Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls

Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation

Bibliographic Data

ID10411517
AuthorsCharles H Parker (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume67
Issue4
Pages1265-1297
Publication date2014-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRenaissance Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-4338 • E-ISSN: 1935-0236
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/679783
OpenAlexW2334563078
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited42

This study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality

Confessional · English Reformation · Enthusiasm · Piety · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Theology · Vitalism · Historical Philosophy and Science · History · History of Medicine Studies · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

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