Experimental Selves: Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe

"Braider’s command of literature, history of ideas, and his ability to make philosophers, scientists, and writers think together is definitely impressive and insightful."

Christophe Schuwey, Yale University, University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018

"Experimental Selves joins a growing number of studies of early modern personhood... Braider explores the idea that, as he puts it, 'person itself is experiment' at length in relation to early modern theatre."

Charles T. Wolfe, Cá’Foscari University, Publishing Research Quarterly

"By weaving together analyses of the emerging empirical sciences, political thought, theater, the early novel, and art, the author manages to contribute to ongoing discussions of the new significance that experience takes on in these domains. Christopher Braider tests the main argument of the book, according to which early modern ‘persons’ were ‘experimental,’ against a rich background of philosophical and intellectual historical ideas about the early modern individual. Indeed, the scope of Experimental Selves is impressive, spanning the gap between late-fifteenth-century neo-Platonist Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century philosophe Denis Diderot and philosopher Immanuel Kant; however, it also intervenes in a debate of even larger scope, on the modern individual, also known as ‘subject’. Braider manages the wealth of references and scholarly works and navigates through them with a steady voice."

Antónia Szabari, French and Comparative Literature, USC

“Experimental Selves is an important, challenging, yet intensely readable book, one that ranges with ease from the Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandola (1486) to the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), from Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century to Diderot’s Salons of the eighteenth.  The book includes wonderful close readings of literary texts and paintings alike.”

Blair Hoxby, Dept. of English, Stanford University