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. |The Book of Hours and the Body Somaesthetics Posthumanism and the Uncanny | Visual Studies
