Carin Franzén and Johanna VernqvistIntroductionThis volume explores different subjective strategies used by early modern women–poets, philosophers or artists–who subverted conventional expressions of body,gender and senses. If the body and its sensations are most present, and sometimesviewed in contradictory ways–expressed, visualized or rejected–in early modernart and literature, women have most often served as the objects for these represen-tations (O’Rourke Boyle 1998; Hairston and Stephens 2010; Loh 2019). Furthermore,for male artists, philosophers and poets, they have incarnated the highest good aswell as the most sinful vices. Certainly, the troubles of being torn between desires ofthe flesh and the soul have roots in Christianity, Platonism and the aesthetic expres-sions of, for example, Petrarch and Dante (Falkeid 2015). Neoplatonists eagerlysought to split body and soul and disregarded what they classified as the lowersenses (touch, smell, taste) in favour of the intellectual senses (seeing and hearing).Let us take a famous example: while both the art and love poetry of Michelangeloare partly expressed through Neoplatonic ideals (Saslow 1986, 1991; Francese 2002),we find a strong focus on sensibility and a longing to touch or be touched, physicallyor emotionally, in his expression. The same tension can be found in Sperone Spero-ni’s philosophical dialogues, and as we will see in this volume, in Gaspara Stampa’spoetry, as well as in the art of Titian, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi.Similar interest in corporeal experience and the role of the senses can be discernedthroughout early modern Europe, as shown recently in works such asAffective andEmotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe(Marculescu and Mor-and Métivier 2018) andGender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe:Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder(Broomhall 2018).