Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Concepts of Monstrosity Before the Advent of the Normal
0. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-94-6372-174-5
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, 202 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Monsters and Marvels. Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bondestam, Maja

Weitere Mitwirkende

Kavvadia, Maria

Cotton, Parker

Paulsson Holmberg, Tove

Garcia Pinar, Pablo

Tresfels, Cecilie

Long, Kathleen

Moore, Rosemary

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Bondestam, Maja
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.