How did the split between the sensibilities affect thoughts about the role or nature of the body in Renaissance literature?

The human body figures as a topic in many literary texts
from the English Renaissance. Although it is difficult to generalize about such a broad
issue, especially as it appears in so many different texts, it may be useful to comment
on a few specific instances.

• The body was often
  contrasted with the soul, and the soul was typically considered superior to the body. At
  the very end of Henry Howard’s tribute to the dead Sir Thomas Wyatt, for example, Howard
  proclaims that while the earth possesses only Wyatt’s “bones, the heavens possess his
  ghost [that is, his spirit]” (38). The body inevitably died, but the soul was capable of
  living forever. As the speaker of sonnet 79 of Edmund
  Spenser’s Amoretti puts
  it,

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. . . onely that is permanent and
free

From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew [that
is, outlast]
(7-8)

• The body was
  often considered the source of many impulses and temptations that conflicted with
  Christian ideals of the period. The male speakers in many Renaissance sonnets, for
  instance, are driven by their own bodily desires to want to possess merely the
  attractive, ephemeral bodies of women rather than valuing those women for their truly
  beautiful souls and characters. Thus, in sonnet 52 of Sir Philip
  Sidney’sAstrophil and Stella sonnet sequence, Astrophil is
  foolishly willing to dispense with Stella’s soul in order that he and Cupid may possess
  her “body” (14). Sidney clearly mocks this choice.


• The
  body was mortal and mutable, but the beauty of the body could be preserved in several
  ways, including marriage and reproduction and also including celebration by a talented
  poet. Both of these ways of passing on beauty are extolled in sonnet 18 of Shakespeare’s
  sonnets.


• Although mere lust for another’s body was
  condemned, physical love for (and with) another person was approved, as long as that
  love was true love, rooted in a prior love of God, and as long as that love was
  sanctioned in holy matrimony. This kind of love seems to be praised, for instance, in
  John Donne’s poem “The Good Morrow” (among many other works). Love of another’s body was
  permissible as long as it was the result of prior love of that person’s soul. Thus, in a
  memorable line from John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” the speaker
  says that if he and his beloved can maintain their spiritual connection, they will “Care
  less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss” if they happen to be physically separated (20).
  Notice that the speaker does not say that they will not miss each
  other physically at all; they will simply miss each other “less” in that way than if
  their connection were merely and completely physical. People whose affections are rooted
  merely in fleshly attraction

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. . . cannot
admit

Absence, because it [that is, absence] doth
remove

Those things [the flesh] which elemented it [their
attraction]

• The
  death of another person’s body could produce great grief in the Renaissance, even though
  people of this period strongly believed that the soul survived the body. Thus, in Ben
  Jonson’s poem “On My First Son,” Jonson realizes intellectually and spiritually that his
  little boy’s soul still lives, despite the death of the boy’s body, but the latter kind
  of death nevertheless produces great grief.


• Ideally,
  then, in the Renaissance the body and soul were expected to be in harmony, not in
  conflict, with the soul clearly superior to the body and in control of
  it.