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 studying the medieval and early modern 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?

In this module you are given 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, sexuality, gender, disability and age), psychology, environment and religious practice. Topics you might study include: the lives of the saints with their strange, resistant bodies; the chromatic fantasies that are illuminated uroscopy manuals; Romances about 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, Avicenna and Augustine) and modern (including feminist and race theory, and other cultural theory on materiality and embodiment).

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction: humorology and the body as microcosm
• Skin colour before and after America crusading romances, race theory
• Reproductive politics: inside the female body (medieval accounts of the foetus in utero and modern discussions of foetal imaging)
• Metamorphosis and monstrosity: theories of bodily transformation and hybridity medieval, early modern and modern
• Body and mind: comparing medieval, Cartesian and modern understandings of the relation between body and mind
• Violence and death: saints’ lives and anatomy
• Body part: votive offerings, relics and theorising material culture before and after the Reformation
• Diagnosing (in) the past: uroscopy manuals and case histories
• Labour and disability, the politics of welfare
• Sexuality and queer bodies: romances, plays 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, Renaissance and Early Modern)
• recognise the intellectual, social, religious, political and cultural contexts in which these ideas developed
• engage with secondary criticism and other forms of evidence
• develop an understanding of current theoretical perspectives on the body in history
• read critically and deconstruct primary evidence and theoretical frameworks
• evaluate secondary criticism
• construct an argument based upon textual evidence
• articulate an informed thesis
• demonstrate an engagement with scholarly conventions and standards
• appreciate the relationship between textual and material forms of evidence.