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Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care
Vital Strife examines the close yet puzzling relationship between sleep and ethical care in early modernity. The plays, poems, and philosophical essays at the heart of this bookby Jasper Heywood, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendishexplore the unconscious motions of corporeal life and the drowsy forms of sentience at the boundaries of human thought and intentionality. Benjamin Parris shows how these writers, although trained under the Renaissance humanist paradigm of attentive care, begin to dissolve the humanist coupling of virtue with vigilance by giving credence to the vital power of sleep. Read more