The Renaissance Studies Program is delighted to present a lecture by Anita Guerrini (Oregon State University), part of our series on “The Senses in the Renaissance,” focusing on innovative approaches exploring sensory forms of embodied cognition and narratives.
The lecture will be followed by a roundtable with IU scholars Domenico Bertoloni Meli (History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine), Alison Calhoun (French and Italian), and Leanna York (Musicology), followed by a Q&A and a reception.
Abstract: Historians have considered early modern dissection to have mainly relied on vision, and secondarily on touch. For William Harvey, however, anatomy was a fully sensual practice that involved all five senses. His two major publications, On the Circulation of the Blood (1628) and On Generation (1651), give ample evidence of this total sensual immersion that allowed Harvey to analyze the human and animal body as few others had done.
Anita Guerrini is Horning Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Oregon State University and Research Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University-Bloomington. The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (Chicago, 2015) won the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. Her most recent book is Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins, 2022) and she is completing a biography of William Harvey for the Renaissance Lives series (Reaktion Press).