Bodily Extremities

Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Florike Egmond, Robert Zwijnenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351955065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A strong preoccupation with the human body - often manifested in startling ways - is a characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts. Whilst modern manifestations of this interest include body piercing, tattoos, plastic surgery and eating disorders, early modern preoccupations encompassed such diverse phenomena as monstrous births and physical deformity, body snatching, public dissection, flagellation, judicial torture and public punishment. This volume explores such extreme manifestations of early modern bodily obsessions and fascinations, and their wider cultural significance. Agreeing that an interest in physical boundaries, extreme physical manifestations and situations developed and grew stronger during the early modern period, the essays in this volume investigate whether this interest can be traced in a wider range of cultural phenomena, and should therefore be given a prominent place in any future characterization of the early modern period. Taken as a whole, the volume can be read as an attempt to create a new context in which to explore the cultural history of the human body, as well as the metaphors of research and investigation themselves.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg

A strong preoccupation with the human body, which manifests itself in often startling ways, seems to be a characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts. Modern manifestations include body art, piercing and tattoos, as well as cosmetic surgery, genetic manipulation, several kinds of sports, body shaping techniques, experimentation with drugs, and a variety of eating disorders. Early modern preoccupations encompassed such diverse phenomena as monstrous births and physical deformity, body snatching, public dissection, flagellation, judicial torture, public punishment and phenomena that we would now describe as eating disorders or psychosomatic symptoms but were then regarded as expressions of religious fervour. Our interest in such early modern phenomena is, of course, related to present-day preoccupations and, perhaps, to a sense of unease with many modern body-practices. If the following investigations give us a slightly different perspective on the present, this might be an additional advantage, but it is not the principal purpose of Bodily Extremities. Our focus in this volume is on early modern times – not in order to ‘learn from history’, but to learn about history.

Cultural analysis

There are many ways of writing about human bodies in the past. This volume concentrates on cultural themes, yet it cannot be classified as a product of traditional cultural history. It presents a way of going about research on the human body in which neither the method nor its contextual field have been determined beforehand. This does not imply, however, that anything goes, as will become evident from the emphasis on specific historical evidence, the persistent interest in reflection upon the methods used, and a tendency to take both historical and modern metaphors literally. Such an approach precludes a focus on long-term historical developments, which are, after all, no more than constructs by modern scholars – as easily deconstructed as rebuilt. Each contribution to this volume is firmly rooted in concrete early modern examples (literary texts, paintings, ritual practices) and can be regarded as a journey of discovery by its author into early modern history which investigates relevant contexts and methodologies.

Our explorations cannot emulate the great early modern discoveries about the (new) world, the universe, or the human body. Neither need they be confined, however, by the strict boundaries of modern academic disciplines. Precisely because context and method are not determined beforehand, they can take us anywhere in early modern history. That is the principal reason why we do not want to label this volume ‘cultural history’. Since many of the contributors to this volume are not historians in the narrow sense of the term, moreover, we prefer to describe the domain of Bodily Extremities as a historically informed branch of cultural analysis.

Over the last decades the literature about the history of the human body has grown exponentially.¹ Yet, for the early modern period it is largely dominated by scholars trained in literary studies, who concentrate on literary sources and usually have a strong interest in metaphor, semiotics and rhetorical traditions.² Most literary studies suffer from a strongly ‘internalist’ approach, which tends to neglect the rich contextual evidence available in the form of visual sources or non-literary textual ones. The implicit assumption of this ‘literary turn’ in the study of early modern bodies seems to be, moreover, that literary sources offer a better ‘view’ of physical aspects of early modern society than other sources. In spite of the rapidly changing appreciation of visual evidence, images are too often still reduced to mere illustrations of textual interpretation, while other evidence is often ignored.³ This regularly leads to the strange phenomenon of bodies being reduced to text and metaphor alone, losing their principal characteristic of physicality. In the present volume we have attempted to profit from the approaches suggested by literary historians, while at the same time trying to avoid their reductionism and to study early modern human bodies as living, acting and feeling subjects.

In a similar way we have tried to learn from and yet not simply follow art historical procedure. Much of art history likewise tends to suffer from ‘internalist’ methodology as well as from simplistic notions of historical change and contextualization. Visual sources (and not just what art historians tend to classify as art) play an extremely important role in the present volume. In trying to study and interpret them, we will not endorse notions in which works of art are taken to reflect a Zeitgeist and vice versa.⁴ We cannot make any a priori assumptions about the connections between a work of art and the society in which it was created: these connections have to be investigated, discovered, and made plausible.

Crucial, then, to this volume and its approach is the attempt to combine philosophy, literary studies, art history, sociocultural history, the history of mentalities, and aesthetics. As implied in our undertaking to make journeys of discovery, ‘combine’ means more than just gluing a piece of art history to an essay on politics or philosophy. It reflects our efforts to (re-)integrate disciplinary fields that have slowly grown apart over time because of institutional demands, increased academic specialization, and the concomitant territorial conflicts. Such efforts seem especially important (or even obligatory) when dealing with a period famous for the phenomenon of the uomo universale and the emphasis on connections and parallels – whether between signs and what they referred to or between macro- and micro-cosmos. Crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to discover new connections and allow new perspectives cannot but entail reflection on these disciplinary categories themselves. For instance, several contributors touch upon phenomena usually classified and dealt with as medical. We are not concerned, however, with medical history in the strict sense of the term – that is, the history of medical ideas or discoveries (of the ‘from Galen to Vesalius’ type) or the institutional history of the medical profession. In studying concepts, practices, or representations linked with the medical domain, our emphasis lies on their many possible links with a wider cultural context rather than on their ‘medical’ quality. This follows from our point of view that classifications such as ‘medical’, ‘judicial’ or ‘artistic’ are themselves cultural constructs that change over time, and should be investigated rather than taken as points of departure. Where such a deconstruction of categories may take us will differ from one chapter to another in this volume. In that sense too our explorations can be compared to journeys of discovery.

One consequence of our approach is that each chapter discusses heterogeneous material. Figures and phenomena belonging to the ‘canon’ of history – such as Leonardo da Vinci, dissection, Montaigne, self portraiture, Vesalius, gender, Rabelais, group identity, Louis XIV, Columbus, martyrdom – are jointly discussed with (as yet) rather more obscure ones. There is room for both high art and everyday practices in this volume. Heterogeneity in the use and combination of sources – visual, literary, and other textual sources – typifies every chapter, reflecting the fact that nearly every contributor to the present volume straddles the disciplinary academic boundaries. The joint approach, our shared interest in extremity, and the fact that all of us call upon the methods, material and traditions of several academic fields, are not fortuitous. The present volume is the result of a project developed by the present editors in the course of 1995–97 in the Dutch Huizinga Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History, which itself combines and coordinates research in many branches of the humanities. The project set out to be interdisciplinary from the start. Although it began in a Dutch context and during its first years mainly entailed a number of presentations and discussions among scholars living in The Netherlands, the intention was from the beginning to turn it into an international enterprise. Soon several colleagues from other countries joined us in this exploration of early modern bodily extremities, and thereafter debate and discussion have taken place mainly through electronic channels of exchange.

Extremes and extremity: the relevance of boundaries, the core, and the surface

Looking for a point of departure and shared interest which could present a challenge on both a practical and a theoretical level to all participants in the project, we chose the theme of bodily extremity. Practically speaking, examples abound of an early modern interest in the human body that reflected a – perhaps new and certainly increasing – preoccupation with the margins of the human body, physical violence, the body in extremis, the crossing of physical boundaries, the transition between outside and inside the human body, and bodily orifices. Moreover, this early modern fascination was closely linked with the quest for further knowledge – or, as it would have been called at the time, curiosity or wonder – about the workings of the human body, as reflected in a professional and public fascination with dissection, torture, and world-wide physical differences between human beings. Again the parallel with present-day professional and public interest in extreme and transgressive forms of physicality such as genetic manipulation, body art, or sex changes is striking. These are all borderline or marginal phenomena in the literal sense of the word and they affect more than physical appearances. Pertaining to the relation between the outside and the inside of the human body, they can throw light on a theme of ongoing interest: the connection between physical characteristics and identity.

It is not by chance that the themes of dissection and curiosity (in the early modern sense of the term) figure in several contributions to this volume. Both were central issues in the early modern period and are recurring themes in historical debate. Precisely in the early modern period ‘anatomy’ came to stand for research and discovery in general, for the uncovering of hidden, inner truths and the laying bare of previously hidden secrets.⁵ As will become clear, there was a darker side to this type of exploration as well. ‘Anatomy’ can also epitomize the violent and extreme side of curiosity: discovery by destruction.

Many of the questions in the present volume deal with early modern explorations of physical limits. Inevitably, our questions about these limits pertain not only to the physical phenomena themselves, but also to the ways in which bodies are presented and represented in our sources – in texts, images and objects. After all, the bodies themselves and their physical sensations are long gone. A study of bodily extremities in the past therefore cannot but deal with the boundaries of the rhetorical and stylistic rules that governed such representations at the time.

Theoretical considerations were equally important in guiding our choice to concentrate on extremity. The project started from the assumption that situations in which boundaries are crossed can be particularly revealing. This assumption is inspired both by older anthropological studies of the importance of social and symbolic boundaries and boundary markers, and by the work of Carlo Ginzburg on the crucial relevance of the marginal.⁶ These works have served as important sources of inspiration and as starting points for discussion, but not exactly as models. One reason why they have been both inspiring and problematic is that they suffer from a lack of clarity about the precise relations between the marginal, extreme, or liminal, and what is supposed to be the core.⁷ In spite of his long-term interest in questions of historical evidence and methodology, not even Ginzburg seems to have explicitly raised the question of whether such relations – which are, after all, part of an epistemological model – are subject to change over time. That is precisely the sort of problem we are grappling with in the present volume.⁸ What we certainly do not propose to do here is, therefore, to present another variety of the structuralism à la Edmund Leach or Mary Douglas in which liminality automatically implies special meaning, and any meaningful situation or phenomenon is therefore immediately characterized as liminal.⁹ We have also tried to avoid both the assumption that the extreme and transgressive should be the reverse of the normal/regular, and its implication that we need only study the extreme or irregular to deduce the normal or regular. Extremes are not necessarily irregular or abnormal. They may be characterized by excess or lack, or they may bear no recognizable relation to what is regarded as normal at all. The heterogeneity of the material used here, the variety of approaches, and the search for relevant contexts are therefore an integral part of our investigations into the relations between core and periphery.

Metaphors and explanations

Underlying the whole of this volume in a generally implicit way is the question of whether the theories mentioned above concerning the relevance of boundaries and the marginal can be of any use at all in the historical setting in which the very metaphors that play such a large role in modern western epistemology – superficial, crucial, marginal, anatomy, penetrating, and so on – gained new meaning and importance. To apply a theory before having established whether the theory is part of or extraneous to the phenomenon that is being studied, let alone what the phenomenon consists of, seems to be putting several carts before a lot of horses. If it is no longer self-evident that the surface is superficial, the marginal at the outer borders, the core crucial, or the essential concealed, then an analysis no longer needs to be penetrating or a truth deep. What about the marginal? Where is it, and can it still remain marginal? Should we look for the essence at the surface or rather give up any such search?

Proximity between approach and subject – which cannot but entail a new look at metaphors – becomes a different matter, moreover, when extremes, the crossing of physical boundaries, and matters of individuality or identity are investigated. Incisive remarks or s...