I Tatti's third Exploratory Seminar of the academic year, The Body Remade: Art, Nature, and Gender 1300 - 1650, was held over March 9-10 2017. Convened by Katharine Park, the twelve participants of the seminar addressed the parts of the body accessible and amenable to human intervention while the subject was still alive: its external surfaces, its bones and muscles, its limbs, and even its vocal chords. The seminar explored the ways late medieval and early modern practitioners remade “natural” bodies, enhancing them or repairing their deficiencies, innate and acquired, through surgery, cosmetics, clothing, and prosthetics. Particular attention was paid to the way in which these techniques were gendered, in terms of their practitioners, the bodies on which they were practiced, and the norms of sex and gender they reflected and sometimes troubled. In the process, the participants aimed to capture multiple facets of the body as experienced, thought, and manipulated by late medieval and early modern actors, as well as the ways these changed over time.
The Body Remade was the third exploratory seminar hosted by I Tatti this academic year, after The Mongols and the Writing of Global History (December 1-2, 2016) and Crossroads Africa: Networks and Global Exchange 1250-1750 (January 12-13, 2017).
participants of the Exploratory Seminar The Body Remade: Art, Nature, and Gender 1300-1650