Moving Body Parts: Their Transcendence of Time and Space in Pre-Modern Europe

According to Jean-Claude Schmitt, “the dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them” – and sometimes, the living not only force them to exist in their memory but also to persist materially. By keeping the mortal remains above the earth, by dividing them, manipulating them and moving them to different places, the deceased are assigned a very active role within the world of the living. The title of this workshop includes, however, also a second “species” of migrating bodily fragments, namely body parts that are imagined to be moving by themselves. We are not sure whether the movement of real, physical body parts can reasonably be linked with the stories of actively wandering body parts as they can be found in hagiography, secular badges and popular literature of the time, but from our perspective it seems worthwhile to think about it, the more so as for some years now there has been developing a broad area of research on objects that move and migrate.

• place: IBZ München (Internationales Begegnungszentrum der Wissenschaft)
• time: 11.04.2014-12.04.2014
• contact: Urte Krass (urte.krass@kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de) und Romedio Schmitz-Esser (r.schmitz-esser@lmu.de)
• call for papers (closed): H-Soz-u-Kult
• program (download, pdf, 2Mb)