The Body of the Text and its Parts: Anatomy, Language, and Academies in the Early Modern Age and Beyond - International Conference
Institute of Italian Studies
Start date: 3 October 2024 / 09:00
End date: 4 October 2024 / 18:30
Aula magna (West USI Campus, 3 October) and Foyer aula polivalente (USI-SUPSI East Campus, 4 October)
The International Conference The Body of the Text and its Parts: Anatomy, Language, and Academies in the Early Modern Age and Beyond is part of the Research Project The «Civilization of Anatomy». The Genre of Literary Anatomies in Seventeenth-century Italy (FNS 100012_204399). The scientific encounter aims to enact the interdisciplinary dialogue at the basis of the Project directed by Linda Bisello, in coordination, for the area of linguistics, with Raffaella Scarpa.
The research focuses on the epistemological effects of Andrea Vesalio’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) on the arts and knowledge of the time. In addition to exerting an extensive influence on visual arts, philosophy, geography, and astronomy, the method of dissection and its early cultural impact can be measured, through the Humanistic Academies, on the arts of discourse, above all philology, grammar, and rhetoric.
The Conference articulates the talks of international experts along two main lines, namely History of Medicine on the one hand and Linguistics and Philology on the other, with the awareness, already proper to the early modern age, that the language that codifies a discipline, far from being an inert instrument of scientific communication, is first and foremost a «means by which the mind tries to give order to itself» (M. L. Altieri Biagi).
While the core of the reflection is in the early modern age (15th-17th centuries), the Conference gives also space to talks with a broader chronology.
