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Introduction
From the very beginning, introspection provides Astrophil and Stella with its narrative drive and its emotional power. "Look in thy heart, and write," commands the Muse, and as Astrophil' s project of lyric persuasion develops we see that the task of wooing Stella is linked inextricably with his capacity to understand himself. Astrophil's emergent self-awareness, predicated as it is upon perceptual experience, suggests powerfully the transformative possibilities of art. Through Astrophil, I wish to argue, Sidney attends to a set of questions about selfhood that became freshly urgent at the close of the sixteenth century: what does it mean to know oneself? How is perceptual experience linked to self-knowing, and what are the limits of selfunderstanding? When we look into our hearts, what can we expect to find?
To be sure, Astrophil and Stella is not a work of philosophy and does not address these questions systematically or comprehensively. Yet it does, I suggest, make important claims about mental experience during a period of intense debate about the nature of perception. In 1641, sixty years after Astrophil and Stella was written, Descartes published his Meditations, presenting a new vocabulary for conceptualizing the self and helping to reorient early modern beliefs about how thinking and feeling worked. That the middle of the seventeenth century saw fundamental revisions to earlier accounts of subjectivity - a historical moment Bruce R. Smith characterizes as a "crisis of consciousness" - is well established.1 Yet I wish to demonstrate that the historical boundaries of that crisis have been too narrowly defined, and that Astrophil and Stella, written in 1581, in fact made a number of crucial refinements to a late-sixteenth-century consensus about the order and functions of the self. Sidney's depiction of Astrophil as a subject defined by his own introspection, whose inward looking is a form of self-analysis, suggests Descartes' cogito: Astrophil's existence is affirmed, and indeed constituted, by his own self-directed thought.
While introspection lies at the heart of Astrophil and Stella, in the 1580s the concept was still in development and yet unnamed.2 The term first appeared in the 1660s, after Cartesian investigations of the soul had established that thought possesses a constitutive power. Yet the fundamental principles underlying the concept were emerging even in the last...