Les corps expressifs

Expressive Bodies: Visible Illness, Visible Health 

 

Call for Papers 

International Medieval Congress to be held at the University of Leeds, July 3-6, 2023.


Over the last decades cultural historians of medicine have joined religious and social historians to approach the body as a primary site of the most intimate and at the same time communally shared human experiences. In these sessions we aim to explore one particular aspect of this entanglement: the visible quality of human bodies to express both illness and health.

We invite papers that explore from a variety of disciplines the visibility of some “actions of the body”, their relevance in medieval cultures and how they were interpreted and acted upon by a variety of agents. From the presence or absence of ulcers, buboes or facial hair to the appearance of the skin or the shape of the genitals, bodily surfaces played a central role in medical and religious understandings of the body and determined important aspects of social life.

Topics to be addressed include but are not limited to: 

• explanations of the outward manifestations of the humoral body
• the role of the visible in health practices
• professional and lay interventions on bodily surfaces
• gender and the visibility of the body and of its parts
• who decided to act on bodily surfaces and on what grounds these decisions were made
• technologies used to modify the appearance of bodies
• institutional approaches to the visible nature of human bodies

Please send your proposals of around 250 words to Montserrat Cabré (cabrem@unican.es) and Anna Peterson (peterson.anna.m@gmail.com) before September 15. The sessions will be sponsored by the project VisibleBodyMed (PID2019-107671GB-I00) funded by the Spanish MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.