Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Maja Bondestam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789463721745
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Maja Bondestam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789463721745
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

Bodily Extremities

Bodily Extremities PDF Author: Florike Egmond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351955063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
A strong preoccupation with the human body - often manifested in startling ways - is a characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts. Whilst modern manifestations of this interest include body piercing, tattoos, plastic surgery and eating disorders, early modern preoccupations encompassed such diverse phenomena as monstrous births and physical deformity, body snatching, public dissection, flagellation, judicial torture and public punishment. This volume explores such extreme manifestations of early modern bodily obsessions and fascinations, and their wider cultural significance. Agreeing that an interest in physical boundaries, extreme physical manifestations and situations developed and grew stronger during the early modern period, the essays in this volume investigate whether this interest can be traced in a wider range of cultural phenomena, and should therefore be given a prominent place in any future characterization of the early modern period. Taken as a whole, the volume can be read as an attempt to create a new context in which to explore the cultural history of the human body, as well as the metaphors of research and investigation themselves.

Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture

Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047423593
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Spirits – airy, volatile ‘subtle bodies' – occupied a central place in early modern European culture. At the edge of the visible and perceptible, spiritus could signify a broad variety of subtle substances, both natural and divine: the vapours moving inside the body, the elements of air and fire, angels, demons and spectres, the Holy Spirit and the human soul. Spirits functioned as intermediaries between two opposite worlds with continually shifting borders. This book investigates specific meanings and uses of spiritus in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields – physiology, psychology, alchemy, theology, demonology, art theory, music theory, novels and the literature on love – thus revisiting the ambivalent history of a central ancient concept in a period of crisis and change. Contributors include: Wietse de Boer, Sven Dupré, Jennifer Frangos, Axel Christoph Gampp, Christine Göttler, Berthold Hub, Dawn Morgan, Wolfgang Neuber, Bret Rothstein, Rose Marie San Juan, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Justin E. H. Smith, Paul J. Smith, Thijs Weststeijn, and Sarah F. Williams.

Sensible Flesh

Sensible Flesh PDF Author: Elizabeth D. Harvey
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812218299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
"As histories of corporeal experience in the period become at one more specific and more focused, this signal collection will stand as a tribute to the general power of such a particular focus."—Studies in English Literature

Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas

Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas PDF Author: Linda Levy Peck
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526175339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women’s experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women’s agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women’s experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France PDF Author: Cathy McClive
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131709736X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.

Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture

Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: A. Petrina
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers. The contributors are codicologists, historians and literary critics, offering a varied reading of the Queen and of her cultural inheritance.

Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain

Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Elena del Río Parra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004392394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain Elena del Río Parra brings together a myriad of criminal accounts to examine the aesthetic and rhetorical construction of violent murder and its cultural stance in early modern Spain.

Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence

Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence PDF Author: Allison Levy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351904485
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Conserving health in early modern culture

Conserving health in early modern culture PDF Author: Sandra Cavallo
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526113503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Did early modern people care about their health? And what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England? Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts Conserving health in early modern culture documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in this period. In both countries staying healthy was understood as depending on the careful management of the six ‘Non-Naturals’: the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the ‘passions of the soul’. To a close scrutiny, however, models of prevention differed considerably in Italy and England, reflecting country-specific cultural, political and medical contexts and different confessional backgrounds. The following two chapters are available open access on a CC-BY-NC-ND license here: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=633180 3 'Ordering the infant': caring for newborns in early modern England - Leah Astbury 4 'She sleeps well and eats an egg': convalescent care in early modern England - Hannah Newton