220104 Climate, Environment, and the Human Body in Early Modern Thought (K) (SoSe 2023)

This course is the historical contextualization to "African Slavery and 'Tropicality' in the Americas, 1500-1888" (Course No. 220103). It is an interactive part lecture, part seminar style course in which we will look at how the human body, health, the environment and climate were perceived in early modern European thought. The course thus bridges the research fields of medical, cultural, and environmental history as well as the more recent field of the history of the body. Once we understand how these different elements converged in and were entangled in humoral pathology, it will also be more evident to understand how "climate" could become an argument for the enslavement of African people in the transatlantic colonial context.

Requirements for participation, required level

Good English language skills, willingness to discuss and interact in English

Bibliography

Carrera, Magali Marie. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Joe and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press, 2001.
———. "Race." In The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. 154-72. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002.
Earle, Rebecca. The body of the conquistador : food, race, and the colonial experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700. Critical perspectives on empire. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Groebner, Valentin. "Complexio/ Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250-1600." In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,, 1990.