Concern with the body, both human and animal, animated natural inquiry across the medieval and early modern periods. This panel brings together historians of premodern science and medicine in order to explore the ways in which definitions of the ideal body were socially constructed, received, enforced, and resisted. Focusing on Europe in the late medieval and early modern period (roughly 1300 to 1700), we collectively explore theories and practices of embodiment and bodily modification, from gender-modification surgery in medieval Europe, to animal breeding and theories of inheritance in Spain and New Spain, from nutrition and Reformation in Baroque Rome, to speculations about the detrimental impact of the human body on the global environment in Renaissance Padua. We seek to uncover the social, political, intellectual, and religious forces behind these attempts to remedy perceived imperfections in human and animal bodies and to render them better adapted to the demands of agriculture, empire, religious uniformity, and patriarchy.
