Join King’s Centre for Early Modern Studies to celebrate the launch of Prof. Evelyn Welch’s (University of Bristol) new book: Renaissance Skin (Manchester University Press). Welch explores Renaissance skin as a bodily surface, as physical matter, and as a generator of new knowledge among early modern physicians, glovemakers, butchers, and parchment makers.
Prof. Evelyn Welch will introduce the book and receive comments from Dr. Elaine Leong (UCL) and Dr. Paolo Savoia (University of Bologna). Chaired by Dr. Hannah Murphy (KCL).
The launch will be followed by a drinks reception.
Tickets: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centreforearlymodernstudies/1859059
Schedule
18:00-18:45 – Book Introduction and Comments from Speakers
18:45 – 19:30: Q&A
19:30 – 20:30 – Drinks Reception
Speaker Bios
Prof. Evelyn Welch (Speaker) is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bristol. She was previously Senior Vice-President for Service, People & Planning at King’s College London, and had been Vice-President (Arts and Sciences) and Provost (Arts and Sciences). She has taught at University of Essex, the Warburg Institute, and held leadership roles at University of Sussex (PVC Teaching and Learning) and Queen Mary, University of London (Dean, Arts and PVC Research and International). As Professor of Renaissance Studies, she has led major research programmes including ‘The Material Renaissance,’ and ‘Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images’. She has authored numerous books, including Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800 (OUP 2017), and Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale 2005), winning the Wolfson Prize for History. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, ‘Renaissance Skin’, from which this book is drawn.
Dr. Elaine Leong (Comment) is Associate Professor in the department of History at University College London. Dr. Leong’s research is centered upon medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production. Her first book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018) was awarded the 2019 Margaret W. Rossiter Prize by the History of Science Society. Before joining UCL, she held a Minerva Professorship and led a research group on the theme of "Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin).
Dr. Paolo Savoia (Comment) is Associate Professor in the department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and gender history of the sciences; history of medicine and the body; history of the relations between food and science; the relations between practical and theoretical knowledge in early modern Europe; the historiography of science and the environment; the political history of ideas of nature. Before joining Bologna, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher on Renaissance Skin, and amongst his many skin-related publications are the monographs Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain (Routledge, 2020), and Superfici; Corpi, pratiche e modelli cognitivi nella chirurgia di età moderna (Officina Libraria, 2024).
Dr. Hannah Murphy (Chair) is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at King’s College London. Her research examines the history of knowledge, science and medicine in early modern Europe, with particular attention to expertise, professional formation, and the practical structures of "race-making". Her first book, A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg (University of Pennsylvania Press) was awarded the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize (2020). She worked on Renaissance Skin between 2017 and 2020, first as “Senior Postdoctoral Researcher” and then as Co-Investigator. She is now the Principal Investigator of the project, “Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720”, a seven-year £2m project, funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
Book Description
Renaissance Skin by Prof. Evelyn Welch explores Renaissance skin as a bodily surface, as physical matter and as a generator of new knowledge. Ranging across anatomy, surgery and sausage making, Welch reveals how skin was managed by physicians as well as by glovemakers, butchers and parchment makers. How did people protect their health in a changing global environment, one where the air itself could be pathogenic? How did they see their bodies in a world where there was suddenly a multiplicity of skin colours and decorations?
Addressing these questions and more, Welch show us what happens when you see skin differently, either in the marketplace, where men and women from far-away lands were put on display, or under the microscope. In doing so, she reveals that the past had a distinctive and very different way of understanding bodily experiences.