Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance carried important and enduring changes in the way Westerners conceived of the body and the soul, shifts in perspective that initially transformed key aspects of (Renaissance) art, including music, as well as literature and philosophy. Renewed interest in anatomy, in particular, forced Renaissance artist and thinkers to reconfigure their ideas of the body and its relationship to the soul. Anatomists searched for the soul by dissecting cadavers; artist dissected the body to better convey the human spirit; and writers dissected the soul through their work. And they thus set in motion paradigmatic upheavals that eventually resulted in changes in the ways Westerners understood the very idea of the human, both theoretically as well as at the level of collective beliefs. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the body/soul rhetoric was recast during the Renaissance; how these changes affected the arts and literature of the period, and show that changes in beliefs and preoccupations pertaining to the body and the soul powerfully contribute to shaping cultural products (e.g., artistic and literary) as well as important aspects of everyday life. This presentation is partly sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# AQ-234985).