A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age
A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age

Author: Linda Kalof

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1350995185

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The Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of medieval Western Europe conceived of the human body in manifold ways. The body was not a fixed or unmalleable mass of flesh but an entity that changed its character depending on its age, its interactions with its environment and its diet. For example, a slave would have been marked by her language, her name, her religion or even by a sign burned onto her skin, not by her color alone. Covering the period from 500 to 1500 and using sources that range across the full spectrum of medieval literary, scientific, medical and artistic production, this volume explores the rich variety of medieval views of both the real and the metaphorical body. A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age 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.

Androids in the Enlightenment
Androids in the Enlightenment

Author: Adelheid Voskuhl

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-05-31

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 022603402X

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The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized. In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body
Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

Author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0393239888

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An eye-opening, spine-tingling, heartwarming tour through the extraordinary history and secrets of the human body. The human body is the most fraught and fascinating, talked-about and taboo, unique yet universal fact of our lives. It is the inspiration for art, the subject of science, and the source of some of the greatest stories ever told. In Anatomies, acclaimed author of Periodic Tales Hugh Aldersey-Williams brings his entertaining blend of science, history, and culture to bear on this richest of subjects. In an engaging narrative that ranges from ancient body art to plastic surgery today and from head to toe, Aldersey-Williams explores the corporeal mysteries that make us human: Why are some people left-handed and some blue-eyed? What is the funny bone, anyway? Why do some cultures think of the heart as the seat of our souls and passions, while others place it in the liver? A journalist with a knack for telling a story, Aldersey-Williams takes part in a drawing class, attends the dissection of a human body, and visits the doctor’s office and the morgue. But Anatomies draws not just on medical science and Aldersey-Williams’s reporting. It draws also on the works of philosophers, writers, and artists from throughout history. Aldersey-Williams delves into our shared cultural heritage—Shakespeare to Frankenstein, Rembrandt to 2001: A Space Odyssey—to reveal how attitudes toward the human body are as varied as human history, as he explains the origins and legacy of tattooing, shrunken heads, bloodletting, fingerprinting, X-rays, and more. From Adam’s rib to van Gogh’s ear to Einstein’s brain, Anatomies is a treasure trove of surprising facts and stories and a wonderful embodiment of what Aristotle wrote more than two millennia ago: “The human body is more than the sum of its parts.”

A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment
A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment

Author: Rebecca Probert

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 135007926X

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The period of the Enlightenment was marked by innovation in political, cultural, religious, and educational ideas with the aim of improving the experience of human beings in society. Key to intellectual debates and day-to-day life were ideas about the law. Many looked to Britain, and to the British, as exemplars of a state governed by moderate laws under a moderate constitution. Britain's laws and constitution were portrayed and satirized in almost every artistic medium. A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays spanning the “long 18th century” (1680 to 1820) which explore the place of law in a range of creative and artistic media, all of which flourished in a commercial society with law at its center and enlightenment as its aim. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

Culture of Enlightening
Culture of Enlightening

Author: Jeffrey D. Burson

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-08-01

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 0268105448

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Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century Reformations to the dawn of the Atlantic Revolutionary era. Generated in competition for a changing readership and forged in dialog and conflict, dynamic and diverse notions of what it meant to be enlightened constituted a broader culture of enlightening from which the more familiar strains of the Enlightenment emerged, often ironically and accidentally, from originally religious impulses and theological questioning. By adapting, for the first time, methodological insights from the scholarship of historical entanglement (l'histoire croisée) to the study of the Enlightenment, this book provides a new interpretation of the European republic of letters from the late 1600s through the 1700s by focusing on the lived experience of the long-neglected Catholic theologian, historian, and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, Abbé Claude Yvon. The ambivalent historical memory of Yvon, as well as the eclectic and global array of his sources and endeavors, Burson argues, can serve as a gauge for evaluating historical transformations in the surprisingly diverse ways in which eighteenth-century individuals spoke about enlightening human reason, religion, and society. Ultimately, Burson provocatively claims that even the most radical fruits of the Enlightenment can be understood as the unintended offspring of a revolution in theology and the cultural history of religious experience.

A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance
A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance

Author: Linda Kalof

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2014-03-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781472554642

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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 period 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 disease, cultural representations and popular beliefs, and self and society.

A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Enlightenment
A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Enlightenment

Author: Carole P. Biggam

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1350193569

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A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Enlightenment covers the period 1650 to 1800. From the Baroque to the Neo-classical, color transformed art, architecture, ceramics, jewelry, and glass. Newton, using a prism, demonstrated the seven separate hues, which encouraged the development of color wheels and tables, and the increased standardization of color names. Technological advances in color printing resulted in superb maps and anatomical and botanical images. Identity and wealth were signalled with color, in uniforms, flags, and fashion. And the growth of empires, trade, and slavery encouraged new ideas about color. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Carole P. Biggam is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. Kirsten Wolf is Professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Volume 4 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier
A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier

Author: Elizabeth A. Williams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1351962566

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One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eighteenth century scientists and physicians believed that such universal laws could be found, particularly in relation to the differences between living and inanimate matter. From the 1740s physicians working in the University of Medicine of Montpellier began to contest Descartes's dualist concept of the body-machine that was being championed by leading Parisian medical 'mechanists'. In place of the body-machine perspective that sought laws universally valid for all phenomena, the vitalists postulated a distinction being living and other matter, offering a holistic understanding of the physical-moral relation in place of mind-body dualism. Their medicine was not based on mathematics and the unity of the sciences, but on observation of the individual patient and the harmonious activities of the 'body-economy'. Vitalists believed that Illness was a result of disharmony in this 'body-economy' which could only be remedied on an individual level depending on the patient's own 'natural' limitations. The limitations were established by a myriad of factors such as sex, class, age, temperament, region, and race, which negated the use of a single universal treatment for a particular ailment. Ultimately Montpelier medicine was eclipsed by that of Paris, a development linked to the dynamics of the Enlightenment as a movement bent on cultural centralisation, acquiring a reputation as a kind of anti-science of the exotic and the mad. Given the long-standing Paris-centrism of French cultural history, Montpellier vitalism has never been accorded the attention it deserves by historians. This study repairs that neglect.