Lessons from the Medieval and Early Modern Body

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Professor Sue Wiseman
• Assessment: a 5000-word research essay (100%)

What lessons can be learned from the medieval and Renaissance body? How can our assumptions and ideas about the body be shaken up by looking at materials from a culture which is very different from our own? What new vistas on the historical body are opened up by looking at historical evidence alongside cultural and critical theory?

This module gives you space and time to develop your own research angle on these questions, enabling fresh explorations of the history of the body in relation to, for example, medicine, identity politics (race/cultural difference, sexuality, gender, disability), psychology, environment and religious practice.

Topics you might study include: the lives of the saints with their strange, resistant bodies; Christ’s body as a sacred and erotic object; the interpretation of the body; magical transformation and hybrid identities; court records about sexual transgression or bodily violence; the struggles with the earth-boundness of body in the work of the mystics. We will prise their meanings open with key theoretical texts, both medieval (with, for example, Aristotle and Augustine) and modern (including feminist and race theory, and other cultural theory on materiality and embodiment). We will consider literary and cultural evidence from the medieval. Modern and Renaissance period and authors and artists we will consider will include Cindy Sherman and Veronica Franco.

Indicative syllabus

• The body as microcosm
• Skin colour before and after America
• Reproductive politics: inside the female body (medieval and seventeenth-century accounts of the foetus in utero and modern discussions of foetal imaging)
• Metamorphosis and monstrosity: theories of bodily transformation and hybridity medieval, Renaissance and modern
• Body and mind: comparing medieval and modern understandings of the relation between body and mind
• Violence and death: anatomy
• Body parts, relics and changing relationships to the sacred and profane body
• Diagnosing (in) the past: uroscopy manuals and case histories
• Women’s desires and writing on love
• Sexuality, desire and queer bodies: romances and court records

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate a knowledge of key texts and topics reflecting the body in history (especially the Middle Ages and Renaissance)
• recognise the intellectual, social, religious, political and cultural contexts in which these ideas developed
• engage with and evaluate secondary criticism and other forms of evidence
• understand current theoretical perspectives on the body in history
• read critically and deconstruct primary evidence and theoretical frameworks
• construct an argument based upon textual evidence.