Discussions of fat, and its relationship to both health and beauty, are ever-present in the modern age, yet how did people in the early modern period understand and experience fatness? This interdisciplinary cultural history--edited by an art historian, a historian, and a specialist in literary studies--explores early modern conceptions of fatness as both an aesthetic judgement and social experience. The book explores the topic of fat through a broad spectrum of thematical and geographical perspectives, examining medical texts and health regimens concerning corpulence, competitions in weight-gaining among German women in childbed, as well as the contemporary connection between fatness and sexuality. It considers the multivalent imagery of the classical God Silenus’s body, the praise of fat women in Italian anti-humanist satire, and the view of the fat body as a threat to the authority of Spanish administrative officials. Finally, it explores the meaning of fattening animals in the context of early modern anxiety about the human/animal divide. In approaching fatness from such varied angles, this book goes beyond teleological narratives and dichotomic arguments to explore the complexity and ambiguity with which fat bodies were perceived and constructed in early modern Europe.
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. This book is written for students and scholars of the early modern period.
Introduction: Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe Part I: Fatness, Health
and Community
1. No Age Did Ever Afford More Instances of Corpulency:
Obesity as a Collective Condition and the Early Modern Medicalization of
Girth
2. Fatness and Fertility: Childbearing and the Size of Womens Bodies
in Early Modern Germany Part II: Cultural Hierarchies
3. The Fat Female Body
in Angelo Beolcos Anti-Classicist Literary Portraits
4. Silenus, as a Vase:
The Fat Mans Body at the School of Fontainebleau (c.1530-c.1570)
5.
Laughter, Guilt, Anxiety: Dealing with Fat Animals in Early Modern Europe
Part III: Shifting Meanings
6. Heavy Debates: Weighing Fatness in a Spanish
Renaissance Dialogue
7. How to Fragment a Perfect Microcosm: The Sphere as
the Shape of Fat Bodies in Shakespeares Comedy of Errors and Cyranos
Contre un gros homme
8. Robust Hero/Fat Fool: Early Modern Fat Stereotypes
in the Portrait of Alessandro dal Borro
Holly Fletcher is a research fellow at University College London, focusing on early modern material culture, bodies, health, and environments. Her first book is Body Size in Early Modern Germany (2026).
Christine Ott is a professor of French and Italian literature at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, focusing on food cultures, concepts of the body, and gastro-myths. She recently co-edited the special issue Fat Worlds. Feasters and Loafers in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (2023).
Jill Burke is a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the body and its representation in early modern Italy. Her most recent book is How to Be A Renaissance Woman. The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (2023).
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