Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature. Early Modern Literature in History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, xiv, 344 pp., 12 b/w and color images.

Although this book belongs to a series of Early Modern Literature, it draws heavily on the medieval legacy of writing about the soul in its various capacities: as an observer or judge of the body, as an audience for the mind or a source of information. The author uses the word premodern in the book’s title because he resists the periodization of English thought about the soul between the medieval world and not only the early modern one, including the Renaissance and Reformation, but even the Enlightenment period (16–20). Nevertheless, the great quantity of literature discussed here comes from the early modern period.