Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, Blood Matters

Why write a book on conceptions of blood between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern age? Because it was exactly in the medicine of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries that the conceptualisations of blood became particularly problematic. As the two editors, Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, explain, ‘blood was at once the red fluid in human veins, a humor, a fluid governing crucial Galenic models of bodily change such as plethora and purging, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life, a medical cure’ (p.2). But blood, following the discoveries of William Harvey, was above all at the centre of one of the most important scientific controversies of the seventeenth century, which is considered by a certain historiographic tradition to be the starting point of modern science. Blood Matters is not, however, a volume of medical history. Or at least it is not only that. It is a collection of essays that, taking to heart the lesson of classics like Wonderful Blood by Caroline Walker Bynum (2007)1 or The Body Embarrassed by Gail Kern Paster (1993),2 brings together historians, literary scholars and drama specialists in order to examine blood as a source of identity and truth; as a tool for class and gender definition; as a physical object connected to alchemical, therapeutic and judicial practices; and as a symbol of life and death

Aesthetics · Alchemy · Art · Art history · Drama · Fifteenth · Identity (music · Literature · Object (grammar · Symbol (formal · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Classics · History · Philosophy