The body is a thing among things.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
This workshop seeks to reassess the twin legacies of body studies and materialism as they have shaped and reshaped disciplinary boundaries in medieval and early modern studies over the past two decades, as well as to think about where work on premodern bodies may go from here. In returning to the "premodern" not as a static originary point against which the modern body can be read, but as a construction based on a different understanding of the human-nature divide, this workshop asks where an interdisciplinary approach can take us after three decades of work on the body that has been based primarily inside the categories of gender and sexuality. Our point of departure will be the semantic range of the medieval Latin term corpus, a word whose double valence—physical body and textual collection—presages recent critical concern with the thin line between body and representation. Recent work in disability studies, book history, the history of medicine, legal studies, as well as art and architectural history have suggested that other focalizers may offer new perspectives upon what it means to textualize the body or to embody texts in daily praxis. The goal of the workshop will be to bring in speakers whose work on the premodern body seeks new understandings of how bodily boundaries relate to ethical boundaries as well as to publicize the large amount of work in this vein currently being undertaken by UW-Madison faculty and graduate students across many disciplines.
Contact: Kellie Robertson or Lisa H.Cooper
