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Full Description
Discussions of fat, and its relationship to both health and beauty, are ever-present in the modern age, yet how did people in the early modern period understand and experience fatness? This interdisciplinary cultural history--edited by an art historian, a historian, and a specialist in literary studies--explores early modern conceptions of fatness as both an aesthetic judgement and social experience. The book explores the topic of fat through a broad spectrum of thematical and geographical perspectives, examining medical texts and health regimens concerning corpulence, competitions in weight-gaining among German women in childbed, as well as the contemporary connection between fatness and sexuality. It considers the multivalent imagery of the classical God Silenus's body, the praise of fat women in Italian anti-humanist satire, and the view of the fat body as a threat to the authority of Spanish administrative officials. Finally, it explores the meaning of fattening animals in the context of early modern anxiety about the human/animal divide. In approaching fatness from such varied angles, this book goes beyond teleological narratives and dichotomic arguments to explore the complexity and ambiguity with which fat bodies were perceived and constructed in early modern Europe.
Contents
Introduction: Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe Part I: Fatness, Health and Community 1. 'No Age Did Ever Afford More Instances of Corpulency': Obesity as a Collective Condition and the Early Modern Medicalization of Girth 2. Fatness and Fertility: Childbearing and the Size of Women's Bodies in Early Modern Germany Part II: Cultural Hierarchies 3. The Fat Female Body in Angelo Beolco's Anti-Classicist Literary Portraits 4. Silenus, as a Vase: The Fat Man's Body at the School of Fontainebleau (c.1530-c.1570) 5. Laughter, Guilt, Anxiety: Dealing with Fat Animals in Early Modern Europe Part III: Shifting Meanings 6. Heavy Debates: Weighing Fatness in a Spanish Renaissance Dialogue 7. How to Fragment a Perfect Microcosm: The Sphere as the Shape of Fat Bodies in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Cyrano's 'Contre un gros homme' 8. Robust Hero/Fat Fool: Early Modern Fat Stereotypes in the Portrait of Alessandro dal Borro
