Dimensions
160 x 243 x 39mm
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.
At its core is an attempt to unravel our most all-encompassing obsession: ourselves. How did we come to a modern understanding of our bodies and souls? What were the breakthroughs that allowed human beings to see themselves in a new light?
The mid seventeenth century - the world of Bunyan, Hobbes, Milton, even Newton - seems impossibly remote to us now. But in the ensuing century and a half, during the Enlightenment's astonishing ferment, philosophers, scientists, journalists and novelists created a whole new picture - so that by Lord Byron's lifetime we find a world that is recognisably our own.
