TY - BOOK ID - 68852482 TI - Exceptional bodies in early modern culture : concepts of monstrosity before the advent of the normal PY - 2020 SN - 9789463721745 9789048552375 9048552370 9463721746 PB - Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, DB - UniCat KW - History of civilization KW - anno 1500-1599 KW - anno 1600-1699 KW - anno 1700-1799 KW - E-books KW - Abnormalities, Human KW - Congenital Abnormalities KW - History. KW - history KW - Europe KW - Monsters KW - Social aspects. KW - bodies [animal components] KW - mismaakte mens UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:68852482 AB - Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society. ER -