Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Maja Bondestam is an Associate Professor in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on the body in the shift from the early modern to the modern period and on medicine and natural history.

• Introduction (Maja Bondestam), Chapter 1 - The Moresca Dance in Counter-Reformation Rome: Court Medicine and the Moderation of Exceptional Bodies (Maria Kavvadia), Chapter 2 - Monsters and the Maternal Imagination: The 'First Vision' from Johann Remmelin's 1619 Catoptrum microcosmicum Triptych (Rosemary Moore), Chapter 3 - The Optics of Bodily Deviance: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón's Path to Public Office (Pablo García Piñar), Chapter 4 - 'The Most Deformed Woman in France': Marguerite de Valois's Monstrous Sexuality in the Divorce Satyrique (Cécile Tresfels), Chapter 5 - Curious, Useful, and Important: Bayle's Hermaphrodites as Figures of Theological Inquiry (Parker Cotton), Chapter 6 - An Education: Johannes Schefferus and the Prodigious Son of a Fisherman (Maja Bondestam), Chapter 7 - Ambiguous and Transitional Bodies: Stillbirth in Stockholm 1691-1724 (Tove Paulsson Holmberg), Afterword (Kathleen Long), Works Cited, Index.