Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Perletti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Past

This chapter relates the statue-like bodies of some Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to the theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourse. In particular, the chapter shows how memory images, which in antiquity played a pivotal role in the art of memory, were represented as inducing a paralysing, statue-like state in living bodies. Shakespeare’s work partakes in this re-assessment of memory images, as words are more powerful memory triggers and carriers than monuments and statues. Moreover, while Shakespeare’s tragedies stage bodies turning into stone because of the destructive fixedness of the past, his late plays manage to set in motion the images produced by memory and by so doing resist death-like paralysis.

‘A Fine Pate Full of Fine Dirt’: Hamlet Among the Atomists

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-190
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter situates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a late sixteenth century atomism increasingly shorn of its atheist metaphysics and Epicurean ethics. Making available new ways of thinking about matter as theoretically compatible with theistic ideas, early modern atomism provides a set of ontological assumptions that governs the playworld and shapes the course of Hamlet’s revenge. Paying special attention to two strands of atomist thought – namely, the body as particularized and the functions of perception, memory, and time as material imprints – this chapter reads Hamlet’s understanding of the dissolvable body and his attempt to remold the court's collective memory, the most proximate record of historical time, as of a piece. Hamlet's revenge, consonant with his prior ways of conceptualizing embodied existence, functions as a kind of material accretion to the past. In his brooding and revenge, Hamlet seeks comfort, then, in the prospect of a reassuringly enduring materiality but a comfort that remains theoretical and contingent. The most intense poignancy of his tragic demise emerges from Hamlet’s surprisingly persistent refusal to abandon the tantalizing, if elusive, consolations proffered by the material world itself.

Louder Than Words: Broadsheets as Agents in a Multimedial Society

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva L E Janssens
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Abstract As significant instruments in the dissemination of Protestant ideas, oral, visual and written media affected early modern culture and its mentalities in an unprecedented way. Through word and image, religious oppositions were exacerbated in order to encourage the process of conversion. The role of prints in Protestant propaganda has already received scholarly attention. Yet, too often, a focus on medium-specific characteristics has ignored the interesting facet of interplay with other media. Through a detailed study of several illustrated broadsheets, this contribution analyses how prints of a Protestant stripe related, both in an explicit and in an implicit way, to other modes of communication. The perspective of multi- and intermediality is used as a scientific window on sixteenth-century prints and their reception.

scholarly journals Truth and the Transunto: a copy of the Holy Shroud in Sixteenth-Century Bologna

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (18 N.S.) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Samantha L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

'Truth and the transunto' investigates the use of a hand-painted copy of the Holy Shroud which found its way to Bologna in the late sixteenth century. Used by the archbishop of Bologna, Alfonso Paleotti (1531-1610), this copy was the source of observations of the body of Christ, in the manner of an autopsy and is presented in Paleotti's book Esplicatione del Lenzuolo [...]. Early modern copies of the Holy Shroud are not however accurate copies, but present seemingly simplified replicas of the original. This article explores how such information, and indeed, level of trust, can come from these copies, which, to the modern eye, seem fallible. Previous studies have excused the strange appearance of these Shroud copies by considering them solely devotional instruments yet as the article shows, Paleotti's use of such an object shows that the copies might be better understood in the context of early modern natural historical studies and illustrations. The article draws on scholarship which discusses the emerging interest for visual evidence in early scientific practice and shows how certain types of images and image-making practices were able to evoke the idea of presence and clarify the indecipherable. Demonstrating that Paleotti's copy of the Holy Shroud was not just a religious tool, but also an epistemic image, this article shows how Paleotti's use of the term 'transunto' could be used as a valuable tool in gaining a more nuanced understanding of the concept 'copy' in Early Modern Europe.   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

Sweet and Clean?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Accurate Picture ◽  
Old Bailey

Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over 30 years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient’s linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practised. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases—plague, smallpox, and typhus—that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

John Calvin’s Vision of Reform, Historical Thinking, and the Modern World

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Complex Relationships

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.

Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Giannetti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
And Gender

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

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