IMC 2021: Sessions

Paper -a:
Medieval women's bodies were sexed, gendered, pathologized, and medicalized according to cultural norms that relied on social and political climates that presupposed male authority. Ancient medical compendiums posited that nature dictated a woman's role in society. Assumptions of nature, such as female inferiority and reproduction's affinity with nature, made women subordinate to men. The physical climate, weather, could provoke an imbalance of the humors. Heterosexual intercourse was a common cure for female humoral imbalances. Female medical subjectivity left control over women's bodily health and hygiene to husbands or practitioners. Medieval women's bodies were subject to socially constructed and environmental climates.

Paper -b:
The subject of my paper is a unique Byzantine representation of the four elements/humors as four interlocked nudes forming a circle dance in a 14th-century scientific miscellany (Marc. gr. 516). Several figures overlap, while others pull and push balancing one another, and sustaining the perpetuity of their ring-dance. My paper analyzes the illustration from an art-historical point of view, also bringing into discussion some of the central concepts that shaped Byzantine cosmology and natural philosophy. It highlights the pictorial and diagrammatic mechanisms by which the Byzantine illustrator ingeniously conveyed the varied relations (kinship versus contrariety; interaction versus disengagement) between the four elements/humors. The motif of the circular dance alludes to the dialectics of the perpetual cycle of destruction and creation where elements/humors/seasons constantly change form through “heating, cooling, solidifying, dissolving” (Timaeus 43d). The illustration becomes a visual epitome of the paradox between change (kinesis) and stability (statis): the conceit that the cyclic continuity in nature is contingent on constant change.