‘The Body in the City’ investigates the complex, diverse, and multi-layered realities and understandings of ‘the body’ in medieval and early modern societies. The research program encompasses various disciplines – art, architecture, literature, medicine, politics, religion, gender, society – and focusses on archival, textual, visual and environmental materials. The time-period covered by this series, 1100-1800, corresponds to a crucial period for the development of European urban centres and cultures. Within this framework the series will explore very diverse, yet still coherent, studies, aiming to speak to each other in thought-provoking ways.
The series aims to intersect and to energise two strands in historical studies: the pre-modern city as an historical subject (encompassing political institutions, rituals, built environments, religious activities, etc) and histories of the premodern body with their debates about how bodies are shaped by discourse and context. The series will emphasize approaches which emphasize the vernacular as revealed by new sources and novel approaches to them. While there are numerous studies of the body in history, this series will explore critically and in innovative ways the relationship between bodies and environments. This will allow scholars involved to analyse how particular spaces, locations and physical milieux affect understandings of the body and govern responses to particular problems. The multi-disciplinary approach to the topic places the series at the leading edge of its field.
By Kristy Wilson Bowers
November 09, 2022
This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who ...
Edited
By John Henderson, Fredrika Jacobs, Jonathan K. Nelson
November 18, 2020
This volume is the first in-depth analysis of how infirm bodies were represented in Italy from c. 1400 to 1650. Through original contributions and methodologies, it addresses the fundamental yet undiscussed relationship between images and representations in medical, religious, and literary texts. ...
Edited
By Maartje van Gelder, Claire Judde de Larivière
May 20, 2020
Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic explores the different aspects of political actions and experiences in late medieval and early modern Venice. The book challenges the idea that the city of Venice knew no political conflict and social contestation during the medieval and early modern ...
By Paolo Savoia
December 11, 2019
This book uses the work of Bolognese physician and anatomist Gaspare Tagliacozzi to explore the social and cultural history of early modern surgery. It discusses how Italian and European surgeons' attitudes to health and beauty – and how patients' gender – shaped views on the public appearance...
Edited
By Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson, Christos Lynteris
November 13, 2018
Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic ...
