Dr Rosemary Moore

Research

Research Summary

My current research explores the entanglements of medicine and art in relation to the manuscript paintings (c.1580) of the English barber-surgeon John Banister. I interrogate the movement of images and ideas, as well as of material transformations and translations between print and painting – with a particular interest in how printed images originally produced in France and Italy are reinterpreted through the visual vocabulary of limning and heraldry. I see this research as contributing to expanding fields of interest in the social histories of medicine, the role of publishing in the growth of medical professions in England, and art historical investigations of the connections between health and painting. As Richard Haydocke’s Tracte of Painting, published in 1598 attests, physicians were often artists, and, as Susan Berger argues in her 2007 book, The Art of Philosophy, images were crucial instruments in the production of – and intellectual engagement with – knowledge. Building on the important contributions of historians like Tara Hamling and Robert Tittler, who have done much to readdress assumptions about vernacular English painting, especially civic portraiture and the material culture of the 'middling sort' – as well as Deborah Harkness's exploration of the knowledge borne out of collaboration between merchants, alchemists, instrument makers etc. in Elizabethan London – I aim to uncover how novel technologies of vision worked together to reshape perceptions of the human body and its relation to the wider world. These include, for instance, print, navigational instruments, lenses, maps and globes. 

I recently presented a paper on this topic at cross-disciplinary workshop Veiling the Body: Cloth, Skin, Membrane, Paper at the John Rylands Research Institute (June 11–12, 2020) and I am currently working on an article, tentatively titled ‘The scalpel, the brush and the printing press: anatomical and professional mobility in Early Modern England’, to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in my field.

In terms of developing this project into a monograph I am keen to explore how, through the figure of the barber-surgeon and related visual culture, the investigative activities of anatomy and maritime exploration overlap. While the work of scholars like Jonathan Sawday (1995) and Valerie Traub (2009) and has done much to address the impact of anatomical thought across Early Modern culture, my aim is to rethink boundaries and to open up discussion about the exchanges taking place between anatomical illustration and travel imagery in particular. Of course, there is the familiar adage that anatomists’ explorations of the bodily interior can be conceived in relation to the European project of mapping the ‘New World’, but there is also the physical impact that new plant and animal specimens brought to Europe from the Americas had on medicine and botanical collections c.1500-1700.

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Publications

Teaching and Supervision

My current teaching responsibilities in the History of Art Department at UCL comprise co-coordinating the BA 'Core Course' HART0001: History of Art & Its Objects. I also oversee the dissertation and extended study essay modules for third/final-year students of the undergraduate degree programmes, in addition to the Art/Work/Space module - a work placement module that entails work experience in a museum, heritage institution, collection, gallery, conservation studio or in the art trade. 

Previous teaching at UCL has included the first-year undergraduate seminar Life, Love & Death in Early Modern Europe; second year advanced undergraduate lecture in the History of Art Early Modern Bodies; and advanced third-year option Early Modern Technologies of Vision. I also contribute to co-taught modules in the department, including a lecture on Perspective in Renaissance Painting for the first year undergraduate module History of European Art: Classical to Early Renaissance. 

Prior to my appointment at UCL I was a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Sussex. There I was responsible for the design and delivery of two undergraduate modules focused on Italian Renaissance art, and for an MA module The Renaissance Print Workshop. I also contributed lectures to a number of co-taught undergraduate modules. 

Biography

I completed my PhD in the History of Art Department at UCL in 2016 with the thesis Paper Cuts: The Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Anatomical Fugitive Prints. Focusing primarily on fugitive sheets, which originated in Northern Europe as a novel variation on the standard anatomical print, employing paper flaps layered over the image of a body to produce an approximation of three-dimensionality and interior space, the thesis explores how cutting altered and reshaped the relation between image and body in Early Modern anatomical print. In effect the viewer, or rather the user as I argue they should be referred to, adopts the role of an anatomist opening up the paper body and revealing new visual information with every turn of a leaf. Drawing on the work of print theorists like Roger Chartier, I bring art historical insights to bear on objects that have previously been situated in the field of history of science. The many novel adaptations of these prints demonstrate the diverse uses found for them and are also a reminder of how the process of uncovering self-knowledge accumulates over time and can have varied outcomes. In this respect the prints offer fascinating insights into the production of knowledge, the formation of ‘self’, and changing attitudes towards medicine and the body in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries.

I continue to present and publish in this area. I have a chapter titled ‘Monsters and the Maternal Imagination’ being published this year in the book Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Nature and Culture. Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal, ed. by Maja Bondestam and with an Afterword by Kathleen Long (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). This is borne out of the paper that I presented at the international workshop Extraordinary Bodies in Early Modern Nature and Culture (Uppsala University, Sweden, October 26–27, 2017). Another article developed out of my earlier PhD research, ‘Fugitive Sheets and the Spectacle of the Spatialized Body’ was recently published in Early Modern Spectacles: Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 25, No. 2/2018, eds. Susanne Gruss and Lena Steveker (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019). In it, I consider how the ‘spectacle’ of Early Modern anatomy is re-staged for modern audiences via new technologies. 

I regularly present new work-in-progress at conferences/seminars, and I am actively engaged in broadening my research to consider the vital role played by visual and material culture in the production of knowledge (particularly knowledge pertaining to the human body, health and identity).