Across early modern Europe, the growing scientific practice of dissection prompted new and insightful ideas about the human body. This collection of essays explores the impact of anatomical knowledge on wider issues of learning and culture.

Across early modern Europe, the growing scientific practice of dissection prompted new and insightful ideas about the human body. This collection of essays explores the impact of anatomical knowledge on wider issues of learning and culture.

Early modern European thought held that men and women were essentially the same. During the seventeenth century, medical and legal arguments began to turn against this ‘one-sex’ model, with hermaphroditism seen as a medieval superstition. This book traces this change in Iberia in comparison to the earlier shift in thought in northern Europe.

Hutton looks at Manchester and Oxford to provide a comparative history of anatomical study. Using the Anatomy Act as a focal point, she examines how these two cities dealt with the need for bodies over two centuries.

This book explores the popular and elite debates over the creation of a two-sex model of human bodies in eighteenth-century Spain.

This illustrated volume examines the different methods artists and anatomists used to reveal the inner workings of the human body and evoke wonder in its form. For centuries, anatomy was a fundamental component of artistic training, as artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sought to skillfully portray the human form. In Europe, illustrations that captured the complex structure of the body—spectacularly realized by anatomists, artists, and printmakers in early atlases such as Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem of 1543—found an audience with both medical practitioners and artists. Flesh and Bones examines the inventive ways anatomy has been presented from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century, including an animated corpse displaying its own body for study, anatomized antique sculpture, spectacular life-size prints, delicate paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Drawn primarily from the vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute, the over 150 striking images, which range in media from woodcut to neon, reveal the uncanny beauty of the human body under the skin

Reading a wide range of early modern authors and exploring their cultural-historical, philosophical and scientific contexts, Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience examines the shift in focus from reliance on shared experience to placing of trust in individualized experience which occurs in the writing and culture of the period. Nick Davis contends that much of the era's literary production participates significantly in this broad cultural movement. Covering key writers of the period including Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer, Spenser, Langland, Hobbes and Bunyan, Davis begins with an overview of the medieval-early modern privatizing cultural transition. He then goes on to offer an analysis of King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, The Winter's Tale, and the first three books of The Fairie Queene, among other texts, considering their treatment of the relation between individual life and the life attributed to the cosmos, the idea of symbolic narrative positing a collective human subject, and the forming of pragmatic relations between individual and group.