semitic
race, their affinity with the Arabs was most conspicuous and
remarkable. Generous, brave, patient of suffering, prodigal of
hospitality, reverential to the aged, loyal to their kindred, impatient of
restraint, merciless in revenge, their character was an epitome of the
rugged virtues and cruel vices of the roving barbarian. The fighting
qualities of this people, joined to the inaccessible nature of their
haunts, and, in no small degree, aided by their poverty, had always
secured for them immunity from conquest. Political reverses had
never been able to efface their national peculiarities. Under
persecution, while apparently conforming to the public faith, they
remained, in reality, fetich worshippers. The long dominations of
Phœnician, Roman, Byzantine, Teuton had effected no alteration in
their language—the Arabic alone has been able to engross about a
third of the terms of their guttural idiom. Their polity resembled a
republic, where each village was independent and governed by a
chieftain elected by the people. Time and again they had mustered
for service against the Emperor armies of thirty and forty thousand
men; but the first defeat dissolved their confederacy; and the rival
chiefs returned with increased avidity to the plunder and massacre of
their allies and friends. Their perfidy, which excited the unwilling
admiration of nations long practised in the arts of deceit, and which
was experienced to their cost by the Romans in the war with
Jugurtha, was, without doubt, in a measure responsible for the
proverbial reputation for duplicity—the “Punica fides”—of Carthage.
Originally idolaters, believers in sorcery and divination, and adorers
of the Sun and of Fire, their intercourse with their neighbors,
considering its irregular and transitory character, had been singularly
productive of changes in religious belief. The emissaries of
Christianity had, with but indifferent success, disseminated among
them the mysteries of their faith; but to the doctrines of the
Pentateuch and the Talmud they lent a willing ear, and the tenets of
Judaism, although not a little tinctured with the traditions of Pagan
mythology, nominally received the assent of the entire Berber nation.
The peculiar type of the Hebrew, insensibly diversified elsewhere by
the associations of commercial intercourse, and by the influence of
soil, climate, and the operation of laws more or less favorable to the
fusion of races, had, in the wilds of Northern Africa, found a
congenial locality for its preservation. The exiles who had escaped
the persecutions of Titus and Hadrian had settled there and
prospered. Laying aside their proverbial reserve, they had joined to
their hereditary inclination for traffic an unwonted disposition to
acquire proselytes; and their opinions had infected, to a greater or
less extent, the population of the coast as well as that of the interior,
from the Greater Syrtis to the Pillars of Hercules. Their relations and
acquaintance extended not only to the extreme Orient, but were
sustained with the semi-barbarous courts of Europe; and their
sympathies with their brethren of Semitic origin, assisted by the
community of ideas, habits, and mode of life of the Berber tribes,
contributed, in a degree which cannot be overestimated, to the
establishment and preservation of the Western empire of Islam.
In the year 647, the covetous glances of the government at
Medina were turned towards the rich plantations and populous
settlements of Al-Maghreb; and the predatory inroads which had
hitherto vexed its borders were, for the first time, superseded by a
systematic and determined attempt at conquest. The weakness and
partiality of Othman, with whom the aggrandizement of his family
was a paramount consideration, had removed the famous Amru from
the viceroyalty of Egypt, and invested with its administration
Abdallah-Ibn-Sa’d, the foster-brother of the Khalif, a warrior of
experience and courage and the finest horseman of his nation, but a
man whose renown had been sullied by the crime of apostasy, and
who had used an employment of confidence to ridicule and revile the
inspired teachings and sacred character of the Prophet.
Calling into requisition all the resources of his government, this
Moslem general marched into the Desert with twenty thousand
soldiers, among them many of the companions of Mohammed and
representatives of the most noble tribes of Arabia. After a few
unimportant skirmishes, and a short but bloody engagement in which
a division of the Greeks was entirely destroyed, the Arab army
advanced to Tripoli, and, investing its walls, pushed forward the
operations of the siege with an energy hardly to be expected from a
people whose experience had been confined to marauding
expeditions and the stratagems of partisan warfare. Under the
dominion of the Byzantine emperors, the office of prefect had been
substituted for that of the ancient proconsul; and this employment
was not only charged with the execution of the laws relating to civil
and military affairs, but also claimed jurisdiction over matters
pertaining to the welfare of the church, the appointment of its
ministers, and the enforcement of the canons of ecclesiastical
discipline. The prefect Gregory, whose talents had been exercised,
and whose prowess had been approved, in many negotiations and
conflicts with the Berbers, at the head of a tumultuous and
undisciplined force of one hundred and twenty thousand men,
moved forward to the relief of Tripoli. Abandoning the siege, the
Arabs accepted the challenge, and a series of battles ensued without
decided advantage upon either side, until the prefect, mortified that
the numerical superiority of his troops should be neutralized by the
desperate courage of his adversaries, offered the hand of his
beautiful daughter—who, completely armed, was each day
conspicuous in the ranks of the vanguard—and a purse of one
hundred thousand pieces of gold to any one who would bring him the
head of the Moslem general. The courage of Abdallah, although he
had faced death in a hundred forms, was not proof against this effort
of his wily antagonist, and, remaining idly in his tent, he left the
conduct of operations to the care of his lieutenants. In the mean time
there arrived at the Arab camp a small detachment headed by Ibn-al-
Zobeir, a warrior of distinction, who heard with contempt of the
pusillanimous conduct of the general. Seeking him, he denounced
his cowardice, suggesting that he should retaliate by the offer of a
similar sum, and the prefect’s daughter as a slave, to whoever
should cast at his feet the head of the Greek commander. The
advice was taken; the tempting reward was published throughout the
camp; the Arab youth were fired by emulation to redoubled efforts;
and Abdallah himself, shamed into action, again appeared in the
front of battle. But the overwhelming numbers of the Greeks, inspired
by the example of a few legions which yet retained the traditions of
Roman steadiness and discipline, and supported by the rapid
evolutions of the Numidian cavalry, famous from the days of
Jugurtha, still rendered the issue doubtful, and by repeated
engagements the ranks of the Arabs were being constantly
diminished. Again the talents of Ibn-al-Zobeir were called into
requisition; the battle was renewed as usual at daybreak; and when
the blazing sun had exhausted the strength of the combatants, both
armies retired to the shelter of their tents. But the Moslems had not
all been engaged, and a division composed of troops, selected for
their bravery and commanded by the intrepid Ibn-al-Zobeir, burst
suddenly like a thunderbolt upon the hostile camp.
Seized with a panic, as they were reposing after the arduous
struggle of the day, the ranks of the enemy were broken, the prefect
was killed, and the camp given over to pillage. A rich booty and
innumerable captives compensated the victors for their trials; the
beauteous Amazon became the slave of Ibn-al-Zobeir; and, after the
capture of the important city of Sufetela, the entire district
acknowledged the authority of the Khalif. The ravages of disease,
the losses resulting from a series of engagements lasting for months,
and the lack of reinforcements, made it impossible for Abdallah to
garrison the towns, or to retain in subjection the restless tribes of the
interior; and he consented, with alacrity, to accept a bribe of two
million five hundred thousand dinars and abandon the conquest. The
spoil was sent to Medina, and Othman further incurred the charges
of injustice and nepotism by presenting Abdallah with the royal fifth,
and by permitting his cousin Merwan to purchase the remainder at
the low valuation of three hundred talents of gold.
For nearly a quarter of a century, the civil wars provoked by the
conflicting claims of the various aspirants to the throne of the
khalifate and the succeeding political establishments left in security
the Greek possessions of the West. The Byzantine court learned
with amazement of the enormous ransom with which the inhabitants
of Africa had purchased the withdrawal of the invaders; and its
avarice was excited when it considered the resources of a country
which could collect so large a sum after having, for generations,
been subject to the rapacious inquisition of the imperial tax-
gatherers. Without delay, the Emperor demanded a contribution of
the same amount as unpaid tribute; and all the mechanism of
extortion was employed, to complete the ruin of his already
impoverished subjects. Oppressed beyond endurance, the Africans
sent an embassy headed by the Patriarch himself to Damascus, and
reciting their grievances, described in glowing terms to Muavia the
wealth of their country and the advantages which must accrue to the
Moslems from its possession. The Khalif, deeply impressed by their
representations, ordered Ibn-Hajij, governor of Egypt, to undertake
the conquest; but the enterprise was not carried out with the
customary vigor of the Saracens, and resulted only in the partial
occupancy of the coast and the subjection of a few unimportant
cities. The permanent establishment of Mussulman rule dates,
however, from this expedition, and henceforth the standard of Islam,
although often furled before the intrepid spirit of the Berbers, was
advanced, foot by foot, to the far distant shores of the Western
Ocean. The most successful commander, and the one who alone,
excepting Musa, made the most enduring impression upon the
valiant and treacherous barbarians of Al-Maghreb, was Okbah-Ibn-
Nafi, who was next invested with the command. Entering the hostile
region at the head of ten thousand veteran cavalry, he made war
with the same resolution and uncompromising spirit which marked
the careers of the daring Amru and Khalid, “The Sword of God.” The
Christians who refused, by either submission or conversion, to
acknowledge the divine origin of Islam were ruthlessly slaughtered;
but the orders of the Khalif explicitly prohibited the equipment or use
of naval armaments, and the seaports of the Greeks escaped, for the
time, the fate which was inevitable. The Berbers, beholding with
wonder the apparently invincible character of their enemy, equally
fortunate in plain and mountain fastness, defeating with ease their
bravest squadrons, and scaling, despite all obstacles, the all-but
impregnable defences of their strongholds, clothed him with the
attributes of divinity, and, submitting to his dominion, recognized the
power of the Khalif, while at the same time, abjuring their idolatry,
they confessed the unity and majesty of God. The advance of Okbah
was the triumphant progress of a conqueror. Almost unresisted, he
traversed the regions peopled by hordes of fierce barbarians, until,
having penetrated to the Atlantic, he rode his horse into its seething
waters, and, drawing his sword, cried out, “God is great! Were I not
hindered by this sea, I would go forward to the unknown kingdoms of
the West, proclaiming the greatness of Thy Holy Name and subduing
those nations who worship other gods than Thee!”
The moral effect of the expedition of Okbah, which familiarized the
nations of the north of Africa with the doctrines of Islam, was of far
more importance than the spoil collected by the victorious army,
which was, in itself, not inconsiderable. The wealth of the Berbers,
ignorant as they were of the mechanical arts and the elegant
appliances of luxury, was confined to flocks and herds; but the
beauty and fascinations of their women aroused the passions of the

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Movement in Renaissance Literature:

Exploring Kinesic Intelligence 1st

Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the

Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the

Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy:

The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional

Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in

Toxicology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Wexler

An Armenian Mediterranean 1st ed. Edition Kathryn

Human-Like Machine Intelligence Stephen Muggleton

Exploring Kinesic Intelligence

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

More information about this series at

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963054

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

K.B. and T.C.

2 Chiastic Cognition: Kinesic Intelligence Between

3 Turning Toward the Beloved (Virgil, Petrarch, Scève) 31

4 Scève’s Denominal Verbs 55

5 Metaphor, Lexicography, and Rabelais’s Prologue

6 The Gunpowder Revolution in Literature:

7 The Finger in the Eye: Jacques Duval’s Traité des

8 Exchanging Hands in Titus Andronicus 155

9 “Cabin’d, Cribb’ed, Confin’d”: Images of Thwarted

10 Shakespeare’s Vital Signs 189

11 Kinesic Intelligence on the Early Modern English Stage 213

12 How Do Audiences Act? 225

Kathryn Banks is Associate Professor in French at Durham University.

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature in the University

Laura Seymour is an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University. She com-

Fig. 7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem,

Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters

Let us roll all our strength and all

When the speaker of Marvell’s poem addresses these (almost) closing

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

registered in our awareness. Hence Daniel Kahnemann’s bestselling

movements.”14 Complexity, then, is not limited to conflicts between

whose phenomenologically inflected cognitive philosophy has found an

weight, warmth, pulse, breath and muscular tension—which explore what

Remembering: Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England

Chiastic Cognition: Kinesic Intelligence

© The Author(s) 2018 13

The Movement of Thought: Montaigne’s

[E]n somme, je sçay qu’il y a une Medecine, une Jurisprudence, quatre

The second sentence of this passage is full of friction, resistance, tension.

The implicatures7 of “gibier” (literally “quarry”) might include something

What is immediately remarkable about that sentence is its tightly con-

of epic and romance battles. Phenomenally, the blow is registered as a

Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marche qu’à tastons, chancelant,

faculty of the writer. It is no doubt worth mentioning that, although k­ inesic

Quand je voy ces braves formes de s’expliquer, si vifves, si profondes, je ne

us”: ordinary people who, although uneducated, have a firm sense of

Mais moy, d’une condition mixte, grossier … me laisse tout lourdement

The chiasmus requires no extended commentary here. Clearly, it is a way

3 Turning Toward the Beloved (Virgil, Petrarch, Scève) 31

4 Scève’s Denominal Verbs 55

8 Exchanging Hands in Titus Andronicus 155

10 Shakespeare’s Vital Signs 189

11 Kinesic Intelligence on the Early Modern English Stage 213

12 How Do Audiences Act? 225

faculty of the writer. It is no doubt worth mentioning that, although k inesic