These talks chart the role of magnetism—a force thought to animate both stones and living bodies—in the intellectual upheaval of the seventeenth century. Focusing in particular on John Donne’s elegiac poems, the Anniversaries (1611-12), the papers explore how the natural phenomenon of magnetic attraction was imbricated with the rhetorical procedures of analogy and metonymy. Mapping the intertwined histories of analogy and magnetism, the first paper concentrates on the disparate types of analogy expressed in, understood through, and embodied by the peculiar powers of the loadstone. The second talk looks at embodied magnetism, the magnetic resonance that links all living bodies to the ambient world and that supposedly holds the therapeutic power to cure wounds, even at a distance.
