The Book of Hours and the Body

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches—somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny—may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment.

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This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment.

It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture.

In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.