"Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the modern day, discussing writers from Plato, Augustine, and Dante to Shakespeare, Locke, and Freud. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a "book of the heart" modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art." "Jager also shows how the medieval "book of the heart" was replaced by the early modern "book of the brain" with the birth of printing, Protestantism, and the New Science. In a conclusion, he considers what the much-prophesied "death of the book" might portend for twenty-first-century conceptions of the post-textual self."--BOOK JACKET.