Defying Death, Improving the Body, and the Early Modern Quest for Longevity

Transhumanists predict that people will achieve immortality by 2045. While this quest for eternal life has been omnipresent in human history, early modern physicians, philosophers, and lay people particularly strove to identify the key to overcoming death. Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment changing aesthetics, new approaches to old texts, and the rise of the New Science opened the door to a wide array of theories and experiments concerning longevity. This period offers intriguing insights into ideas and practices for improving one’s body and beauty, for living healthily, and possibly even for defying death. This panel brings scholars working on different aspects of the connected histories of death and long life into conversation about continuities and innovations in life extension in the early modern period.