Generisches und spezifisches Anderssein: Shackshoone (1665–1680), Antonio Martinelli (1718–1740) und frühneuzeitliche Darstellungen von menschlichen Doppelfehlbildungen

Katritzky, M. A. (2021). Generisches und spezifisches Anderssein: Shackshoone (1665–1680), Antonio Martinelli (1718–1740) und frühneuzeitliche Darstellungen von menschlichen Doppelfehlbildungen. In: Stolberg, Michael ed. Körper-Bilder in der Frühen Neuzeit: Kunst-, medizin- und mediengeschichtliche Perspektiven. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Herausgegeben von Hartmut Leppin Kolloquien 107. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, pp. 199–228.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110731842-010

Abstract

Conjoined bodies were pervasive in early modern secular and religious visual culture. They contributed to scientific understanding and the performance economy through the circulation of non-normative corpses, performers trading on their physical otherness, and their images. My overview of generic conjoinment images is followed by a close focus on two performers with parasitic conjoined twins, Shackshoone, an Indian in seventeenth-century London, and Antonio Martinelli, an Italian in eighteenth-century central Europe. I investigate their medical and theatrical impact with reference to eye-witness textual and visual documents not previously considered together, including a new image of Shackshoone. Their cases demonstrate the importance of transnational, interdisciplinary and image-based researches into historical individuals whose fundamental basis for participating in the performance economy was their own exceptional medicalized bodies.

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