From the Stillroom to the Royal Society: Early Modern Women in Science Kathleen P. Long , editor.Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. XV + 330 pages; ISBN: 9780754669715. Lisa T. Sarasohn .The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. XI + 272 pages; ISBN: 9780801894435.

2011 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-616
Author(s):  
Christopher D'Addario
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Women In Science ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Johns Hopkins University

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Nature And Society

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

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