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Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds. Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003. ix + 235 pp. + 27 illus. $79.95. Review by REBECCA DE HAAS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA.
Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg's collection of essays, Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, is an enlightening and interesting selection of essays about the body in early modern culture. The "body-project," as the editors term it, was supported by the Huizinga Institute. It begins with a brief introduction and explanation of the title; the editors state at the outset that the essays in their book will address the more extreme treatments of the human body, including execution, torture, and pain. In addition, the editors emphasize that in addressing these "bodily extremities," the approach will necessarily be interdisciplinary. Indeed it is, for the contributors (who represent a wide range of scholarship from European universities) discuss a variety of texts, including paintings, literary works, and historical documents. One may now ask what links such a disparate group of essays. As the editors assert, the collection has "four closely connected themes that recur in different combinations in most of the chapters: honour and shame, bodily integrity, identity and self-preservation, and pain" (9).
The first three essays principally concern art history; one of the more enlightening essays in the collection is Daniela Bolide's "Skin and the Search for the Interior: The...