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Article ID: CBB001422561

Domesticating Cannibalism: Visual Rhetorics of Madness and Maternal Infanticide in Fifteenth-Century Italy (2015)

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Volume: 45, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 159-195

DOI: 10.1215/10829636-2830064

Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Article in a special issue: “Thinking through Death: The Politics of the Corpse”
Language: English

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Mental disorders and diseases Infanticide Miracles Iconography Illustrations Science and art Death Human body 15th century Early modern Italy

This article examines a miracle, credited to the Dominican saint Vincent Ferrer, in which a “demented” wife and mother butchers and partially cooks her infant son. In the decades following Vincent's 1455 canonization, artists like Colantonio and the Erri workshop approached the macabre narrative in very different ways. Beyond this iconographic instability, this essay argues that the unsettled status of the narrative---in both text and picture---enabled its use as a malleable vessel for articulating and projecting certain social anxieties. The Erri version, the primary focus of the article, emerges as a case study in pictorial indeterminancy: saintly power is both pivotal and marginalized; social class is both highlighted and obfuscated; cannibalism is both seen and unseen. These contradictions demonstrate the contested status of the social problems represented: female madness, child-killing, cannibalism, and, in a broader sense, the inability of men to assert control over the spaces of their domestic world.

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Article Finucci, Valeria (2015) Thinking through Death: The Politics of the Corpse. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (pp. 1-6). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001422561/

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