The Book of Hours and the Body: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny
Sherry C. M. Lindquist, B0CTVPPB5X, 0367504529, 9780367504526, 978-0-367-50452-6, 978-0367504526, 978-0-367-50454-0, 978-0367504540, 9780367504540, 978-1-003-04990-6, 9781003049906, 9781003049906
This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment.
It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture.
In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.