Renaissance medical learning: evolution of a tradition, Osiris

Renaissance, as it appears through art, architecture, literature, music, dance, anatomy, and much else besides. The subject is vast, and there are thirty-three separate contributions to the volume, together with an introduction by Andre Chastel and a masterful synthesis of the many and complex themes of the conference by Marie-Madeleine Fontaine. It is impossible to do it full justice here, and different readers will find their own preferences. The book is divided into five sections. In the first, 'Le corps "en montre"', Monique Chatenet throws light on the connections between "corps" and "logis" in the royal chateau of Saint-Germain en Laye, showing how the architecture reflects the dictates of ceremonial; Alison Saunders writes on the ideal of female beauty represented by the "blasons anatomiques" produced in France in the 1 530s; Gabriel A. Perouse demonstrates how an insight into the norms of masculine beauty as perceived in the Renaissance, and an appreciation of their evolution, may add significantly to our understanding of Renaissance texts from Rabelais to Montaigne; Stella Mary Newton and Madeleine Lazard consider costume, the second in particular with much informative detail; finally, Henri Zerner analyses Clouet's famous picture of La Dame au bain, relating it both to pictorial traditions and to social and cultural reality. Other sections are similarly multi-faceted; in the second, 'Du corps maltraite au corps transfigure', the themes include the body subjected to violence, the body and witchcraft, the cult of relics, and dissection; the third, 'Les expressions du corps' has contributions relating to the literature and iconography of the English Renaissance, the semiotics of the body, and especially to music and dance. Readers of this journal will perhaps find most of interest to them in the fourth and fifth sections of the book, dealing with bodily exercises ('Les techniques du corps') and knowledge of the body respectively. Vivian Nutton, for instance, discusses the De Arte Gymnastica of Hieronymus Mercurialis, and Guy Bonhomme, in a fascinating article, explaining the evolution from horse to vaulting-horse, sets out the role of the horse in Renaissance gymnastic exercise. The value of the volume, however, is that it sets each of its individual themes against the culture and science of the period as a whole, and it is for this achievement that its editors are to be congratulated.