Workshop with speakers on Identifying, Narrating, Regulating, Covering, Healing the Jewish Body in the Early Modern Period.

In collaboration with the UCL Department for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies

Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have imagined the human body as the site of complex, entangled discourses of belonging and not-belonging, health and illness, familiar and alien, in need of regulation or absolution. In this workshop, scholars will present their research on the human body as invested with meaning and as the object of practices, looking at the case of the Jewish body in Ashkenas, ie. roughly the German territories and Eastern Europe, with contributions from the history of medicine and of knowledge; literary studies; cultural and gender studies.

Speakers:

* Cornelia Aust, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz

* François Guesnet, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London

* Magdaléna Jánošíková PhD student, School of History, Queen Mary University London

* Anna Novikov, Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Central and Eastern Europe, Cologne-Bonn

* Iris Idelson-Shein, Post-doctoral Fellow, Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main

* Marek Tuszewicki, Department of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków

PROGRAMME

Identifying, Narrating, Regulating, Covering, Healing the Jewish Body: (Eastern) Ashkenas in the Early Modern Period April 25, 2017 IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building

9:30 am—10:00 am Registration

10:00 am—11:30 am Session I: Chaired by Iris Idelson-Shein

Anna Novikov (Centre for Central and Eastern Europe, Cologne-Bonn): ‘I Wrapped You with Fine Linen and Covered You with Silk.’ Dress as Critical Category in Eastern European Jewish History

Cornelia Aust (Leibniz Institute, Mainz): Covering the Female Jewish Body. Dress and Dress Regulations in Early Modern Ashkenas

11:30 am—11:50 am Coffee Break

11:50 am—1:20 pm Session II: Chaired by François Guesnet

Iris Idelson-Shein (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt): The Womb and its Woes in Early Modern Jewish Medical Texts

Magdalena Janosikova (QMUL): Identifying the Body of Medical Texts: Recording Medical Knowledge in Early Modern Ashkenas

1:20 pm —2:15 pm Lunch Break

2:15pm—3:45pm Session III: Chaired by Mechthild Fend

François Guesnet (UCL): Entangled Hair, Entangled Mythologies: References to Matted Hair in Western and Eastern Ashkenas

Marek Tuszewicki (Jagiellonian University, Kraków): Human Body in Ashkenazi Folk Medicine of 19th -20th centuries

3:45pm—4:00pm Closing Remarks