Das Grenzwesen Mensch is a pathbreaking book, unprecedented in its scope in examining sixteenth-century theories of the body by natural philosophers and writers in tandem with recent feminist and gender theorists (Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, among others). Bidwell-Steiner, a literary scholar specializing in Iberian literature, identifies three “transversals” (283)—“Affects, Emotions, Passions,” “Human and Animal,” and “Human and Artifact” (the book's three main parts)—which poignantly illustrate the porous boundaries of the human body. For Bidwell-Steiner, the premodern and postmodern—periods framing the Scientific Revolution—are comparable in the way they conceptualize the body holistically. They are characterized by similar epistemological frameworks and rhetorically inflected “styles of thought” (1). Bidwell-Steiner contends that “the path from a speculative holistic materialism of the sixteenth century to modern natural sciences could be polemically described as one from living to dead matter” (100)—a path reversed only in the course of the twentieth century, with the “linguistic turn” (1), gender studies, and (materialist) feminist theories (3). Das Grenzwesen Mensch, then, recuperates the importance of philosophers and writers such as Girolamo Fracastoro, Ludovico Ariosto, Fernando de Rojas, Olivia Sabuco, Bernardino Telesio, Giovanni Battista della Porta, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, for the conception of the holistic body prior to (and after) its systematization and fragmentation in the course of the Scientific Revolution.

The first part centers on the recent affective turn and its early modern counterpart, exemplified here by philosophical precursors to Descartes's Passions de l’âme (1649). The question of emotions as movements of the soul is discussed and challenged by writers such as Girolamo Fracastoro, for whom the affect (conatus) is an “instinct of self-preservation” (80); Juan Luis Vives, who considered emotions “social fields of strength” (83); Olivia Sabuco's Nueva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (1587), which offers a “radically naturalistic image of the human being” (90); and Juan Huarte de San Juan, who describes affects as a specifically male disposition for use in state affairs. For Bidwell-Steiner, affect is not prediscursive, but entangled with language. The metaphor as “the most corporeal element of our language” (57) expresses, then, the affect's “liminal human experience” (67).

Starting with Cassirer's reflection on the human being as an “animal symbolicum” (101), the second part asks about early modern criteria used to distinguish between the human and the animal. A magisterial tour de force, this part brings together Derrida's critique of carnophallogocentrisme (139) and Bernardino Telesio's discussion of spiritus as the matter of the soul (anima); Barbara Smuts's exploration of the truthfulness of bodily language in animals and the “veracity” of bodily language as a means to legitimize torture in the early modern Inquisition (143); Francesco Patrizi's and Girolamo Fabrizio's insights into animal language (189), together with the Stoics’ rejection of the animal soul (180); and Ludovico Ariosto's poetic rendering of the fine line that separates humans from animals alongside the topos of love melancholy (amor hereos).

The third part delves into the question of bodily manipulations. Following Walter Benjamin's reflection on the difference between the magician and the surgeon in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Bidwell-Steiner discusses the fantasy of the self-appointed active and omnipotent male “surgical sculptor” (228) who models, transforms, and alters the female body. She finds significant parallels between the “physiognomic theater of illusion” (265), encapsulated in Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (1543), Juan Valverde de Amusco's Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556), Laura Mulvey's feminist film theory, and films such as Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. With Giovan Battista della Porta's Magia Naturalis (1589), Bidwell-Steiner contends, new strategies of body engineering emerge: here, the surgeon acts like a magician seeking to control and use the female body against the backdrop of “heterosexual erotics” (264).

What drives Das Grenzwesen Mensch is a deep reflection not only on the human body, but also on the commonalities in the organization of knowledge in premodern and postmodern times. Pushing back against common assumptions, Bidwell-Steiner shows that holistic epistemologies, not only of the body but of knowledge itself, are largely incompatible with the systematic (and thus necessarily fragmented) methodologies of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment (100). I can only hope that this most timely and important book, written in German, will soon be translated and made available to English-speaking readers.