As part of the symposium, we looked at a number of source materials from John Rylands' Special Collections (more information is available by following the links):
1. William Blake's illustrations to Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1797)
2. Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1555)
3. 'Noli Me Tangere' from the Macklin Bible, after a painting by William Hamilton (1797)
4. An advertisement for the Rev. J Scholefield's safety tomb to protect against body snatching (c.1830)
5. Images from Studies in the Palaeopathology of Egypt by Sir Marc Armand Ruffer (1921)
Some of the questions we asked when looking at each source included:
1. William Blake's illustrations to Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1797)
2. Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1555)
3. 'Noli Me Tangere' from the Macklin Bible, after a painting by William Hamilton (1797)
4. An advertisement for the Rev. J Scholefield's safety tomb to protect against body snatching (c.1830)
5. Images from Studies in the Palaeopathology of Egypt by Sir Marc Armand Ruffer (1921)
Some of the questions we asked when looking at each source included:
- What understandings of the body are suggested by the text(s) and image(s)?
- To what extent can we said to be 'touching' the text or image? (And how might it be regarded as 'untouchable'?)
- How have understandings of the body, if at all, changed since the text or image was composed?