Abstract Summary
Different forms of corporeal improvement emerged between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Humanists, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, tried to educate the elite and rulers in books like his how-to manual ‘Institutio Principis Christiani’ (1516) dedicated to Prince Charles, the future Emperor Charles V. Ecclesiastics and pious lay people trained their bodies and minds to reach spiritual discipline in order to live more righteously (e.g. Jesuits, Pietists) and possibly achieve salvation (e.g. ascetics, eremites). In the field of medicine, the physician Andrea Vesalius, among others, led the way to modern anatomy with the publication of the findings from his empirical dissections in ‘De humani corporis fabrica’ (1543). Generally speaking, in the Renaissance and in the wake of the New Science, novel techniques of observation and their corresponding instruments evolved, as Gianna Pomata and Lorraine Daston have shown in their work on the ‘Observationes’ and the ‘epistemic genre’ respectively. I argue that these new empirical methods fostered the practices of corporeal experiments and the corporeal experiments in turn contributed to the New Science. My paper will show how the media and methods of observation and improvement of the body intersected in the early modern period.
