Phineas Fletcher was a distinct literary presence in the first half of the seventeenth century: "This learned person, Son and Brother to two ingenious Poets [Giles Fletcher the elder and the younger] himself the third, not second to either...," wrote...

PHINEAS FLETCHER'S ALLEGORICAL ATLAS of the human body, The Purple Island, or, The Isle of Man (1633), models both the geophysical composition and the social character of a fictional Pacific Island on the skeletal structure and anatomical systems of the human body. In...

...