Over the last several years, scholars have increasingly attended to the role of craft knowledge and artisanal practices in early modern Europe. These studies have investigated the importance of hands-on experience for ways of knowing about the world and pointed to the significance of artisanal practices in the so-called Scientific Revolution. This panel uses the lens of hands-on practices to explore the processes and materials used to build different kinds of early modern bodies. The bodies we are concerned with are human and animal, natural and artificial, or some combination thereof. Noria Litaker's paper, "Some Assembly Required," examines how local nuns, doctors, and artisans built seemingly intact saintly bodies from relic/bone fragments acquired from the Roman catacombs. Heidi Hausse's paper, "Artisans and Artificial Hands," explores the material world of extant artifacts of prostheses to link them to craft practices. Jessica Keating's paper, "Automata and Artifice," turns to clockwork automata and questions just how lifelike these objects appear under close scrutiny. Together, our papers ask how and why these different kinds of fabricated bodies took the forms they did. By bringing into conversation holy bodies, prosthetic parts of natural bodies, and entirely artificial and artful bodies, the panel aims to generate a fruitful dialogue about the nature of bodies as early moderns conceived them, the blurring lines between the natural and artificial in their creation, and the potential connections or divergences to be found in our different stories of making and materiality.
