Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies recent issues

Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Rosenthal, M. F. — 2009-09-23

In the past two decades, the multifaceted discipline of the history of medieval and early modern dress has benefited from reconceptualizations of the long, late Middle Ages and Renaissance as having undergone a revolution of consciousness, belief, and thought with global implications that we still recognize today. A widening of the number and variety of crafts and industries, a proliferation and multiplication of skills and artisanal productivity that crossed regions, the ingenuity of pioneering ideas, and an unprecedented movement of goods, all had far-reaching influences on how merchants, diplomats, humanists, artists, mendicants, pilgrims, itinerant artisans, and laborers viewed their world and moved within it.

Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in Florence from the Mid-Sixteenth to Early Seventeenth Centuries

Currie, E. — 2009-09-23

This essay explores the practicalities of making and buying clothing in early modern Florence. Drawing on the household accounts of families associated with the Medici court, together with a range of other archival sources, the essay uncovers complex patterns of interaction between consumers, artisans, and retailers. Such networks were fundamental to the way dress fashions developed and achieved wider diffusion during this period. Wealthy Florentines closely supervised the many different stages involved in the acquisition of clothing, often drawing on expertise they had accumulated as silk merchants and as agents purchasing goods on behalf of others. Buying clothing was also a strongly gendered pursuit, shaped by contemporary views of women's domestic roles. Despite the influence exercised by consumers, members of the clothing trade played a significant part in promoting change in fashions. In particular, tailors and mercers became known for their ability to create new designs and offer novel products.

"Worn in Venice and throughout Italy": The Impossible Present in Cesare Vecellio's Costume Books

Jones, A. R. — 2009-09-23

In Cesare Vecellio's costume books, Degli Habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590) and Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il Mondo (1598), the basic premise of the costume book—that it recorded styles of dress being worn at the moment of publication in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World—was challenged by a range of cultural transformations: changes in the style of clothing, the categories of people who wore particular fashions, the disappearance of fashions over time and through political changes, and the infringement of sumptuary laws. Vecellio acknowledges all these changes, often in a tone of regretful melancholy. This essay analyzes the losses he records as he comments on the 430 to 500 woodcuts that make up his books, which, under pressure from historical shifts, call the epistemological claims of the genre into question.

Old Habits Die Hard: Vestimentary Change in William Durandus's Rationale Divinorum Officiorum

Denny-Brown, A. — 2009-09-23

A medieval and early modern "best seller," William Durandus's monumental late-thirteenth-century liturgical treatise, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, offered its readers a definitive, codified explanation for almost every aspect of church symbolism. A close look at its book-length discussion of the use and hermeneutics of hurch vestments, however, reveals a consistent problem at the heart of ecclesiastical attire: how the changing "fashion" of actual garments worn by the clergy in this period no longer accorded with the traditional, often biblical prescriptions that guaranteed the authority of those very garments. This article investigates Durandus's delicate (and sometimes not so delicate) handling of these discrepancies with an eye toward the larger theoretical questions involved when material objects, and especially clothes, are used to convey material transcendence.

Moralizing Apparel in Early Modern London: Popular Literature, Sermons, and Sartorial Display

Hentschell, R. — 2009-09-23

This study investigates the cultural and textual relationship between two types of texts that inveigh against the preoccupation with fashionable attire: imaginative secular writing and sermons. While scholars have noted the influence sermons had on secular texts in the period, this article shows how popular literature of the profane, in denouncing excessive pride in apparel, had a profound and lasting influence on homiletic discourse. Sermons are hybrid texts that incorporate both the themes and literary flourish of texts written by secular, polemical authors, such as Philip Stubbes and Thomas Nashe. Special attention is given to the sermons preached at Paul's Cross to show how the complex social space surrounding the pulpit was crucial in enabling preachers to express the critique against excesses in apparel.

Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Muzzarelli, M. G. — 2009-09-23

The ample record of medieval and early modern sumptuary laws represents an extensive historical period and a broad geographical area. Though scholars have not completely ignored these laws, they deserve far more attention and should be explored from many critical approaches. Because of the physical distance separating the documentary evidence, rarely have comparisons been made between sumptuary laws from different geographical areas. This study offers just such a comparison of the laws enacted in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and England between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in order to show how these laws operated to reconcile the interests of the privileged few with the common good. Legislators and preachers aimed to redistribute resources by taking advantage of the wealthy's passion for ostentation. The moral rationale for regulating consumption stressed the need for the rich to reserve at least part of their resources for social measures in the form of charity. By regulating luxury through various forms of fines and penalties, sumptuary laws helped to benefit the less privileged and the city in general. Critiques of consumption, of disproportionate individual spending, and, simply put, of luxury, gained significant momentum as a result of sumptuary laws.

Fashions of Friendship in an Early Modern Illustrated Album Amicorum: British Library, MS Egerton 1191

Rosenthal, M. F. — 2009-09-23

The album amicorum, or album of friends, is a singular visual example of early modern travelers' fascination with swiftly changing fashions, regional customs, family lineage, and manuscript decoration. A type of souvenir scrapbook, the album amicorum preserves in its pages colored depictions of local fashions in dress and various regional customs witnessed while traveling. Along with these miniatures, the album combines sententious mottoes, heraldic shields, and personalized inscriptions from friends met during one's travels. The album owner and friends display their newly acquired humanist education by quoting from ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Italian, often on the theme of everlasting friendship. This essay looks closely at one album, owned by a German student attending law school at the University of Padua from 1575 to 1579, in order to determine the organizational structure of the album amicorum and how the visual material interacts with the written mottoes and inscriptions.

New Books across the Disciplines

Cornett, M. — 2009-09-23

Call for Submissions

2009-09-23

Rethinking the Twelfth-Century Discovery of Nature

Ritchey, S. — 2009-04-22

According to long-standing scholarly opinion, the twelfth century discovered nature. This essay argues that earthly nature was not discovered in the twelfth century. The twelfth-century authors of the philosophia mundi or the sculptors who fashioned the acanthus capitals at Rheims Cathedral in fact did not think of their work as belonging to the category of nature but to something entirely different from nature–to the order of creation. Continuing to seek "nature" in the medieval past risks overlooking or misunderstanding some profoundly suggestive materials about how people once experienced God, each other, and the world. Examining metaphor and imagery that adopts features of the natural world, this essay thinks through the implications for twelfth-century people's spiritual lives of the idea that God, through the Incarnation, entered not nature, but creation. In particular, the essay examines the role of "trees of incarnation" as contemplative models in women's religious communities for making Christ present in the imagination and in the world. M. D. Chenu's attention to the category of nature in his historical and theological writings is then revisited in order to propose ways of rethinking the manner in which medieval religiosi perceived the material world as a medium for experiencing and continuing the Incarnation of Christ.

The Idea of Universal Salvation in Piers Plowman B and C

Pearsall, D. — 2009-04-22

This essay takes up Nicholas Watson's important and influential article, "Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England," and argues that, for William Langland at least, the promise of universal salvation is at best ambiguous. The essay examines in detail Christ's speech after he has harrowed hell, the principal locus for the expression of Langland's views on the matter, but attempts to place this speech in the context of and as the climactic statement of Langland's salvation theology as it develops through the poem. Important variations between the B and C texts in their treatment of the subject are given special attention. The emphasis is always on the continuously evolving drama of Piers Plowman as a poem searching for the truth of belief rather than as a poem that expounds a system of already-existing belief.

Tugging at the Roots: The Errant Textography of Middle English Romance

Seaman, M. — 2009-04-22

This article offers an alternative story of the transmission of Middle English verse romance to the one traditionally told by textual scholarship, one rooted in stemmatics' focus on genealogical descent and its principal interest in origins. Like the medieval romance hero himself, the English romance narrative wandered from locus to locus, in this case from manuscript to manuscript, with each encounter inscribing on it a different identity with characteristics influenced by local cultural values. Stemmatics' analogy of the family tree thus enforces an artificially unified reading of Middle English romance and promotes a fundamentally modern reception of the genre. The stories that individual manuscript versions tell, when linked together in an organic network rather than grafted into a hierarchical family tree, is episodic with no clear cause-and-effect, action-and-reaction relationship indicated among these various versions. Its story lies in its scattered dissemination, fruitfully conveyed by the image of the rhizome.

Literacy after Iconoclasm in the English Reformation

Spolsky, E. — 2009-04-22

Believing that the destruction of church imagery was necessary to the amendment of Christian life, the religious reformers in sixteenth-century England aimed to change minds as well as church furnishings. Image worship was to be replaced by reading, and learning from pictures and statues was to be replaced by learning to read the English Bible. Literacy, however, isn't easy, even now. Taking up the issues of iconoclasm and literacy from the perspective of recent research in cognitive neuroscience, this essay explores the reformers' misunderstandings about how people could or couldn't reform their spiritual lives, and suggests a new view of why changing minds wasn't as easy as the reformers had hoped, and why stripping the churches of their rood screens, burning or hiding statues of saints, overpainting narrative wall murals, and replacing stained glass with plain windows turned out to be easier than producing Bible readers.

Manliness and the Visual Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Culture

Simons, P. — 2009-04-22

The ubiquity and charm of pissing putti in early modern imagery has inured us to their valence, for an important proof of masculinity in the European tradition is to be able to emit fluids from the penis, usually with some force, and significantly while standing erect. In early modern culture, the fluids were multiple and metaphoric, inviting a range of erotic wordplays and visual puns about urine, semen, water, and wine. The sexual economy was as much characterized by liquidity as it was obsessed with penile penetration. The somatics and semiotics of early modern masculinity consisted of more than sexual intromission or inhibiting anxiety, and visual metaphors presented manliness in ways that were often humorous, usually public, and always assertive.

Cockfighting as Cultural Allegory in Early Modern England

Hamill, T. A. — 2009-04-22

This essay examines the ways in which cockfighting in early modern England operates as an allegorical mode, as a trope for conscribing social relations and phenomena as distinct as male subject-formation and the realization of eschatological truth. Focusing on two distinct cockfighting texts (one that promotes the virtues of cockfighting as a sport and another that figures cockfighting as an extension of animal husbandry), the essay maps the range of cultural and behavioral practices that early modern cockfighting discourse makes possible. Located in allegories of the cockfight are conflicting systems of meaning that at once affirm and disrupt anthropological distinctions between human and animal activity and the anthropocentric ideologies that construct such demarcations. Reading the early modern cockfight challenges us to critique how we engage sport, early modern culture, animals, and allegory itself as signifying texts.

"Optimism of the Will": Isabella Whitney and Utopia

Bartolovich, C. — 2009-04-22

Isabella Whitney's "Wyll" has been misrecognized generically because temporal utopias–of which her poem is the first instance–are not supposed to exist in the sixteenth century. Because women had a different relationship to the social and economic disruptions of emergent capitalism that gave birth to the genre in More's Utopia, however, female utopian thought is differently manifested as well. In the "Wyll," the contradictions attending the moment of transition are embodied in the dissonant form of a poem that, in its first half, describes a city of abundance, and in its second, the dark side of the "same" London for the poor. Proposing that London should be abundant for all its inhabitants through a redistribution of the city's wealth and pleasures, the "Wyll" situates the utopian city in a yet unrealized future that readers, as executors, are enjoined to realize.

New Books across the Disciplines

Cornett, M. — 2009-04-22

Call for Submissions

2009-04-22

Intricate Alliances: Early Modern Spain and England

Brownlee, M. — 2009-01-20

"Intricate Alliances" is a phrase that calls attention to the inevitability of contrastive referencing by which the two imperial powers of early modern Europe–Spain and England–have all too often been regarded. This special issue explores in a more nuanced manner, and from a variety of methodological perspectives, cultural constructions and parallel concerns common to both empires as well as a number of inherent differences. Articles address the emergence of new historical, political, social, and aesthetic possibilities for these two imperial powers in both Old World and transatlantic contexts.

Motherhood and Ritual Murder in Medieval Spain and England

Weissberger, B. F. — 2009-01-20

Anti-Semitic myths of ritual murder are less developed and more belated in medieval Spain than in northern Europe, where they flourished since the twelfth century. This essay suggests one reason for this difference: the presence and increasing importance in late medieval Spain of the converso, a hybrid who blurs the boundaries between Christian and Jew. Using recent psychoanalytic criticism of the Prioress's Tale, Chaucer's sentimentalized representation of the murdered child's mother is contrasted with the very different one in Damián de Vegas's Memoria del Santo Niño de La Guardia (1544), an account of a 1489-90 alleged ritual murder that was instrumental in the Catholic Monarchs' decision to expel the Spanish Jews in 1492. Vegas characterizes the two mother figures in his tale as being deceitful, indifferent, and blind, all traits traditionally used to stigmatize Jews. This conflation of mother and Jew is a striking literary marker of the crisis of categories that contributed to the discrimination against conversos in medieval and early modern Spain.

Tears in the Desert: Baroque Adaptations of the Book of Lamentations by John Donne and Francisco de Quevedo

Kallendorf, H. — 2009-01-20

Scholars have for decades compared many aspects of the poetry of two contemporaneous Baroque poets, John Donne (1572–1631) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1640). But, oddly, no one has compared their almost simultaneous adaptations of the Old Testament Book of Lamentations. Why would both poets independently, but writing at almost exactly the same time, choose this biblical text for poetic adaptation? What was it about the Book of Lamentations that resonated so poignantly with their particular historical moment? This study focuses not on questions of political or personal crisis, nor on affirmations of religious orthodoxy. Instead, it concentrates on a shared spiritual formation involving Jesuit meditational techniques. Jesuit meditational practice relied on sensorial imagery, and this type of acute sensorial experience is found in both Donne's and Quevedo's reworkings of Lamentations.

The "Scriene" and the Channel: England and Spain in Book V of The Faerie Queene

Greene, R. — 2009-01-20

This essay analyzes the figures of language and of landscape that allow Edmund Spenser to consider in an international context the virtue at the center of Book V of The Faerie Queene, justice. How, he asks, is justice projected from one society into another in an act of empire? Spenser's thinking on this issue is conditioned by his participation in a way of figuring empire through the palus, or the wooden stake that marks the boundary of civil society in a colonial setting, often under English rule. The alternative way of figuring imperial power on the landscape during this period is the via, that is, the way or channel that penetrates indigenous territory. Spenser also explores teleiopoesis, or the making of imaginative effects at a distance, an imaginative force that complements and drives across the figures of the palus and via. The essay argues that justice in Book V must be understood through these figures and in the international context that Spenser evokes in his exploration of justice. Such an approach does not cancel out but augments many of the traditional readings of this virtue in The Faerie Queene.

A Fine Romance: Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Sixteenth Century

Samson, A. — 2009-01-20

England and Spain's close ties of kinship had bound the royal houses together stretching back to the thirteenth century. In the later sixteenth century, English interest in Spanish culture, history, and politics had intensified precisely during the period when political relations had deteriorated into war. The perception of closeness and filiation ran parallel with enmity and hate. This study demonstrates the complexity of diplomatic and cultural exchange, assimilation, competition, and cooperation that characterized the intricate alliance between England and Spain. It examines England and Spain's shared cultural heritage and the trade agreements and dynastic marriages that had linked them closely by blood. Special attention is given to Philip II's entry into London in 1554 as the new English king, a pivotal moment in the rivalry between the two countries. While popular hostility and fear of Spanish domination certainly contributed to the conflict surrounding the marriage of Philip and Mary, the most difficult issue for the royal couple was the household drama in which the parties on each side sought their own prestige and commercial and political advantage. Perhaps this moment of international diplomatic relations demonstrates above all the delicate balance between honesty and deception, admiration and jealousy, cooperation and rivalry, love and hate that can be found in any close relationship.

Windmills over Oxford: Quixotic and Other Subversive Spanish Narratives in England, 1606-1654

Smith, N. — 2009-01-20

This article explores Edmund Gayton's Pleasant notes upon Don Quixot (1654), a sentence-by-sentence commentary on Thomas Shelton's 1612 and 1620 translation of Cervantes. Gayton's text partakes in the characteristics of a series of translations from the Spanish that involve some degree of intrigue against the English polity. Pleasant notes itself was a defense of pre–Civil War literary values (where Ben Jonson is regarded as the English Cervantes) and of pre–Civil War and Civil War Oxford (during which time the university was the royalist headquarters), which is presented as a picaresque, carnivalesque utopia. Mock-romance becomes an acceptable mode of fantasy for the defeated royalist, including erotic encounters offered as a culturally rebellious, defiantly anti-Puritan activity. Gayton's playfulness is, in its own terms, consistent with the cultural interplay of Spanish and English terms manifest in James Mabbe's earlier translations of Spanish romance, Rojas's Celestina and Aleman's Guzman, and their own pro-Roman-Catholic politics, played out in the real and literary landscapes where Spanish and English interests met–in the Low Countries.

"A Spaniard Is No Englishman": The Ghost of Spain and the British Imaginary

Lezra, J. — 2009-01-20

The prevailing anthropological understanding of mimesis, this essay argues, is inadequate to the study of early modern cultural exchange, in particular of the ways in which literary cultures imagine themselves in the lexicons provided by other national traditions. The idiom of haunting–both in its psychoanalytic and in its Elizabethan and Jacobean iterations–provides a preferable account of the temporality of cultural exchange, of the conflicting sorts of imitation at issue in early modernity, of the uncertainty with which images are valued. The essay examines works by James I and by Dekker and his circle, focusing on the conflict between English responses to the battle of Lepanto and the Armada. The battling "ghosts" of these two events, one a conciliar victory led by the Spaniard John of Austria, the other an act of aggression ordered by his half-brother, Philip II, form the ground of the British cultural imaginary.

Beyond the Missing Cardenio: Anglo-Spanish Relations in Early Modern Drama

Fuchs, B. — 2009-01-20

This essay uses the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio and its eighteenth-century redaction, Double Falshood to think through the problem of Spanish sources in early modern English drama. I argue that the search for Shakespeare's hand in the texts has occluded the significance of the contemporary Spanish source, Don Quijote, and, moreover, that the field systematically overlooks the translatio from Spanish prose to English drama. I offer a reading of Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife as an example of how we might recover the ideological vectors between the two corpora.

"A Language All Nations Understand": Portraiture and the Politics of Anglo-Spanish Identity in Aphra Behn's The Rover

Lockey, B. C. — 2009-01-20

Aphra Behns' The Rover harks back to an earlier period of intense Anglo-Spanish rivalry in which the iconography surrounding Queen Elizabeth played a central role. But the play also moves past nostalgia for late-sixteenth-century narratives of English national identity to a cosmopolitan perspective that substitutes the vitiated courtesan for the virgin queen. This essay considers Behn's play–as well as its antecedent, Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso–as part of a trajectory of dramatic, poetic, and prose works, including Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friay Bungay, Sir Walter Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Philip Massinger's The Renegado. Such works either directly or indirectly comment on the Anglo-Spanish rivalry, and together they amount to an incremental critique of Queen Elizabeth's defining place within the late-sixteenth-century imagination.

Thomas Gage and the English Colonial Encounter with Chocolate

Campos, E. V. — 2009-01-20

This essay explores the early English encounter with chocolate, a beverage associated with New World and Spanish tastes, and popular among English recusants returned from Spanish service. In particular, it follows the career of Thomas Gage a Dominican priest who had spent considerable time in the Spanish New World before returning to England, where his account of travels in Spanish America helped ease his repatriation and religious reintegration. Gage's attention to New World food, especially the confection and consumption of the Indian drink chocolate, provided English readers with valuable information on the cultures of colonial Spanish America in the early seventeenth century. The Spanish lore transmitted to England by reconciled recusants became an abiding cultural concern of colonial promoters upon England's acquisition of cacao-producing Jamaica later in the century.

New Books across the Disciplines

Cornett, M. — 2009-01-20

"New Books across the Disciplines" is a bibliographic resource that facilitates a cross-disciplinary survey of recent publications. Its scope ranges from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Coverage is comprehensive for the large majority of North American and British publishers. Other European titles are included whenever received. Books are classified under variable topical headings and listed alphabetically by author's name. Entries include complete bibliographical data and annotations. With few exceptions, books appearing here have been published within the previous two years. Many will be presented here before they are ordered and shelved by libraries. The topics for this issue include:

Editions and translations

Reference

Biographical studies

Mapping space

Contact cultures

Jewish studies

Christian saints and professions

Family and the everyday

The marvelous

Visual culture

Narrative structures, lyric effects

Essay collections

Call for Submissions

2009-01-20

The Diseased Body in Premodern Europe: Ideology and Representation

Zimmerman, S. — 2008-09-17

The phenomenon of disease played an important role in the development of premodern European culture, and in the reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the New World. Its understanding and regulation involved all sectors of society–religion, politics, science, law, commerce–and affected the welfare of individuals in every social class. Disease is, in fact, a singularly useful subject for examining the interdependence of these social sectors as well as their competing interests, and for interrogating the divide between hegemonic and popular cultures. The essays in this special issue analyze a number of issues of particular importance to the current study of premodern medicine. These include the uses and misrepresentations of long-standing paradigms for the interpretation of disease, such as the theory of humoralism, as well as the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, and Places tradition; the neglect of nonacademic sources such as the written records of patients or the recorded comments of ordinary citizens; the relationship of disease to the constitution of civic communities; the function of disease in the defining of national identities; the representation of disease in nonmedical literature such as travel treatises; and concepts of disease in pan-European myth-making. The volume concludes with a description of a major archive for the study of medical history, the Duke University History of Medicine Collections. In a sense, each essay encapsulates both the promise of the field–the interdisciplinary richness of the possible topics, the new voices to be uncovered in archival research–and the problems of interpretation that must be taken up in mining these prospects.

The Forgotten Fear of Excrement

Kuriyama, S. — 2008-09-17

Many patients in Europe and America today think it perfectly plausible that a cure for their insomnia or headaches, say, might be found in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine of Han dynasty China, that approaches to the body conceived in a distant culture, more than two thousand years ago, might solve their suffering here and now. Yet they wouldn't dream of seeking succor in the works of Galen. Why? How have the beliefs and practices that guided Western medicine up through the eighteenth century come to seem, paradoxically, more alien and distant than ancient Chinese notions of qi? To understand this strange forgetfulness about the Western past, we must linger on a defining feature of traditional humoralism, often slighted in modern synopses: the haunting fear of excrement.

Place, Health, and Disease: The Airs, Waters, Places Tradition in Early Modern England and North America

Wear, A. — 2008-09-17

In the early modern era, physical place, health, and disease were integrally linked in a geographical and climatological theory of the environment. The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places served as a template for viewing the relationships between places, health, disease, and the physical and mental constitutional nature of people and nations up to the early twentieth century. Central to this conception of the body and its environment is the perception of causal connections between a place, including its climate, season, water, and food, and the people born into it. This essay discusses some of the characteristics of the Airs, Waters, Places tradition and the way this conception of nature was embedded, especially in the discourse of colonial settlement, in the early modern period and beyond.

Stories of Disease Written by Patients and Lay Mediators in the Spanish Republic of Letters (1680-1720)

Pardo-Tomas, J., Martinez-Vidal, A. — 2008-09-17

Consultation by mail had been common in medical practice more or less since the time of its consolidation in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but this mode of communication vastly expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Analyzing a group of letters sent to the Spanish court physician Juan Muñoz y Peralta (1665–1746) by his patients, this article shows how these patients, far from being passive, were actively involved in elaborating medical knowledge and in making decisions about therapeutic strategies for their own treatment. Our main aim is to focus attention on these nonprofessional voices, on the words of patients themselves or those who, like them, were not trained in medicine. Approaching our subject through this interpretative framework, we provide an example of medical-cultural analysis that documents voices belonging to patients who were active in considering, interpreting, and treating disease in an effort to have control over their own bodies. Their voices should be taken into account when writing a cultural history of early modern medicine.

The Body Debated: Bodies and Rights in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Germany

Lindemann, M. — 2008-09-17

Scholars of medical history have discovered that the notion of "monstrous births" presented challenging legal issues in the early modern world. Were such offspring–often conjoined twins– "monsters" in the civil sense? Were they, for example, able to make a will, inherit, contract, and perform other civil actions? While the question of the "civil rights" of conjoined twins in the early modern period usually remained truly academic (as few such births survived), a whole series of other conditions–some unusual, some very common–raised similar medico-legal issues. Pregnancy, mental retardation, epilepsy, deformity, disputed sexuality (hermaphroditism, intersexuality, or castration), deafness, blindness, and even more fleeting circumstances such as fever, could call into question an individual's ability to perform normal legal actions or to be allowed to inherit an estate, serve as a guardian, or give testimony in court. This article examines how competence imperatives worked out in quotidian practice. While there are numerous points at which a "body" became problematic (in a medico-legal sense), this study uses two particular situations–baptism and marriage–to probe how practices were shaped not only by "experts" (physicians, theologians, and jurists) but also by what may be called local knowledge.

"There's the Rub": Searching for Sexual Remedies in the New World

Finucci, V. — 2008-09-17

In his late forties, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562–1612) decided he needed a new biostimulator to cure his legendary restlessness, for he was experiencing senior amatory difficulties. Thus he sent a young apothecary on a journey from Mantua to Spain, and then to Panama and Peru, to find an animal Viagra-equivalent in that expanse of lands where marvels were contained. The duke's discreet fantasy of resurrecting the flesh, anchored in male anxiety, narcissistic excess, and a peculiar dream of domination, occupies hardly a footnote in the multinational project of mercantile imperialism that marked the discovery of the natural beauties of the New World. Yet, within the historical moment in which it played, the halcyon cure that this aging conquistador desired serves as a miniature parable that can reconfigure what is by all means a trivial colonialist narrative into an erotics of knowledge.

Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary

Zimmerman, S. — 2008-09-17

The derogation of leprosy in medieval culture was disproportionate to its medical threat, presumably influenced by the spectacle of a disintegrative process akin to putrefaction. In the medieval imaginary, leprous blood was linked to menstrual blood, supposedly discharged by both impure women and Jewish men, and believed to be a carrier of the disease. The perceived threat of leprous blood to Christian bodily integrity was played out in atropaic social rituals and in widespread defamations against lepers, women, and Jews as devourers or cannibals. This study claims that such practices worked to displace fundamental anxieties generated by the "sacramental cannibalism" of the eucharistic feast, in which the body and blood of Christ were fused with those of communicants through the process of ingestion. The medieval counternarrative mythologizing lepers, women, and Jews as would-be devourers served to insulate the sacramental status of the Eucharist, to distinguish pure from impure blood, and to displace the archaic fear of physical obliteration. However, of the three demonized groups it was the leper alone who was subject to a kind of double jeopardy: as a visible emblem of the instability of bodily boundaries, the leper served as both agent and illustration of the fearsomeness of physical dissolution.

The Diseased Body: Resources for Scholarly Inquiry in the Duke University History of Medicine Collections

Glaze, F. E., Nance, B. K., Porter, S. — 2008-09-17

This article examines the holdings of the Duke University Medical School Library's History of Medicine Collections, including the Trent Collection. It provides a generalized topical description of the collections' contents, as well as an exploration of specific resources that can be used to study the diseased body in medieval and early modern Europe. Bibliographic notations direct the nonspecialist to further readings on the subject.

New Books across the Disciplines

Cornett, M. — 2008-09-17

The topics for this issue include:

Editions and translations

Reference

Historiography, historians, and critical theory

Biographical studies

Medicine, science, and technology

The body

Sexuality

Gender and works of women

Visual culture

Authorship and textuality

Call for Submissions

2008-09-17