This thesis examines representations of decaying organic matter in early modern English literature. The ubiquitous preoccupation with processes of organic dissolution and decay in the poetry, prose, and drama of the years 1580-1660 has often been understood to reflect this period’s pervasive anxieties about mortality and the mutability of the flesh. In this thesis, I argue, by contrast, that the slimy, dusty, vermiculated, and otherwise putrefactive remains of the organic body detailed so energetically in numerous early modern texts, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the natural histories of Francis Bacon to the sermons and poetry of John Donne, manifest instead a paradoxical awareness of matter’s inorganic animacy—an ontological and aesthetic generativity immanent in matter’s very formlessness. Drawing on recent scholarship emphasising the profoundly embodied nature of early modern interiority, I place the period’s fascination with processes of organic decay in the context of broader epistemological concerns about the relationship between outward form and interiority in this period; the body’s internal processes of dissolution, manifested especially vividly in the putrefaction of the corpse, suggest to early modern writers a conception of inner being as fluid, formless, and yet generative process—a process continually producing material forms in excess of the identities represented by the body’s static outer appearance. In my introduction, I explore the striking parallels between this conception of materiality and those of three twentieth-century materialist philosophers: Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, and, especially, Gilles Deleuze, whose theory of affect or intensity offers this thesis its central insight into the aesthetic and ontological generativity of material process. The central chapters of the thesis focus on three early modern writers: Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Thomas Browne. Chapter One, ‘Spenser’s Slime: Indistinct Matter in The Faerie Queene’, studies that poem’s pervasive fascination with spontaneously generative muck, arguing that slime, mud, and mire offer the poem a powerful image of its own formless yet fertile materiality. In Chapter Two, ‘“Perplex’d Discomposition”: The (In)animacy of Dissolution in the Writings of John Donne’, I suggest that Donne’s notorious obsession with the putrefaction, dissolution, and atomisation of the human corpse, evident in his poetry, sermons, and devotional writings alike, reflects not his anxieties about the annihilation of identity in death, as literary critics have frequently maintained, but his fascination with matter’s ‘posthume’—its posthumous and posthuman—aesthetic fertility. My final chapter, ‘“Living Corruptions”: Thomas Browne’s Equivocal Materiality’, focusses on Browne’s late essay Hydriotaphia, whose unsettling meditation on the forms assumed by matter as it decays—incrassated gellies, saponified fats, equivocally generated serpents—evince what I will term an aesthetic of the putrefactive sublime. Throughout the thesis, I will be concerned with the ways in which these literary texts might themselves embody the formless forms they describe, dissolving structure into indistinct process, organic totality into fertile putrescence.