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The Renaissance was a time of immense change in the social, political, economic, intellectual and artistic arenas of the Western world. The cultural construction of the human body occupied a pivotal role in those transformations. The social and cultural meanings of embodiment revolutionized the intellectual, political and emotional ideologies of the period.Covering the years from 1400 to 1650, this volume examines the flexible and shifting categories of the body at an unparalleled time of growth in geographical exploration, science, technology and commerce. A ltural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and age, cultural representations and popular beliefs and the self and society.>
List of contents
Introduction
William Bynum (University College London, UK)
1 Birth and Death in Early Modern Europe
Lianne McTavish (University of Alberta, CANADA)
2 Why Me? Why Now? How? The Body in Health and Disease
Margaret Healy (University of Sussex, UK)
3 Sexuality: Of Man, Woman, and Beastly Business
Katherine Crawford (Vanderbilt University, USA)
4 The Body in /as Text: Medical Knowledge and Technologies in the Renaissance
Susan Broomhall (University of Western Australia, AUSTRALIA)
5 The Common Body: Renaissance Popular Beliefs
Karen Raber (University of Mississippi, USA)
6 Beauty and Concepts of the Ideal
Mary Rogers (independent scholar)
7 The Marked Body as Otherness in Renaissance Italian Culture
Patrizia Bettella (University of Alberta, CANADA)
8 The Marked Body: The Witches, Lady Macbeth, and the Relics
Diane Purkiss (University of Oxford, UK)
9 Fashioning Civil Bodies and "Others": Cultural Representations
Margaret Healy (University of Sussex, UK)
10 Renaissance Selves, Renaissance Bodies
Margaret L. King (City University of New York, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
About the author
Linda Kalof is Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University and author of
Looking at Animals in Human History and editor of
A Cultural History of Animals (Berg, 2007).
William Bynum is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine at University College London and author of many books, including
Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century and
History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction.
Summary
The Renaissance was a time of immense change in the social, political, economic, intellectual and artistic arenas of the Western world. The cultural construction of the human body occupied a pivotal role in those transformations. The social and cultural meanings of embodiment revolutionized the intellectual, political and emotional ideologies of the period.
Covering the years from 1400 to 1650, this volume examines the flexible and shifting categories of the body at an unparalleled time of growth in geographical exploration, science, technology and commerce.
A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and age, cultural representations and popular beliefs and the self and society.
