Book excerpt: Explores the history and theory of personhood in the Renaissance periodOffers the first sustained study of the history and theory of personhood in the Renaissance periodProvides a study of personhood from a materialist perspectiveModels new way of entering posthumanist critique - animal studies, ecocriticism, and food studies - into conversation with legal theory, cultural history, and literary studiesUnfolding as a series of materially oriented studies ranging from chairs, machines and doors to trees, animals and food, this book retells the story of Renaissance personhood as one of material relations and embodied experience, rather than of emergent notions of individuality and freedom. The book assembles an international team of leading scholars to formulate a new account of personhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one that starts with the objects, environments and physical processes that made personhood legible.