Fabian Jonietz:
Die Topik des hässlichen Künstlers. Zum Körperbild als Reflexionsfläche von Diskurs und Kritik
[The Topos of the Ugly Artist. The Image of the Body as a Reflection of Discourse and Criticism]

This paper examines the perception and function of the artist’s body within discourses on the arts from the Middle Ages to the early 18th century, focusing on the changing meaning and instrumental use of allegedly ugly and beautiful appearances. Early on, the physical constitution of renowned artists, such as that of the painter Giotto, played a crucial role in the emancipation of the arts from the artes mechanicae. Unattractive bodies were a narrative convention deployed to establish a ›modern‹ type of artist. From 1400 onwards, however, this motif appeared often with a different intention. The famous aphorism ›Ogni pittore dipinge sé‹ reflects the reception of aristotelian and platonic thinking, as well as the integration of normative models of the body communicated in physiognomic treatises and key texts as Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano. Beginning with Giorgio Vasari, artist biographies often followed a strict binary scheme, idealizing the physique of complimented artists and, conversely, disparaging some artists via negative physiognomic descriptions. This idiosyncratic but continuous trend in biographical practice seems to have reached its zenith in Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Vite. However, some singular exceptions of reputable ›ugly artists‹ existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, the most prominent of these cases being the characterizations of Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Notably, these exceptions seem not to have originated in the critique of their biographers or to have arisen from the unconscious use of physiognomic topoi. Rather, these literary images resulted from the artists’ own self-promotion and their efforts to establish themselves as being different from the mainstream. This strategy of self-promotion proves not only their cognizance of bodily norms, but furthermore the potential power of breaking traditional narrative conventions that linked beautiful bodies to artistic genius.

Julia Weitbrecht:
Die Performanz von Weltleben und Konversion. Maria Magdalena im geistlichen Spiel
[The Performance of Worldly Life and Conversion. Mary Magdalene in Late Medieval Religious Drama]

There are a number of saints’ legends in which conversion represents the crucial point in the process of sanctification. One of the most popular and most ambivalent converts is Mary Magdalene: The story of her conversion is so powerful that it appears to dominate all other biblical narratives about her. The formation of Mary Magdalene as a repentant sinner follows the logic of conversion narratives: It is given a paradoxical coherence, because the convert, in her radical renunciation of her former self, is constantly made to invoke this former, false life. The teleological self-reference to the ›old‹ life leads to a demarcation and constitution of a ›new‹ identity. Thus, the sinful past life receives its function through the conversion: In the cancelling of everything that is sinful and false the licence is found to show precisely these things in an entertaining way. In the article, this interrelation is inquired into in legendary narratives and in German Easter and Passion plays (14th and 15th centuries). Especially in the drama tradition, Mary Magdalene’s individual conversion is being connected with the collective salvation through Christ’s resurrection. In the Easter Plays, this connection is invoked narratively, in Mary Magdalene’s recounting, while in the Passion Plays the model character of the conversion is translated into dramatic form. Here there is a dynamic representation of the conversion in which Mary’s worldly life and the act of her conversion are presented much more extensively than her later virtuous life. Thus, early modern ›conversion drama‹ stages the vices it at the same time condemns.

Christina Wald:
»I would eat his heart«. Liebeshunger und Blutdurst in Shakespeares Much Ado About Nothing
[»I would eat his heart«. Hunger for Love and Blood Lust in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing]

The article argues that the motif of hunger for love is aligned with blood thirst in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which negotiates the dark, violent underside of romance throughout its action as well as the rhetorics and imagination of the characters. With reference to early modern medical and religious discourses and their medieval tradition, the paper examines in particular the romantic topos of the exchange of hearts and proposes that Shakespeare plays with the demetaphorisation of this topos in a vision of heart cannibalism. The fairy tale »Mr Fox« and Dante’s Vita Nuova are discussed as relevant intertexts of Much Ado About Nothing, as their scenarios of cannibalism open the very spectrum from absolute romantic love to sexualised violence and destruction which underpins the action of Shakespeare’s play, too.

Harald Kleinschmidt:
Normwandel durch Normdiffusion. Reguliertes Körperverhalten in Militär und Tanz vornehmlich des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts
[Norm Change through Norm Diffusion. Regulated Bodily Behaviour in Armies and in Dance, mainly in the 17th and 18th Centuries]

In political science, norm diffusion has been studied as a cross-cutural process associated with the power structure of the international system. Political scientists thus have assumed that norms do not change during the diffusion process. By contrast, historians of culture, politics and society have focused on norm change as an intra-cultural process that has not been connected with diffusion. The article seeks to demonstrate that norm change has been effected through purposeful norm diffusion in Early Modern Europe. It analyses norm diffusion within armies, as a case of forced norm change, and within court dances as a case of voluntary norm adaptation. In either case, the norm change concerned patterns of regulated bodily behaviour, not seen as a general and unalterable element of human nature, but as a specific and changeable element of culture.