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The Making of the Early Modern Human Body: Violence, Knowledge and Representation
The early modern remaking of the human body entailed many arenas and strategies, from its brutal fragmentation in official practices of punishment and medical research to its re-invention as an artificial entity in the form of the articulated skeleton or the mechanical automaton. A crucial factor was the rendering of the body as a visual image, one that drew on new and innovative formats and materials and served many purposes. What they all shared was the close scrutiny under which they were now assessed: 听medical anatomical image鈥檚 relation to the experience of the actual human body, differences between the European body and the body now encountered within travels to distant lands and categorised as cannibal, exchanges between the human and non-human body on display in the cabinet of curiosities, radical shifts between religious sacred images and new forms of painting of everyday life in the new 听picture gallery, and even the comparison between images of capital punishment and the experience of witnessing such practices. In different ways, all demonstrated the body鈥檚 life-like condition, not only as an entity defined through animation but also in constant transition and mutability. This kind of replication of the body, involving artistic invention, experimental technologies and mixtures of the human and non-human, is the focus of this course, which will examine all forms of representation that confront the body as material and in transition, including unpredictable transitions such as those between life and death. 听
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Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 19th August 2024.
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