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Coda

“to think upon----------&c”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Caroline Bicks
Affiliation:
University of Maine, Orono
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Summary

The Coda briefly explores how depictions of female adolescent brainwork grew more negative over the course of the seventeenth century, particularly in some medical and sexual handbooks. This loss of girls’ minds to their raging adolescent physiognomies suggests some kind of shift in popular thinking about female adolescent cognition — or, at least, in how to market it. At the same time, other writers (including some medical ones) continued to feature girls’ focused and dynamic brainwork. The Coda concludes by considering the 1687 journal entry of a Protestant Englishman who recorded his visit to an English Carmelite convent in Antwerp, where he encountered a young novice who challenged his concerns that she was being buried alive and claimed she would not wish to change places with any woman. His description of the conversation that “materially passed between us,” and of her pledge to remember and pray for him, suggests that notions of embodied and extended cognition were still in circulation, even as theories like Cartesian dualism and the mechanistic body were developing in the latter half of the century. And that English girls’ dynamic brainwork continued to be recognized and valued — if, perhaps, in more limited contexts.

Type
Chapter
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Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
Rethinking Female Adolescence
, pp. 222 - 230
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Coda
  • Caroline Bicks, University of Maine, Orono
  • Book: Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933919.008
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  • Coda
  • Caroline Bicks, University of Maine, Orono
  • Book: Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933919.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Coda
  • Caroline Bicks, University of Maine, Orono
  • Book: Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933919.008
Available formats
×