Artisans of the body in early modern Italy: identities, families and masculinities – By Sandra Cavallo (original) (raw)
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DESCRIPTION: This groundbreaking study explores the role of those involved in various aspects of the care, comfort, and appearance of the body in 17th and early 18th century Italy. It brings to light the strong cultural affinities and social ties between barbers, surgeons, and the apparently distant trades of jeweler, tailor, wigmaker, and upholsterer. Drawing on contemporary understandings of the body, the author shows that shared concerns about health and wellbeing permeated the professional cultures of these medical and non-medical occupations. At the same time, the detailed analysis of the life-course, career patterns, and family experience of "artisans of the body" offers unprecedented insight into the world of the urban middling sorts.
Gesnerus, 2010
La méthode cartésienne en médecine repose sur les dissections, alors que le livre revendique l'absence de traitement spécifique des questions anatomiques (p. 7). Elle se lit dans le Discours, avec les preuves de la circulation du sang et la controverse avec Harvey sur le mouvement du coeur. Elle se voit dans les comptes rendus des dissections pratiquées par Descartes, les Excerpta anatomica. Mais le livre en cite peu d'extraits, d'où des inexactitudes sur le chorion (p. 316-317) que Descartes a observé avec les membranes enveloppant les foetus d'animaux (OEuvres, édition Adam et Tannery, tome XI, p. 574sq.). L'intérêt du traité de L'Homme est minoré pour l'étude du corps (p. 16, 31) et de la douleur (p. 366). La conclusion reprend le thème du commencement de l'union de l'âme et du corps, que Descartes ne traite pas. Les sources secondaires sont peu citées et la bibliographie contient de nombreux ouvrages non utilisés, sur les monstres par exemple.
Reti Saperi Linguaggi, 2024
Briefly tracing the origins of the debate, the article exposes the developments of the interdisciplinary tendency that, in the Italian context, claimed to identify the profession and craft as a physiognomic hallmark. Choosing a backward path, it compares the deterministic and fixist Lombrosian perspective (focused on the jobs of the criminal and the criminal as a job) and the different considerations of the profession as a habit (Mantegazza and the pioneers of the first half of the century). Far from being monolithic, such a comparison rather uncovers the intersection between the medical-anthropological and political-social planes, where the theatrical element constituted, metaphorically and otherwise, the real point of contact between the different traditions at stake.
Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class
2020
Did ordinary Italians have a 'Renaissance'? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenth century visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.
Lucia Dacome, Malleable Anatomies: Models, Makers, and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy
European History Quarterly, 2019
Malleable Anatomies by Lucia Dacome presents the history of anatomical modelling in mid-18th-century Italy. It explores the lives of people involved in the production, consumption, and display of anatomical models, and uses their biographical histories as a lens through which to investigate the 'lives' of anatomical wax models as material objects, commodities, and communicators of bodily knowledge. In the book Dacome examines a multitude of interactions between medicine, religion, politics, art, and commerce on the Italian peninsula in the age of Enlightenment, as a period that brought with it a growing fascination with the body, celebrity, and travel, as well as a prominent visual and material culture. Dacome shows that it was the distinctive fusion of medicine, religion, and artisanal culture in mid-18th century Bolonga which gave birth to fashions for anatomical wax models which later spread elsewhere in Italy, and eventually throughout Europe, in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Malleable Anatomies is precisely researched, and full of rich detail about the lives and times of anatomical models and their makers. It is also beautifully illustrated, featuring some 54 high quality colour plates of surviving wax and fabric anatomical models, including images of models of 'nerves' and 'muscle' men, dissected kidneys and eyes, and interactive midwifery models. The images also show contemporary anatomical displays and their architecture, and other visual and material evidence associated with 18thcentury Italian anatomical modelling. There is also a further set of black and white images showing contemporary prints, portraits, and paintings of anatomical model makers, and the world in which they lived. The book makes original contributions to scholarship on wax and anatomical modelling, and the 18thcentury Italian commercial, artisanal, and visual culture.
P. Sardina, Barbers and Surgeons in the medical marketplace of the Fifteenth-century Corleone
2019
The article analyses the role of surgeons and barbers in the fifteenth-century Corleone, royal town in the hinterland of Sicily with a pretty rich economy based on agriculture and sheep-breeding. The documents reveal a rich and complex medical marketplace were the barbers went into partnership with other barbers or with surgeons. Furthermore, surgeons and barbers invested in the real estate market, traded wine, wheat and animals, had slaves. In Corleone there were also barbersurgeons from Naro, Palermo, Caltabellotta and renowned surgeons of Polizzi, with whom barbers of Corleone could train. In the notorial acts the same person could be qualified as magister, barber and surgeon, however according to the patients the skill of the practioner was more important than his qualification.