Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, this volume considers the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine 16th-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. The book includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the "virtual" body of satire, and ends the late 17th century with representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of traveller's tales as signifiers of racial difference. It intends to push forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses and offers new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ("fictions") of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. The essays in this collection aim to shed new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge.