REVIEWS: The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience. Lianne Habinek,. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018. xvi + 284 pp. $49.95

The Subtle Knot borrows its title from Donne's “The Ecstasy,” a poem that prompts the onto-epistemological conundrum of the first chapter: the locatability of the soul in the rete mirabile, a “wonderful net or miraculous knot” of arteries at the base of the brain where seventeenth-century English anatomists surmised the locus of the rational soul (49). Regional functions of the brain can be deduced by observing psychomotor deficits caused by damage to neural tissue, a practice Habinek traces back to early modern physicians Franciscus Arceus and Helkiah Crooke, who espoused methods of retrograde diagnosis: from effect to cause. The Subtle Knot beautifully weaves multiple strands of neuroscience's literary history, but its conceptual frame glosses over a growing body of neuroscientific research on metaphor and neuroimaging.