RE-WRITING HISTORY: BERNHARD LANG’S MONADOLOGIE SERIES (2007–PRESENT)
OWNING OVERTONES: GRÁ AGUS BÁS AND SPECTRAL TRADITIONS
CLARENCE BARLOW’S TECHNIQUE OF ‘SYNTHRUMENTATION’ AND ITS USE IN IM JANUAR AM NIL
Francesco Casoni and the Rhetorical Forensics of the Body
In early modern Europe, judges read the bodies of victims and suspects through a variety of lenses shaped by popular beliefs, Renaissance notions of physiognomy, and by the study of medicine, classical rhetoric, and natural law theory. This article explores the writings of Francesco Casoni (1500–1564) on these themes. Casoni emerges as critical of certain traditional assumptions and was deliberate in his rethinking about how judges might read the body, basing his ideas on the careful study of Cicero and Quintilian. Casoni became skeptical about the use of torture as part of the judicial process, eventually adopting the view that it was possible to convict an individual on the basis of indicia indubitata (compelling circumstantial evidence) alone. Attitudes about the body and torture in the sixteenth century must be examined in relation to a broad range of medical, theological, and judicial beliefs, which were far from consistent. But judges by necessity were forced to read the bodies of the accused for hints of guilt or innocence in the difficult process of carrying out their trials.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/45/1/103?rss=1
Domesticating Cannibalism: Visual Rhetorics of Madness and Maternal Infanticide in Fifteenth-Century Italy
This article examines a miracle, credited to the Dominican saint Vincent Ferrer, in which a "demented" wife and mother butchers and partially cooks her infant son. In the decades following Vincent’s 1455 canonization, artists like Colantonio and the Erri workshop approached the macabre narrative in very different ways. Beyond this iconographic instability, this essay argues that the unsettled status of the narrative—in both text and picture—enabled its use as a malleable vessel for articulating and projecting certain social anxieties. The Erri version, the primary focus of the article, emerges as a case study in pictorial indeterminancy: saintly power is both pivotal and marginalized; social class is both highlighted and obfuscated; cannibalism is both seen and unseen. These contradictions demonstrate the contested status of the social problems represented: female madness, child-killing, cannibalism, and, in a broader sense, the inability of men to assert control over the spaces of their domestic world.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/45/1/159?rss=1
The Patronage of the Body: Burial Sites, Identity, and Gender in Fifteenth-Century Venice
This essay examines the social orientation of married and widowed Venetian patricians in the fifteenth century as expressed in their election of final resting places. Comparing the choices of women and men reveals sharp contrasts by gender in burial patronage of lineage and of religious institutions. Most men displayed loyalty to their lineage of birth in their chosen site of interment, while women’s family choices demonstrated nearly equal loyalty to natal and marital family, indicating varied individual responses to the vicissitudes of married life. The most striking contrast, however, was between men’s and women’s affiliations to religious institutions. Men usually opted for burial in male monasteries, chiefly those with their family’s tombs, another indication of enduring identification with their natal lineage. The great majority of women, by contrast, patronized female convents, usually ones with no family connections, demonstrating a preference for postmortem association not with family but with a community of celibate women.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/45/1/79?rss=1
Thinking through Death: The Politics of the Corpse
This special issue of JMEMS addresses different ways of thinking through death and dying in the medieval and early modern period, including different philosophical and legal positions concerning the relationships between the body and its parts, corpses and burial sites, the bodies of saints and the bodies of criminals, the bodies of the dying confessing on their deathbeds and the bodies of suicides choosing to be buried with their souls unprepared. A new frame of knowledge becomes possible when we familiarize ourselves with the face of death. The six essays presented in this special issue do not revolt against the prospect of death, do not neglect what in the early modern period was called "the art of living and dying," but perform their own version of the "dance of death" as they reconstruct in multifaceted layers the social and at times the political reality of dying present in an array of medieval and early modern European materials.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/45/1/1?rss=1