Flesh in the Age of Reason

"A book that was an obsession of Roy Porter's for many years, Flesh in the Age of Reason was finally completed shortly before his untimely death. It is one of his most immediate, important and attractive books and the culmination of his work on the British Enlightenment." "Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Porter goes on to chart how, through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson and Gibbon, ideas about medicine, politics and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the body moved centre-stage in the eighteenth century, writing brilliantly on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, primped, tanned and slimmed themselves: activities that we find familiar but which a Puritan divine would have considered Satanic. And Porter explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul - which had become ever less important in Georgian Britain - took on a new but very different significance in the work of Godwin and Blake."--BOOK JACKET.