scholarly journals Small Volumes, Concealed Images: Portrait Miniatures and the Body = Pequeños volúmenes, imágenes ocultas: Las miniaturas retrato y el cuerpo

2018 ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Marianne Koos
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Binary Relations ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
La Joya ◽  
Model Transform ◽  
Opening And Closing

This paper examines a group of artifacts that are paradigmatic for images worn on the body: the portrait jewel. In particular the article focuses on the envelopes in which English Renaissance portrait miniatures – like human bodies – were protected. Historical sources reveal very different materials: Besides paper, silk, ivory or velvet we find jeweled metal containers that made it possible to fix the portrait on one’s own body. The article analyzes how, both in images of an official and very intimate nature, these jeweled artifacts interact with the wearer’s body. It does so by focusing on the process of handling: Portrait jewels always demanded an act of opening and closing, of turning and folding, through which they ‘unfolded’ their specific semantics – and their very agency. How exactly these tiny items could model, transform and question binary relations of object and subject is finally shown with a ‘close reading’ of the Heneage Jewel, the most complex of these artifacts. Este documento examina una serie de objetos que representan ejemplos de imágenes que se llevan sobre el cuerpo: las joyas-retrato. En particular, el artículo se centra en los envoltorios con los que las miniaturas-retrato del Renacimiento Británico - al igual que el cuerpo humano - estaban protegidas. Las fuentes históricas nos revelan materiales muy distintos: además del papel, la seda, el marfil o el terciopelo, encontramos contenedores metálicos enjoyados que permitían llevar el retrato sobre el propio cuerpo. El artículo analiza cómo, tanto en imágenes de naturaleza oficial como muy íntima, estos objetos enjoyados interaccionan con el cuerpo del usuario. Esto tiene lugar centrándose en su proceso de manipulación: las joyas-retrato siempre requerían de una acción de apertura y cierre, de giro y plegado, a través de la cual desplegaban su significado específico así como su propio cometido. El cómo exactamente estas diminutas piezas podían modelarse, transformarse y cuestionar sus relaciones binarias entre objeto y sujeto, se demuestra finalmente con una lectura pormenorizada de la joya Heneage, la más compleja de estas piezas.

Creating the Wind

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-31
Author(s):  
Élodie Dupey García
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Postclassic ◽  
Comparative Examination ◽  
Meteorological Phenomenon

This article explores how the Nahua of late Postclassic Mesoamerica (1200–1521 CE) created living and material embodiments of their wind god constructed on the basis of sensory experiences that shaped their conception of this divinized meteorological phenomenon. In this process, they employed chromatic and design devices, based on a wide range of natural elements, to add several layers of meaning to the human, painted, and sculpted supports dressed in the god’s insignia. Through a comparative examination of pre-Columbian visual production—especially codices and sculptures—historical sources mainly written in Nahuatl during the viceregal period, and ethnographic data on indigenous communities in modern Mexico, my analysis targets the body paint and shell jewelry of the anthropomorphic “images” of the wind god, along with the Feathered Serpent and the monkey-inspired embodiments of the deity. This study identifies the centrality of other human senses beyond sight in the conception of the wind god and the making of its earthly manifestations. Constructing these deity “images” was tantamount to creating the wind because they were intended to be visual replicas of the wind’s natural behavior. At the same time, they referred to the identity and agency of the wind god in myths and rituals.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals Demetaphorization, Anatomy, and the Semiotics of the Reformation in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Attila Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revenge Tragedies ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes

Abstract Reformation theology induced a profound thanatological crisis in the semiotics of the human being and the body. The Protestant Reformation discontinued numerous practices of intercession and communal ritual, and the early modern subject was left vulnerable in the face of death. The English Renaissance stage played out these anxieties within the larger context of the epistemological uncertainties of the age, employing violence and the anatomization of the body as representational techniques. While theories of language and tragic poetry oscillated between different ideas of imitatio (granting priority to the model) and mimesis (with preference for the creative and individual nature of the copy), the new anatomical interest and dissective perspectives also had their effects on the rhetorical practices of revenge tragedies. In the most shocking moments of these plays, rhetorical tropes suddenly turn into grisly reality, and figures of speech become demetaphorized, literalized. In a double anatomy of body and mind, English Renaissance revenge tragedy simultaneously employs and questions the emblematic and poetic traditions of representation, and the ensuing indeterminacy and ambiguity open paths for a new mimesis.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

The cosmology of the early medieval emporia?

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Imaginary World ◽  
Central Places ◽  
The Relationship

This characteristically thoughtful essay by Frans Theuws illustrates how far our analysis of central places in the early Middle Ages has advanced. Like his study of Maastricht (2001), it reveals a close reading of the archaeological and historical sources. Indeed, as Michael McCormick's encyclopaedic volume (2001) on the origins of the medieval economy shows with stunning authority, as archaeologists we have taken huge strides since Philip Grierson quipped, ‘It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak’ (1959, 129). Hence it comes as no surprise that Theuws is exploring the ‘relationship between forms of exchange and the imaginary world from which “value” is derived’ (p. 121).

A Novel Bio-Inspired Pneumatic Valve Adapter for Soft Robotic Vasculature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin O. Saunders ◽  
John P. Swensen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Outer Tube ◽  
Soft Robotics ◽  
Tube System ◽  
Pressure Flow ◽  
Pneumatic Valve ◽  
Cardiovascular Systems ◽  
Opening And Closing

Abstract This paper proposes a novel pneumatic valve adapter that decreases the size and quantity of pneumatic tubes and valves necessary for soft robotics by mimicking cardiovascular systems. Some cardiovascular systems, evolved to be powered by a single reservoir, the heart, which in turn powers the rest of the body by systematically opening and closing valves as needed. The presented valve adapter consists of a set of concentric tube, where both tubes have strategically patterned holes. The inner tube can be moved translationally and rotationally to align with designated hole positions in the outer tube, thus opening and closing pathways to chambers for pressure flow. The two-tube system can be used to either pressurize a chamber or depressurize a chamber or multiple chambers simultaneously.

scholarly journals Mixing Body and Soul: Galen on the Substance of Soul in QAM and De Propriis Placitis

Phronesis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-246
Author(s):  
Robert Vinkesteijn
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Body And Soul

Abstract In a late treatise, That the Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body (QAM), Galen of Pergamum infamously offered the view that the substance of the soul is identical with a bodily mixture. This thesis has been found radical and extreme in modern scholarship and is generally considered to be at odds with Galen’s ‘agnosticism’ on the substance of soul. In this paper I propose a close reading of QAM that allows us to make sense of it in terms of Galen’s other work, including his late work On My Own Opinions (De Propriis Placitis).

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