Bodies of Artisans/Artisans of the Body: Objects, Texts, and Techniques, 1650-1800

In the past decades, historians of medicine and historians of the body have produced a considerable amount of research on the circulation and transformation of medical knowledge and practices across different social groups, while historians of science and technology have shed light on the role of artisans in the making of science, both intellectually and practically. Numerous scholars have also pointed at the importance of embodied processes of knowledge making. Still, relatively little attention has hitherto been devoted to a finely grained study of the historical realities of ordinary bodies in the early modern world – the way in which bodies were conceived, fashioned, shaped by work, studied, cured, soothed, embellished, conditioned after death, represented and depicted in their actual, peculiar social determination. Whose bodies and for what purposes? Numerous aspects of these processes, and the practitioners taking part in them, remain largely unexplored or poorly contextualised. By focusing on objects, texts and techniques, this panel delves into the material history of the construction of the body as an object of knowledge and action. Probing the heuristic virtues of an approach centred on individual bodies, papers seek to shed light on the ways in which material circumstances and intellectual technologies shaped the production of knowledge, while exploring how specific, historical bodies informed, or interfered with, this process.