Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens, eds. The Body in Early Modern Italy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. x + 438 pp. index. illus. bibl. $70. ISBN: 978–0–8018–9414–5.

Abstract

As Julia Hairston and Walter Stephens explain in their introduction, The Body in Early Modern Italy resulted from a 2002 conference at Johns Hopkins University that aimed ''in short, to be truly interdisciplinary'' (x). The roster of distinguished contributors attests that this goal has been admirably met: here are fifteen essays from largely senior scholars in literature, art history, history, cultural studies, history of science, architectural history, and even sport science. These are grouped loosely into four parts, the first of which treats the body in the Petrarchan tradition. Margaret Brose connects the instability and anxiety that surround the body in the Canzoniere to Petrarch's preoccupation with temporality and decay. Luca Marcozzi's essay provides a valuable history of the corpus carcer metaphor, followed by a thoughtful and detailed study of its use in Petrarch. Part 2 turns to scientific and philosophical considerations, beginning with Katharine Park's essay. Building on her groundbreaking Secrets of Women, Park disproves the persistent misconception that the medieval church prohibited dissection. The essay highlights an intriguing shift in end results from medieval to sixteenth-century dissection ''from bodies producing thaumaturgic objects to bodies producing anatomical evidence'' (70). Walter Stephens's remarkable article traces the question of demonic corporeality from Augustine to Aquinas and Bonaventure, through to Ficino's selective appropriation of Psellus. Scholars of the fifteenth century obsessively asked whether sexual relations with incubi and succubi were imagined or embodied. Stephens provides us with one of the volume's most insightful comments on gender in arguing that the association of women with the senses turned the testimony of witches into powerful proof that demons had bodies. Their detailed sensory recollections of sexual encounters with devils confirmed demonic corporeality as philosophy couldn't. Sergius Kodera also thoughtfully takes up the representation, understanding, and gendering of matter, figured in Italian Renaissance philosophy through the image of the prostitute. The third and largest section of The Body treats ''gendered corporeality''; these essays are largely traditional discussions of gender that assume an unproblematic correspondence of sex and body. Albert Ascoli eloquently explores the symmetry of impenetrable armored bodies and unpenetrated virgin (feminine) bodies in Ariosto's Orlando furioso