Overview

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.

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9780367504526

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""This book is a significant and original contribution to the study of body perceptions, gender, and identity formation through engagement with visual-cultural products in the premodern world."" -- CAA.reviews

Author Information

Sherry C. M. Lindquist is Professor of Art History at Western Illinois University. Her publications include Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Routledge); The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Routledge); and Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders (co-authored with Asa Mittman).

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