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Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Charles H. Parker
Charles H. Parker*
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University
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Abstract

This study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 1265 - 1297
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

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Footnotes

*

A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship during 2010–11 made the research and writing for this study possible. Many people have made valuable contributions to this study. Derek Hirst and Jonathan Sawday commented on several drafts, providing much-needed guidance at critical moments. Thomas Flowers, SJ, Ward Holder, Georgia Johnston, Sherry Lindquist, Mike Malone, Colleen McCluskey, Rebecca Messbarger, Patrick O’Banion, Gianna Pomata, Steven Schoenig, SJ, Rebecca Sheldon, Damian Smith, Emily Thompson, and Joe Western also offered timely advice and assistance along the way. The author gratefully acknowledges their support. All translations are the author’s.

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