ABSTRACT
In the wake of Michel Foucault’s work, a rich literature has evoked the multiple ways in which bodies were “created,” that is lived, fantasized, or performed in the medieval and early modern period. Reconceptualizing the premodern body has enhanced our understanding of how people in the past related both to others in their immediate environment and to their world at large. 1 In Christian theology, the body opened the way to salvation or perdition. From the twelfth century through early modernity, with the development of physiognomy as a discipline, the power of ethnographic “observation” and the rise of “geohumoralism,” (i.e., the foundational theory that sought to situate culture and human temperament at the intersection of climate and the body’s humors 2 ), bodies have been discursively constructed as markers of identification and as sites where symbolic classification and the formation of social relationships meet. As social and cultural identities and their boundaries were projected onto bodies, the body became a locus where conversion was performed and a semiotic battlefield where discourses on conversion were articulated.
