Our final conference took place in person at the Council Room at King's College London's Strand Campus, on the 8th and 9th June 2022.
We were delighted to feature papers from (in order of appearance):
We also featured lightening talks …
We will be holding an in person seminar on Friday 11th February with Hannah Marcus, Harvard University.
Hannah will be presenting her paper ''The Spectacle of Cassandra Fedele: Gender, Disability, and Long Life in Early Modern Venice''.
On May 1, 1556, the 91-year-old humanist and former child prodigy, Cassandra Fedele, performed a Latin oration celebrating a visit to Venice by …
'Visible Skin: Rediscovering the Renaissance through Black Portraiture' is running 10 September - 10 December 2021, on King's College London's Strand Campus, and on our webpages here.
We are holding an online closed reading group with Alexander Bevilacqua on 11th May on ''Race and Royalty at the Brandenburg-Prussian Court'', looking especially at visual and material culture.
''.the temple of her skin is a visual documentary project exploring the stories, traditional practices and aesthetics around African women and our tattooing and scarification journeys - exploring the largely undocumented world of how and why we inscribe our skin in contemporary tattoo and scarification.
In this interactive session we engage the idea behind …
An online closed workshop 'Tattooed Bodies in Early Modern Worlds', held over two afternoons March 30th and 31st.
We are holding a virtual reading group with Karin Sennefelt on 12th February, 11am. Professor Sennefelt of Stockholm University is a cultural and social historian of early modern Europe. She will be presenting her paper “Sensing the spirit: the bodies of Lutheran prophets and visionaries in the seventeenth century”.
We are holding a virtual reading group with Mona O'Brien on 8th December, 2pm. Mona is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, and is researching the social and medical histories of epidemic disease in early modern Europe. More details to follow.
We are holding a closed reading group with Dr Erin Griffey, associate professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. We will be discussing Erin's work-in-progress on early modern wrinkle removal and skin rejuvenation recipes.
On 5th August we are holding a closed reading group with Dr Alex Bamji, Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds. We will be discussing Alex's upcoming book on death in Renaissance Venice.
Hannah Murphy and Kathleen Walker-Meikle are participating in a Wellcome Collection workshop, sharing methodological perspectives on digitally accessible collections, to assist early career researchers. For more information and to sign up, see the Eventbrite page here.
We are excited to welcome Katherine Dauge-Roth of Bowdoin College for a virtual reading group, discussing her new book Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France. If you would like to join, sign up on Eventbrite here, or email renaissanceskin@kcl.ac.uk.
Signing the Body is the first scholarly monograph to address the rich history of the …
We are holding a small reading group with Prof. John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
Prof. Henderson will be presenting his paper: 'Visualising the Great Pox in Early Modern Italy: patients, symptoms and treatment'.
The experiences of patients who …
We are holding a small workshop on early modern surgery, with papers from Peter Jones (Cambridge), Philippa Hellawell (KCL), and Carolin Schmitz (Cambridge).
Papers:
Join us for the launch of the English edition of our former project member Paolo Savoia's book 'Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain'.
Paolo's book will be introduced by Evelyn Welch and Elaine Leong from 6pm at The Anatomy Museum, King's College London on the 29th January.
ln collaboration with Kings College London historians, Luke Murphy and renowned sculptor Alex Pentek collaborate on this provocative performance installation examining the nature of touch, contact and lifecycle of our skin.
With a large …
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
HERMAN BENNETT CHLOE IRETON TATIANA SEIJAS ANJANA SINGH
The Renaissance in Europe saw a reinvigorated focus on natural surfaces as a key to creating order. Medical and natural philosophical frameworks emphasized the continuity of surface between the human and non-human: skins covered the humoral bodies of humans, …
Join us for a round table on the question of "Race before Race in Early Modern Europe". We are joined by Carmen Fracchia who will give a short paper on her new book ‘Black but Human’, in dialogue with Herman Bennett , whose publications include ‘African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic’, to informally …
A reading group to workshop Olivia's work The Poxed Body in Early Modern Rape Trials, joined by Fritz Dross.
5th June 2019, 4-6pm, Strand Campus
We welcome Dr Noam Andrews (Ghent) at our Renaissance Skin Reading Group to discuss his work on tailors, geometry, and the surface of the body.
Andrews will explore the innovative contributions made by tailors to a new surface-oriented and surveyable conceptualization of the body that emerged in tandem with the onset of print media. …
Renaissance Skin: Animal and Human Surfaces in Early Modern European Medical Practices
The Renaissance Skin team will be holding a panel at RSA Toronto. Chaired by Evelyn Welch, the session papers are:
Join us for our first Renaissance Skin Reading Group of 2019 as we welcome Dr Caroline Petit (Warwick) to discuss her work on Galen and 16th-century medicine.
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
In the 1660s, members from the most important European scientific societies – including the Académie des Sciences in Paris, the Royal Society in London, and the Accademia del Cimento in …
This roundtable brings together scholars from different periods and places to reflect on the relationship between technologies and the body, focusing on specific technologies that are …
Join us for our final reading group of 2018 as we frame our conversation around the issue of complexion and skin in the early modern period.
We welcome Professor Carina L. Johnson (Pitzer) to our Renaissance Skin Reading Group for a discussion of her essay 'Naming the “Turk” and the “Moor”: praxis and the editions of Nicolas de Nicolay’s Books …
Booking is now closed for this sell-out event, but keep posted on their registration page for any last-minute availability.
The conference aims to generate a discussion about the cross-cultural influences in dress and textiles by considering how …
Taking place over two days (20-21 September 2018), this workshop focuses on the practices of a range of artisans (tailors, barbers, cooks, cheesemakers, gardeners, and agronomists) and their relationships with the fields of meteorology, botany, natural history, medicine, earth sciences, and veterinary medicine. These artisans and their practices shared a …
Join us as we focus on changing conceptions of the body and its surface in the context of medical rhetoric and the influence of the sixteenth-century medical marketplace.
We welcome Professor Cynthia Klestinec (Miami University, Ohio) to our first meeting of the Renaissance Skin Reading Group for 2018/19, at which she will lead a discussion on the medical agon and …
This half-day workshop will reflect on the multiple ways in which animal skin, fur, feathers, hair, scales and shells were conceptualised and used between 1450 and 1700. Combining different historiographical approaches and sources (textual, material, and visual), the workshop aims to open the field up to a wider audience, strengthen the need …
We are delighted to welcome Professor Craig Koslofsky to join us for a presentation of his new work on skin, colour, and meaning in the early modern world. In his paper 'Ensignes …
The next meeting of the Renaissance Skin Reading Group will explore human and animal skin in early modern drama. Joining us will be Professor Patricia Cahill (Emory) as she presents her current work-in-progress 'Leonine Encounters on the Early Modern Stage'.
What …
Two papers will be presented at this CEMS event.
Taking place over two days (20-21 September 2018), this workshop focuses on the practices of a range of artisans (tailors, barbers, cooks, cheesemakers, gardeners, and agronomists) and their relationships with the fields of meteorology, botany, …
This half-day workshop at King's College London will reflect on the multiple ways in which animal skin and the by-products of the evacuation of humoreal excreta (hair, fur, feathers) were conceptualised and used between 1450 and 1700. Combining different historiographical approaches and sources (textual, material, and …
Evelyn will be presenting on the material culture of skin in the Renaissance as part of the University of Cambridge History of Art department's Graduate Research Seminar Series, Lent Term 2018 programme 'Art …
Join us as we focus on recent work on observation and ways of looking at the body. We will explore how early moderns saw the body – technologically, physically, epistemically, artistically?
The third meeting of the Renaissance Skin Reading Group will discuss microscopy. Joining us will be Dr Sietske Fransen, from the ‘Making Visible’ project at the University …
This paper focuses on the sixteenth-century Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis’ text on beautifying the face and body: De decoratione (1601). As a counterpart to his most famous text on skin diseases (De morbis cutaneis, …
In the Galenic tradition, medicine was distinct from surgery. While the former dealt with diseases caused by internal conditions (internal humoral imbalances), the task of surgery was …
This paper presents the challenges of representing infirmities, from smallpox to toothache, that involved rupturing the skin posed in Early Modern Europe. Since Galen, skin, the top layer of the body, has been considered a …
Due to an overwhelming response, the conference is now full. Please follow us on Twitter for updates on any changes to availability.
In early modern medical theory, skin was imagined as a porous boundary. Plato, Hippocrates and Galen all agreed on the permeable quality of the skin, which the sixteenth century physician …
More porous than skin is the eye. Even if it is not the lamp or the window of the soul, its gaze is revealing of what is inside the skin, of how one creature sees …
Due to the nature of this working group, this event is for invited participants only.
In early modern Europe, skin – both human and animal - formed part of the spirited world of matter. As leather, animal skin took on a vast array of forms, from shoes …
Join us as we pursue the themes of porousness and excretion, as well as the methodological approach of using source-based and comparative material.
The second Renaissance Skin Reading Group will explore the porousness of the body and the role of the non-naturals in maintaining, preserving, and protecting its integrity. We will …
Join us to explore the relationship between anatomy and art in interrogating and constructing early modern concepts of skin.
The Renaissance Skin Reading Group will meet for the first time to discuss the relationship between anatomy and art in interrogating and constructing early modern concepts of skin. We will read selections …