Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Concepts of Monstrosity Before the Advent of the Normal

Buch | Hardcover

202 Seiten

2020
Amsterdam University Press (Verlag)
978-94-6372-174-5 (ISBN)

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Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, 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, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

Maja Bondestam is an Associate Professor in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on the body in the shift from the early modern to the modern period and on medicine and natural history.

Introduction (Maja Bondestam)
Chapter 1 - The Moresca Dance in Counter-Reformation Rome: Court Medicine and the Moderation of Exceptional Bodies (Maria Kavvadia)
Chapter 2 - Monsters and the Maternal Imagination: The 'First Vision' from Johann Remmelin's 1619 Catoptrum microcosmicum Triptych (Rosemary Moore)
Chapter 3 - The Optics of Bodily Deviance: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón's Path to Public Office (Pablo García Piñar)
Chapter 4 - 'The Most Deformed Woman in France': Marguerite de Valois's Monstrous Sexuality in the Divorce Satyrique (Cécile Tresfels)
Chapter 5 - Curious, Useful, and Important: Bayle's Hermaphrodites as Figures of Theological Inquiry (Parker Cotton)
Chapter 6 - An Education: Johannes Schefferus and the Prodigious Son of a Fisherman (Maja Bondestam)
Chapter 7 - Ambiguous and Transitional Bodies: Stillbirth in Stockholm 1691-1724 (Tove Paulsson Holmberg)
Afterword (Kathleen Long)
Works Cited
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	10.05.2021
Reihe/Serie	Monsters and Marvels. Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
Co-Autor	Maria Kavvadia, Parker Cotton, Tove Paulsson Holmberg, Pablo Garcia Pinar
Zusatzinfo	17 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Amsterdam
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Themenwelt	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
ISBN-10	94-6372-174-6 / 9463721746
ISBN-13	978-94-6372-174-5 / 9789463721745
Zustand	Neuware