The Public Anatomy Lesson

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-262
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Dutch Painter

This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public anatomy lesson. The body, this piece of ‘natural’ property that every human ‘has’, was being increasingly opened up and peered into for the purposes of finally seeing human nature itself. Bringing together visual studies and international relations, the chapter charts the scopic regime that established vision as modernity’s primary ordered instrument and that was honed upon the body dissected in public. To map its contours, it begins with the writings of anatomist William Harvey and scientist-statesman Francis Bacon. The chapter then tracks how this scopic regime was institutionalised by the spread of the highly popular public anatomy lesson across early modern Europe. It then analyses Renaissance and early modern representations of the public anatomy lesson, notably the frontispiece of the first manual of modern medicine, Andrea Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1943), and Dutch painter Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson paintings. The chapter examines the work of boundary-drawing and state-building wrought by these public performances by tracking the roles of the female and the poor body in their crafting.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Monumentality and the Roman Empire

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Close Link ◽  
The Public ◽  
Roman Italy

The quality of "monumentality" is attributed to the buildings of few historical epochs or cultures more frequently or consistently than to those of the Roman Empire. It is this quality that has helped to make them enduring models for builders of later periods. This extensively illustrated book, the first full-length study of the concept of monumentality in Classical Antiquity, asks what it is that the notion encompasses and how significant it was for the Romans themselves in molding their individual or collective aspirations and identities. Although no single word existed in antiquity for the qualities that modern authors regard as making up that term, its Latin derivation--from monumentum, "a monument"--attests plainly to the presence of the concept in the mentalities of ancient Romans, and the development of that notion through the Roman era laid the foundation for the classical ideal of monumentality, which reached a height in early modern Europe. This book is also the first full-length study of architecture in the Antonine Age--when it is generally agreed the Roman Empire was at its height. By exploring the public architecture of Roman Italy and both Western and Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the point of view of the benefactors who funded such buildings, the architects who designed them, and the public who used and experienced them, Edmund Thomas analyzes the reasons why Roman builders sought to construct monumental buildings and uncovers the close link between architectural monumentality and the identity and ideology of the Roman Empire itself.

scholarly journals The sacredness of the self, of society and of the human body: the case of a Finnish transgender pastor Marja-Sisko Aalto

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Veikko Anttonen
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Folk Biology ◽  
The Town

In 2008 the change of sex of a Finnish transgender pastor attracted media attention to Lutheran Christianity on a worldwide scale, which compared to other religious traditions seldom makes it to the world news. This article­ discusses the sex reassignment undergone by Marja-Sisko Aalto, a Lutheran pastor from the town of Imatra, in south eastern Finland, who in 2008, at the age of 54, was transformed into a woman. First some remarks on the relation between religion and the body are made and terminological issues are discussed briefly. The second part of the article presents Aalto's life story based on the author's interview with her in April 2010. In the last section the author discusses the Finnish cognitive scholar Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s reflection on folk biology as an explanation for making sense of the public image regarding a priest’s gender. The article concludes by looking at Marja-Sisko Aalto’s case from the perspective of marking boundaries between the categories of the self, the society and the human body. 

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

Song, Confession, and Criminality: Trial Records as Sources for Popular Musical Culture in Early Modern Europe

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
City Government ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the city government of Augsburg, Germany, struggled to maintain religious peace as the confessional boundaries between its Catholic and Protestant communities hardened. As tensions gradually rose, city officials feared and scrutinized the disruptive potential of the psalms and chorales sung by Augsburg's Protestant majority. Those suspected of owning, singing, or distributing inflammatory songs were subject to imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and exile. When an Imperial decree established a fully Catholic city government in March 1629, the authorities tightened this scrutiny, banning Protestant singing entirely in public and private and using a network of informants to catch violators. A remarkably well-preserved collection of criminal interrogation records in Augsburg dramatizes city officials' concern about religious song and their attempts to restrict its cultivation through coercive measures. These records, which preserve the testimony of suspects and witnesses as well as original evidence (such as manuscript or printed songs), show the ways in which local authorities tried to control singing that they felt threatened the public peace. At the same time, these sources give us unparalleled insight into the production, performance, and circulation of religious songs. Although the interrogations reveal much about how and where songs——often contrafacta of well-known psalms or chorales——were written and performed, the authorities were especially intent on finding out how they originated, who bought, sold, and sang them, and why. These exchanges between interrogators and suspects provide a starting point for an analysis of the relationship between singing, religion, and criminality in an early modern urban environment.

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