Symposium 2023: Embodied Histories

Session Chair: Dillon Gisch

Hannah Johnston (Stanford History), “ 'Dame Venus' and the Monster: Machiavelli, The Sex Industry, and the Performance of Gender in Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Hüseyin Göcen (UC Davis), “Plagues, vampires, and fatwas: Vampire-related questions in provincial jurisconsults’ fatwa collections in early modern Ottoman Empire (1600-1800)”

Jessica Riskin (Stanford History), “The Garden Where it All Began (No, Not That Garden)”

The fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé is itself a historical reading of a primary text. The translator-adaptor moralizes Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reads them as representations of sacred and secular history. In this study, I read the Ovide moralisé as a historical and a theoretical text, that is, as a primary source that both makes historiographical claims and theorizes the bodies through which such claims are articulated. I will focus in particular on the story of Calisto, raped by Jupiter, transformed into a bear by Juno, and then into a constellation by Jupiter. More broadly, I will interrogate the articulation of history on the (transformed) bodies of women and the inscription of history on the transformed bodies of animals.

Session Chair: Fiona Griffiths 

Edward Halley Barnet (Huntington Library), “Embodied Souls and Vital Sounds in Perrault’s Essais de physique and Baglivi’s De Fibre Motrice”

Audrey Martel-Dion (Stanford History), “Early Modern Embodiments of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Giovanni Bordoni”

Merve Tekgürler (Stanford History), “ 'Deficiency of Attention' and 'Stubborn Pondering': From Eighteenth-Century Pathologization to Contemporary Medicalization of Attention and its Disorder”

Session Chair: Nicole Hughes

Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford Art & Art History), “AudioVision at Sainte-Foy in Conques”

Marisa Galvez (Stanford French and Italian), “Embodiments of Lyric Form as a New Approach to Global Premodern Culture”

Lorenzo Tunesi (Stanford Music), “Walking and Hearing on a Feast Day: Narrating, Reenacting, and Questioning Listening on St. Joseph’s Day in 15th-century Milan”