Body, Mind and Spirits: The Physiology of Sexuality in the Culture of Sensibility

Abstract

Current scholarship recognises both physiology and sexuality as central elements of the eighteenth‐century culture of sensibility. But scholars have yet really to explore the physiology of sexuality. Through an interdisciplinary approach this article demonstrates the profound resonance of late seventeenth‐century physiological discussions about nerves and animal spirits as the basis for understandings about sexuality and sensibility. Those discussions particularly emphasised specific ways that sex affected the sensible body and rational mind. The physiology of animal spirits – and associated ideas about the body and mind – would underpin representations of sexuality in the art and literature of sensibility in the mid‐eighteenth century.

Epochs of Embodiment: Men, Women and the Material Body

“…Notably following the work of Thomas Willis, greater interest was given to the spirits as the substance that travelled between the brain and the body, through nerves, connecting the metaphysical and the physical. 43 They remind us that one impact of the science of nerves was to continue a long-standing merging of corporeal and emotional. These letters also suggest the rise of sensibility.…”

Desire, disgust and indigestibility in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb

“…While the sexual dynamics, philosophical underpinnings and the role of sensibility in Cleland's writing have been much explored, his interest in human physiology has been largely overlooked. 5 Cleland, who claimed to 'understand the nerves better than any doctor in Europe', published two works exploring the bodily economy: the medical-dietary treatise Institutes of Health (1761) and the pamphlet Phisiological Reveries (1765). These dietetic and medical writings show that the appetite, palate and the intestines -rather than the…”