Christine Ott - Böcker

This book is the first to examine understandings and experiences of fatness in early modern Europe (c. 1450–1700), uncovering attitudes towards fat bodies across England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain through interdisciplinary analysis.Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of how early modern Europeans perceived and experienced fat bodies through historically specific contexts rather than modern assumptions. The book delivers this through interdisciplinary scholarship combining history, art history, and literary studies to analyse sources across five major European regions. This approach reveals both continuities and contradictions in attitudes towards corpulence, examining medical, artistic, and literary perspectives within their proper historical frameworks. By considering early modern experiences on their own terms and relating them to period-specific conceptions of embodiment, readers will develop nuanced appreciation for how fatness was understood before modern medical and social constructs emerged.This book is written for students and scholars of the early modern period, particularly those studying European history, cultural history, and the history of the body. It will also appeal to researchers in fat studies seeking historical perspectives and non-specialists interested in historical attitudes towards bodies and embodiment.

The series Sprache und Wissen [Language and Knowledge] is a publication platform for high-quality papers on German linguistics with interdisciplinary focus. The series takes on current trends in the scientific community from a linguistic perspective in order to show how general and expert knowledge are made possible through language and gain perspective through it. The linguistic treatment of discursive knowledge formats aims to advance the field of linguistics and other sciences interested in language in an innovative way. The series presents papers with semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic approaches from the perspective of variety-specific as well as text- and discourse-linguistic cognitive interest. The series welcomes monographs as well as systematically-structured anthologies and conference proceedings. Editorial Board:Markus HundtWolf-Andreas LiebertJuliane SchröterBerbeli WanningIngo H. WarnkeMartin Wengeler