Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices

Medieval aspects of Renaissance learning

Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For examp...

Tracing Medieval and Renaissance alabaster artwork back to quarries: A multi-isotope (Sr, S, O) approach

Multi-isotope fingerprinting (sulphur, oxygen and strontium isotopes) has been tested to study the provenances of medieval and Renaissance French and Swedish alabaster artwork. Isotope signatures of historical English, French and Spanish alabaster source quarries or areas reveal highly specific, with a strong intra-group homogeneity and strong inter-group contrasts, especially for Sr and S isot...

Not of woman born: representations of Caesarean birth in medieval and Renaissance culture

"Fertility control has always been a culturally dependent category. Accordingly it is impossible to write 'the' history of the patterning of fertility, since the experience of each society has been unique" (p. 5). McLaren offers little on medical aspects of birth control such as the technology and pharmacology of abortion, or the medical havoc of bungled and septic abortions as a factor in its ...

Medieval perspectives in Europe: Oral culture and bodily practices

Prior to the invention of book printing, Western culture had no efficient storage medium that served to unburden human memory. Instead of writing a mnemotechnics based on the visual perception of bodily movements, took over the functions of orienting, identifying, and stabilizing the social order in the medieval period. In medieval instructions on ecclesiastic and secular norms of behavior, the...