Course Convenors: Dr Jessica Maratsos, Dr Helena Phillips-Robins

How does the body communicate? How do literary and visual works invite emotional, cognitive, or embodied responses from their audiences? And to what extent are these questions universal or historically contingent? This module explores conceptualisations of emotion, sensation, identity, and relationality, giving particular attention to the roles played by gesture and varied forms of embodied action in Italian culture 1250-1700. As a historical moment defined by dramatic religious, political, economic and social upheaval, this period offers particularly rich material for the investigation of these questions that remain pressing in the 21st century. Innovative modes of visual and literary expression—including strategies of mimetic representation and first-person narration—developed alongside new trends in affective devotional praxis and regimes of corporeal regulation. While amorous poetry blurred the boundaries between the beloved and the self, as well as the sacred and the secular, the very nature of the physical body was coming under pressure, as practices of anatomical dissection defied centuries of inherited Galenic knowledge. Examining a range of visual and textual sources from the period, as well as phenomenological, somatic, and sensory discourses, the module will encourage students to explore various methodologies and theoretical perspectives, including approaches drawn from Affect studies, the History of Emotions, Gender studies, Theology, and Philosophy.

The module will focus on major writers (Dante, Catherine of Siena, Petrarch, Vittoria Colonna) and artists (Giotto, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentileschi, Bernini), who not only had a significant impact on Italian art and literature of the period, but also helped to shape expressive discourses that continue to resonate in culture today. There will be significant opportunities for student presentations, in which further related topics can be explored. As such, this module will equip students to engage with issues of the body, gestures, and the emotions across a range of visual and literary disciplines.

Reading knowledge of Italian is desirable, but all texts are available in translation, and students are welcome to work with them in English.

NB: If any Film and Screen MPhil students wish to take this module, they should first seek approval from the Course Director.

Preliminary Reading:

• Braddick, Michael J., ed. ‘The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives’, special issue Past & Present 203 suppl. 4 (2009).
• Burgwinkle, Bill, ‘Medieval Somatics’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 10-23.
• Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
• Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds, The Affect Theory Reader (London: Duke University Press, 2010)
• Hairston, Julia L. and Walter Stephens, eds. The Body in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
• Ibbett, Katherine, ‘When I do, I call it affect’, Paragraph, 40.2 (2017): 244-53
• Kalof, Linda and William Bynum, eds. A cultural history of the human body in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010)
• Massumi, Brian, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique, 31 (1995): 83-109
• Rosenwein, Barbara H., Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Summers, David. Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
• Webb, Heather, Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)