Practical Knowledge Aspen, Second Floor Organized Session
03 Nov 2018 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T1600 20181103T1800 America/Vancouver Body Matters: Making Catacomb Saints, Prosthetic Hands, and Automata in Early Modern Europe

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.

Commentator: Matthew Jones (Columbia University)

Organized by Heidi Hausse (Columbia University)

 Aspen, Second Floor History of Science Society 2018 meeting@hssonline.org
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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.

Commentator: Matthew Jones (Columbia University)

Organized by Heidi Hausse (Columbia University)

Artisans and Artificial Hands: Reading Early Modern Objects Inside and OutView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionPractical Knowledge 04:00 PM - 04:40 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 23:40:00 UTC
Prosthetic hands in early modern Europe were singular objects of artifice designed to supplement the natural body.  With moveable fingers and flesh-toned paint, they incorporated practical and aesthetic functions in ways impossible for other kinds of prostheses.  After all, silver noses could not smell, nor enameled eyeballs see.  Iron hands, by contrast, could hold other objects.  Made of metal, wood, leather, and paint, these artifacts have sparked modern imaginations since the nineteenth century, when pseudo-historical accounts arose attempting to identify the original wearers of surviving examples, often describing them as possessions of injured knights.  The presentation of these objects in museums and print today predominantly reflects this tradition.

This paper argues that rather than these objects’ wearers, we should investigate their makers.  The vast majority of early modern prosthetic hands have unknown provenances: they cannot be linked directly to specific historical persons.  But they can be linked to craft practices, and through these practices tied to groups of people.  Reading extant artifacts—extracting information by studying their material components—is crucial for finding clues to the world in which they were produced.  Using several German artifacts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper reads prosthetic hands to explore how these objects were made and what functions they served in early modern society.  It proposes that incorporating 3D modeling of these objects along with firsthand observation has the potential to reveal much about early modern intersections of medicine, technology, and culture.
Presenters
HH
 Heidi Hausse
Auburn University
Some Assembly Required: Building Whole-Body Catacomb Saints in Early Modern BavariaView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionPractical Knowledge 04:40 PM - 05:20 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 23:40:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 00:20:00 UTC
After the “rediscovery” of the Roman catacombs in 1578, the Catholic Church began exporting the relics of early Christian martyrs across Europe and beyond.  Between 1578 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria received almost 400 of these “catacomb saints,” whose sparkling bodies still rest on altars across the region to this day.  In almost every case, however, churches did not receive whole skeletons from the catacombs and what appear to be full bodies are, in fact, complicated constructions made from available bones and meticulously carved wooden replacements. 

How and why did early modern Bavarians build such bodies rather than leaving them in pieces?  Using several case studies, this paper will examine the construction and decoration process required to transform bone fragments into “holy bodies,” with special attention to the materials, medical and artisanal knowledge and labor that was required to create them. I will demonstrate that the creation of these bodies was a team effort including artists and physicians familiar with human anatomy; carpenters and metalsmiths who carved missing bones and built custom support structures for the “bodies;” and nuns skilled in the decorative technique known as Klosterarbeit (cloister work) who covered the saints remains in jewels, pearls and gilded wire. In closing, I will briefly discuss why early modern Bavarians so insistently presented these saints as whole bodies, arguing that this approach facilitated both the development of intensely local cults and tied these communities to larger movements in the post-Reformation Catholic Church.
Presenters Noria Litaker
University Of Nevada, Las Vegas
Automata and ArtificeView Abstract
Part of Organized SessionPractical Knowledge 05:20 PM - 06:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 00:20:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 01:00:00 UTC
This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of the early modern desire to replicate nature. But why, this paper asks, is this the case when all the extant examples of automata look unquestionably un-lifelike? Nothing about them—not their scale, their material makeup, their subject matter, nor their programmed movement—is naturalistic. In taking seriously what early modern automata replicate, this paper proposes a new mode for thinking of early modern mechanical bodies that sees them at odds with lived experience and not continuous with it.
Presenters Jessica Keating
Carleton College
Heidi Hausse
Auburn University
Jessica Keating
Carleton College
Dr. Noria Litaker
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Matthew Jones
Columbia University
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