Les représentations visuelles du corps en santé dans la période moderne

Visual representations of the body in health and disease in the early modern period (1450-1750)

Call for papers

Munich, Historisches Kolleg, March 28-30, 2019

Countless visual representations of healthy and diseased bodies have come down to us from the early modern period, in the arts, in popular media, in medicine and the sciences. They reflect the perception and understanding of the human body and its diseases at a given time and in a given social and cultural context. They give expression to changing ideas about the bodily differences between “nations” and “races”, between the sexes, between rich and poor, town and countryside, young and old, and they convey implicit and explicit social, moral, and religious judgments of bodily features, disabilities and diseases.

Medical historians have often made use of this rich body of visual material to illustrate their books and papers. They have rarely embarked on a systematic analysis of visual evidence as sources in their own right, however, within the context of the historical development of art, artistic techniques, and habits of seeing. Art historians, in turn, have examined countless artistic representations of healthy and sick bodies. However, they have rarely engaged in a consistent manner with the underlying, often quite complex medical ideas about the body and its diseases that were expounded in learned treatises and that circulated – not necessarily in an identical form − among the lay public and among artists.

The aim of this workshop is to promote a dialogue between medical historians and art historians about these issues. We want to look at the ways, in which changing ideas about the body and its diseases framed and informed their visual representation in the arts, the sciences and popular culture. Contributions can focus on individual images or groups of images that seem particularly illuminating in this respect, or on specific genres, like portraits, representations of miracles or anatomical tables. They can examine representations of certain parts of the body, like the eyes or the skin, of affects and temperaments (which at the time where also considered as bodily phenomena), of bodily conditions such as obesity, or of certain diseases, like dropsy, leprosy, plague or the French disease.

The workshop aims to bring together scholars from different countries and papers should as a rule be presented in English. The contributions to the conference will be published in a collective volume with papers either in German or in English, depending on the language of the author.

The Historische Kolleg will cover the expenses for travel (economy, within Europe) and lodging.

Please send abstracts of proposed contributions (200-300 words, in German or English) to michael.stolberg@uni-wuerzburg.de before May 31, 2018.