A Moral Anatomy of the Early Modern Sneeze (original) (raw)
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The Silent Sneeze of the Early Middle Ages
In This Modern Age: Medieval Studies in Honor of Paul Edward Dutton (eds. Courtney Booker and Anne Latowsky), 2023
People in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages sneezed, just as today. Few historians have considered what they did in response, however, and what they thought about this disruptive reflex. This chapter shows that while sneezes were indeed linked with divination, as has long been recognized, they had myriad other associations. Their role in augury and particularly the Bible may have lent them an unsavory character. Nonetheless, sneezes retained an important role in medicine, and this could have influenced the content of medieval gardens. More notable than anything else is the silence of the early medieval sneeze: never associated with the plague, it is likewise absent from whole genres of literature. We do not even know what someone would have said to a sneezer in this era.
Reply to Sneezing in Jewish Tradition: Intercultural Parallels
Lechaim, pp. 35-40 , 2008
The sneezing, just as other manifestations of our body functioning, is ambivalent in Jewish culture, though negative attitude towards it prevails. As for the custom of wishing health in reply to sneezing – it can be viewed as a borrowing from non-Jewish world, but it is also acceptable to consider it as an independent element of Jewish medieval culture.
On the function, utility, and fragility of the nose – Early modern patients and their surgeons
This paper presents how rhinoplasty as a surgical technique with a particular social impact developed, and how motivated patients and courageous surgeons contributed to the process before Gaspare Tagliacozzi published his seminal work De curtorum chirurgia in 1597. The few sources that provide evidence of people having their noses reconstructed enable us to understand how this technique gradually spread across Europe from the south of Italy northwards. They also give information about the fate of some individual patients and their surgeons. While patients considered rhinoplasty a painful but worthwhile procedure, liberating them from having to wear a prosthesis, scholars' and physicians' opinions on the subject were polarized.
This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.
On the Function, Utility, and Fragility of the Nose
Nuncius, 2017
This paper presents how rhinoplasty as a surgical technique with a particular social impact developed, and how motivated patients and courageous surgeons contributed to the process before Gaspare Tagliacozzi published his seminal work De curtorum chirurgia in 1597. The few sources that provide evidence of people having their noses reconstructed enable us to understand how this technique gradually spread across Europe from the south of Italy northwards. They also give information about the fate of some individual patients and their surgeons. While patients considered rhinoplasty a painful but worthwhile procedure, liberating them from having to wear a prosthesis, scholars’ and physicians’ opinions on the subject were polarized.
Noses on the vast majority of ancient stone sculpture are missing. Some of them have inevitably broken off accidentally, but an overwhelming number of them have been deliberately targeted, and this wanton destruction of ancient portraits alludes to traditions of real-life facial mutilation that is evident across the ancient world from Homeric Greece, the Persian Empire, Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and Republican and Imperial Rome right through to the Byzantine period. Along with gouging out the eyes, slicing off the ears, cutting out the tongue and castration, dismemberment and other mutilations, nose-docking has been a widely recognized form of punishment not only in the classical world, but also in historical cultures across the globe. Across all these contexts, it has been a powerfully symbolic gesture associated with humiliation, visibility, exclusion, lost identity and pain, and has participated in discourses about politics, gender, race and slavery. This paper will examine the contribution made to this tradition by over a thousand years of evidence from Greco-Roman antiquity, the significance attributed to facial disfigurement in the ancient world, and its relationship to ideas about sensory deprivation and disempowerment.
The Human Snout: Pigs, Priests, and Peasants in the Parlor
Ireland reeked throughout the nineteenth century from the pages of English representation. The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dungheaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them also, Ireland’s rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened,” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland’s domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry’s pigs for Irish national character – a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. This paper examines Irish and British literary and historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelo-Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland.