ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beauty matters. Contested arts, contested sciences in the premodern world

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The session examines how shifting methodological perspectives can challenge established boundaries between the arts and sciences in historical inquiry. From antiquity to the early modern period, traces of body care and cosmetic practices appear in a wide range of texts, including medical and pharmacological treatises, artisanal manuals, and philosophical writings, as well as in visual and material evidence such as vessels, tools, and residues. These abundant but heterogeneous sources have rarely been examined as part of historical forms of knowledge.
The session aims to take these materials seriously as historical evidence by focusing on methodological approaches that make them analytically accessible. It asks how recipes can be read as records of experimentation and transmission, and how artefacts such as vessels, tools, and residues can be treated as sources that connect instruction with embodied practice. By combining textual, visual, and material analysis, the session challenges the stability of distinctions such as theoretical versus practical, or artistic versus institutional, oral versus textual or visual traditions, and gendered domains of knowledge.
The session calls for a reconsideration of methods: what happens when historians of science and medicine approach cosmetic texts and materials not as marginal curiosities but as epistemic artefacts? What kinds of historical agents and practices come into view? In exploring these questions, the session situates beauty care within contested zones of knowledge, where the making, knowing, and shaping of the body blurred disciplinary lines long before those lines were drawn.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Elena Serrano, Institute of History of Science. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Individual Presentations

• White as marble: Greek and Roman cosmetic sources and racial theories - Laurence Totelin, Cardiff University

• Local knowledge and the gendered attribution of collective expertise: the cosmetic practices of medieval women - Montserrat Cabré, Universidad de Cantabria

• The materials and making of beauty in Early Modern Europe: texts and images - Erin Griffey, University of Auckland

• Beyond texts and images: Beautifying artefacts as sites of knowledge - Romana Sammern, University of Salzburg

Session Organizer

• Montserrat Cabré, Universidad de Cantabria