Renaissance Personhood

Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy. His books include Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment (2024), Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020) and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).

Merging law and literature with environmental humanities, this timely and innovative volume discloses personhood as a reifying machine that instrumentalises the liberty it protects and retools subjects as objects in institutions such as slavery and marriage. Yet the authors also present personhood, especially when it passes through literature and art, as an enduring resource for recognising potential subjects in their creaturely variety.

• Acknowledgments List of Contributors1. What Was Personhood?, Kevin Curran Part I. Materialities of Personhood: Chairs, Machines, Doors2. Daughters, Chairs, and Liberty in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious, Stephanie Elsky 3. The Inner Lives of Renaissance Machines, Wendy Beth Hyman 4. Two Doors: Personhood and Housebreaking in Semayne’s Case and The Comedy of Errors, Colby Gordon Part II. Taxonomies of Personhood: Status, Species, Race 5. Should (Bleeding) Trees Have Standing?, Joseph Campana 6. Aping Personhood, Holly Dugan 7. Race, Personhood, and the Human in The Tempest, Amanda Bailey Part III. Processes of Personhood: Eating, Lusting, Mapping8. Liquid Macbeth, David B. Goldstein 9. Things in Action: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Macbeth, and Levinas on Shame, John Michael Archer 10. Edward Herbert’s Cosmopolitan State, Gregory Kneidel Index