The Purple Island and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy, and Theology

This book sets out to reconstruct and analyze the rationality of Phineas Fletchers use of figurality in The Purple Island (1633) a poetic allegory of human anatomy. To this end, textual analyses of The Purple Island lead via bibliographical, biographical, conceptual, formal, and linguistic connections to other works of literature, natural philosophy and theology, and to anatomical demonstrations.