Recent Historical Consulting by Michelle A Laughran
"True Colours: Hair Colouring for the Curious and the Cautious" by Milly Ahlquist & Mark Constantine , 2022
"Hair dyers of the modern age, whether you henna, highlight or permanently dye, whether it’s over... more "Hair dyers of the modern age, whether you henna, highlight or permanently dye, whether it’s over the sink or in the salon, this book is for you. Come rifle through the history and science of hair dye, both synthetic and herbal, from its origins in the ancient world to the health scandals of the 20th century. Learn why human evolution determines your natural hair colour, how dyes of different strengths alter it, and what effect colourants could have on your health. An honest and intriguing look at what hair dye is, what it does, and the power it holds over us. Includes the story of henna hair colour within Lush, with practical tips for henna application from trichologist Mark Constantine. Written by Milly Ahlquist and Lush Co-Founder Mark Constantine, this book has reworked and updated Mark’s original Herbal Hair Colouring book, first published in 1978."
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Videos by Michelle A Laughran
50th Annual General Meeting, Save Venice - Boston Chapter, 2021
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e40C2jGPH3Mav_JpUYi7vxguuPfJMtS4/view?usp=sharing
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
(talk starts at 4:15)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Selected Publications by Michelle A Laughran
Venetia 1600: Births and Rebirths, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Art, faith and medicine in Tintoretto's Venice. Exhibition @ Scuola Grande di San Marco, VE, 2018
"This project builds on the exhibition that Cynthia Klestinec recently co-curated with Gabriele M... more "This project builds on the exhibition that Cynthia Klestinec recently co-curated with Gabriele Matino at the Scuola grande di San Marco, a large room connected to the main hospital in Venice. The exhibition, which opened in September 2018, [was] called Art, Faith and Medicine in the Age of Tintoretto" @
https://www.tintorettovenezia.com/la-mostra-di-tintoretto-a-venezia-scuola-grande-di-san-marco/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In an age where women wear pants and men can fashionably sport kilts, it seems as though accessor... more In an age where women wear pants and men can fashionably sport kilts, it seems as though accessories are now a defining touch of gender expression, indicating gender boundaries with which an individual is either identifying or testing. Women wearing neckties or men carrying handbags are not out of the question in the early twenty-first century Western fashion system, but nevertheless there are few dress acts which are more immediately visually challenging to cultural expectations of gender roles. Thus, in a world of Manolo Blahniks, we are accustomed to footwear being one of these highly visible and very public representations of gender identification and/or expression. Yet in the premodern and early-modern fashion system, we argue that gender identification and expression though shoes were primarily based on degrees of their invisibility.
Premodern men and women's footwear were initially unisex and utilitarian in design, and women's shoes were distinguished primarily by the fact that they tended be to some of the less visible aspects of contemporary female costume. Indeed, with the advent of Renaissance conspicuous sartorial consumption, women's shoes would become even less readily visible, draped as they were in dresses constructed of layers of far more expensive fabric. Ironically, however, this is the very same period in which footwear styles of men and women would begin significantly to diverge for the first time. How to explain this apparent paradox?
A parallel development interestingly occurred simultaneously in what would come to be called lingerie. The deeper women's undergarments were buried under myriad strata of clothing, the more diverse (and eventually sexualized) they became. In this article, we will argue that early-modern footwear in this same way essentially became a kind of gendered intimate wear, the increased fascination with which relied on the power of what was usually unseen, but a glimpse of which might be granted to or stolen by the viewer.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Historical Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Storia d'Italia Annali: La moda, 2003
Cosmetics' use in Italy from ancient times to the twentieth century.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, 1999
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Selected Conference & Professional Presentations by Michelle A Laughran
Save Venice - Boston Chapter 50th Annual General Meeting, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
European Centre for Living Technology, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2019
How does one go about cultivating a contemporary's understanding of the body in historical popula... more How does one go about cultivating a contemporary's understanding of the body in historical popular cultures? In many cases, the traces that remain have to be judiciously gleaned from the sources that these cultures generated, like proverbs and "books of secrets," or else from documentation which was instead often antagonistic. During the early-modern period, battle lines were drawn between professionalizing physicians and unlicensed healers branded as "charlatans." In the case of sixteenth-century Venice, physicians had the support of the Venetian Republic, but this support was not only the result of physicians' treatments being deemed more effective or safer to the human body. Documentation suggests that orthodox medicine's corporeal schemas were also more compatible with the Republic's conceptions of its own "body politic" than were more plebeian treatments of the body that were instead painted as a potential danger to both.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Italian Heritage Center of Portland Maine (February 28, 2016)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: “The body is an oft utilized conceptual model in organizational discourse. Acc... more ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: “The body is an oft utilized conceptual model in organizational discourse. According to Mary Douglas, metaphors like that of a ‘body politic’ exist because the human body is humanity’s most accessible image for a social system. Even the Republic of Venice, though lacking a hereditary monarch which could invoke the Kantorowiczian ‘king’s two bodies,’ managed nevertheless to develop its own embodied ideology of political legitimacy through the careful maintenance of its uniquely serenissima constitutional ‘complexion.’ But the body is – by definition – fragile and mortal. Terror Management Theory argues that references to the body inherently also connote mortality salience, engendering existential fears demanding some form of remediation. Throughout the sixteenth century, when mortality salience hovered around the Venetian body politic like a pall and there was no ‘kingly body’ to serve as an antidote, the Republic grappled with existential anxieties particularly through its newly-established public health magistracy, the Provveditori alla Sanità.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Fifth Annual History of Medicine Night, New York Academy of Medicine, March 11, 2015
"In 1555, p... more Fifth Annual History of Medicine Night, New York Academy of Medicine, March 11, 2015
"In 1555, physician Bernardino Tomitano was called before the Venetian Inquisition on the basis of an anonymous denunciation. He was not alone; at least sixteen physicians would be summoned to defend themselves before Venice’s Holy Office during the sixteenth century, including at one point the city’s entire College of Physicians. While this might seem to indicate that physicians were particularly sympathetic to the Protestant cause, since they were rarely convicted my research suggests an alternative explanation.
Renaissance physicians often sought rapid social advancement as courtiers, and trials before punitive tribunals like the Inquisition were frequently triggered by retributive denunciations resulting from high-risk strategies gone awry. Indeed, at that same time, Tomitano had been engaged in a very high-profile published debate about whether the plague epidemic rampant at that time might actually be contagious, a controversial theory challenging Venice's other resident illustrious physician (and Tomitano’s powerful rival), the galenist Nicolò Massa.
Thus debates typical of what has been called the "medical renaissance of the sixteenth century" were staged in (if not a direct product of) the same cultural arena generating Italian Renaissance itself, the court and its rules of cortesia. In the process, Italian physician-courtiers were driven to innovate new medical theories or defend old ones as part of the often risky courtly art of discutere (to discuss, argue, converse) and the influential medical ideas and knowledge developed would then be exported throughout a Europe on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution by the vast publishing empire of Venice."
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Analysis of the dual role of the doge as titular ruler and yet simultaneously primus inter pares,... more Analysis of the dual role of the doge as titular ruler and yet simultaneously primus inter pares, following the lines of a Kantorowiczian political theology is, of course, not new in Venetian studies. Paradoxically, though, Kantorowicz is not seamlessly transferable to the Venetian context, however rampant dual-body imagery was in the city’s ceremonial life. After all, the king’s immortal body royal had to depend symbiotically on its body natural, relying upon the later’s unique capacity for biological reproduction in order to ensure continuity of the dynastic bloodline which would allow the monarchy, at least in theory, both to endure in perpetuity. In Venice, however, such a formulation was impossible, not least because, as part of the measures to limit potential ducal reigns, doges – like popes – tended to be elected at an advanced age. Hence, a different formulation of the two-bodies model had to be devised for the Venetian context. Only by becoming the living incarnation of the relics of Saint Mark could the otherwise constitutionally (and perhaps, for that matter, even biologically) largely impotent doge manage to embody both a widely-recognized, powerfully stabilizing influence and a monarchic sacrality.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Western historians have no conceptual basis for more than minimally understanding plague sufferer... more Western historians have no conceptual basis for more than minimally understanding plague sufferers' torments (and thus the contemporary importance of their representations). Pain is a quintessentially alienating experience, but I suggest that Tintoretto would attempt to render this complex exterior and interior experience of plague suffering visually in his narrative paintings of the life of San Rocco executed for the confraternity’s church. The plague victims depicted by Tintoretto both individually assumed and collectively expressed a consciousness of one’s own fragility, mortality and evanescence, which had a potential to be transitively communicated, just as the confratelli di disciplina both assumed and collectively expressed the penitence of the brothers, the confraternity and even the society as a whole.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
"'A Man Must Not Embellish Himself like a Woman: The Body and Gender in Renaissance Cosmetics"
1... more "'A Man Must Not Embellish Himself like a Woman: The Body and Gender in Renaissance Cosmetics"
15th Annual Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Interdisciplinary Symposium
(University of Miami, 2006)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
While Ann Carmichael has traced an epidemiological link between the poor and epidemic diseases co... more While Ann Carmichael has traced an epidemiological link between the poor and epidemic diseases conflated with plague, she suggests that this association served as a focus for the concerns and fears of the elite, needing, as she put it, “the attention of a social historian more than a medical one.” In sixteenth-century Venice there is perhaps no better source to examine these sociopolitical concerns than the 40,000-page diary of Venetian nobleman Marin Sanudo, who yearned to serve as the republic’s official historian. Sanudo was well aware of Venice’s need to bolster its body politic from a myriad of external threats. I argue that the result would lead, not merely to the identification of the foreign poor as the source of the epidemic of the late 1520s, but also to their representation as being physiologically predisposed to acting as the very plague itself, which was afflicting the “body of the city.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Toronto, 2003
In the sixteenth-century, the battle-lines were drawn between professionalizing physicians in the... more In the sixteenth-century, the battle-lines were drawn between professionalizing physicians in the process of fashioning themselves as the gold standard of medical practice 1 and other medical practitioners, who at that point were often branded as charlatans or "ciarlatani." But medical practitioners were not the only ones whose reputations were at stake. The Venetian health magistracy, the Provveditori alla Sanità, was sympathetic to professionalizing physicians not only because they deemed their medicine more "effective" or "safer" to the physical body, but also because their so-called "orthodox" medicine was more compatible with Venetian conceptions of its own body politic, while the unregulated practice of popular medicine by "ciarlatani" seemingly posed a danger to both. On 8 January 1545 (m.v.), however, the Venetian Public Health Office would officially confirm the licensing procedures of that city's College of Physicians against the "pessima corruptella" of "the many empirics who have no experience whatsoever in medicine… [and who] medicate various and diverse illnesses." 2 As a result, the Provveditori declared the privilege of the Venetian College of Physicians and Surgeons to examine and license "all Barbers, Apothecaries and charlatans (zaratani) of whatever status and condition both residents and foreigners, and every other person either male or female, who are not educated in general studies…" 3 Those caught practicing without such a license-either from the Venetian Collegio or from an affiliated College of Physicians from another city-would be fined L. 300 di piccoli, imprisoned for three months, and then banished from Venice for five years. 4 From our modern perspective, regulation of medical practitioners is a distinct issue of public health. A set of clear criteria informs this regulation: graduation from a recognized and accredited institution of medical education; a residency experience in a health-care institution like a hospital; a state licensing process, etc. And yet, these criteria did not exist in sixteenth-century Venice. Was this regulation simply a question of professional hegemony, that the Venetian Collegio dei Medici wanted to be the ones who licensed all medical practitioners, regardless of the actual differences in individuals' practices or preparation? The total number of medical practitioners licensed, as well as those unauthorized who were prosecuted by the Provveditori on the basis of this legislation, is unclear since the Health Magistracy's notebooks in the 1560s largely restrict themselves to bureaucratic concerns like appointments and salaries, and since a large part of the records of the Venetian College of Physicians was destroyed by fire in the early nineteenth century. 5 Nevertheless, the number of licenses given by the Collegio every year (which for the twenty-year period of 1541-61 normally averaged less than six annually) seems to have suddenly jumped to a high of seventy-three in 1545 when-in conjunction with the confirmation of the College's privileges-the Provveditori alla Sanità ordered that all current license-holders be 1
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Recent Historical Consulting by Michelle A Laughran
Videos by Michelle A Laughran
Selected Publications by Michelle A Laughran
https://www.tintorettovenezia.com/la-mostra-di-tintoretto-a-venezia-scuola-grande-di-san-marco/
Premodern men and women's footwear were initially unisex and utilitarian in design, and women's shoes were distinguished primarily by the fact that they tended be to some of the less visible aspects of contemporary female costume. Indeed, with the advent of Renaissance conspicuous sartorial consumption, women's shoes would become even less readily visible, draped as they were in dresses constructed of layers of far more expensive fabric. Ironically, however, this is the very same period in which footwear styles of men and women would begin significantly to diverge for the first time. How to explain this apparent paradox?
A parallel development interestingly occurred simultaneously in what would come to be called lingerie. The deeper women's undergarments were buried under myriad strata of clothing, the more diverse (and eventually sexualized) they became. In this article, we will argue that early-modern footwear in this same way essentially became a kind of gendered intimate wear, the increased fascination with which relied on the power of what was usually unseen, but a glimpse of which might be granted to or stolen by the viewer.
Selected Conference & Professional Presentations by Michelle A Laughran
"In 1555, physician Bernardino Tomitano was called before the Venetian Inquisition on the basis of an anonymous denunciation. He was not alone; at least sixteen physicians would be summoned to defend themselves before Venice’s Holy Office during the sixteenth century, including at one point the city’s entire College of Physicians. While this might seem to indicate that physicians were particularly sympathetic to the Protestant cause, since they were rarely convicted my research suggests an alternative explanation.
Renaissance physicians often sought rapid social advancement as courtiers, and trials before punitive tribunals like the Inquisition were frequently triggered by retributive denunciations resulting from high-risk strategies gone awry. Indeed, at that same time, Tomitano had been engaged in a very high-profile published debate about whether the plague epidemic rampant at that time might actually be contagious, a controversial theory challenging Venice's other resident illustrious physician (and Tomitano’s powerful rival), the galenist Nicolò Massa.
Thus debates typical of what has been called the "medical renaissance of the sixteenth century" were staged in (if not a direct product of) the same cultural arena generating Italian Renaissance itself, the court and its rules of cortesia. In the process, Italian physician-courtiers were driven to innovate new medical theories or defend old ones as part of the often risky courtly art of discutere (to discuss, argue, converse) and the influential medical ideas and knowledge developed would then be exported throughout a Europe on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution by the vast publishing empire of Venice."
15th Annual Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Interdisciplinary Symposium
(University of Miami, 2006)
https://www.tintorettovenezia.com/la-mostra-di-tintoretto-a-venezia-scuola-grande-di-san-marco/
Premodern men and women's footwear were initially unisex and utilitarian in design, and women's shoes were distinguished primarily by the fact that they tended be to some of the less visible aspects of contemporary female costume. Indeed, with the advent of Renaissance conspicuous sartorial consumption, women's shoes would become even less readily visible, draped as they were in dresses constructed of layers of far more expensive fabric. Ironically, however, this is the very same period in which footwear styles of men and women would begin significantly to diverge for the first time. How to explain this apparent paradox?
A parallel development interestingly occurred simultaneously in what would come to be called lingerie. The deeper women's undergarments were buried under myriad strata of clothing, the more diverse (and eventually sexualized) they became. In this article, we will argue that early-modern footwear in this same way essentially became a kind of gendered intimate wear, the increased fascination with which relied on the power of what was usually unseen, but a glimpse of which might be granted to or stolen by the viewer.
"In 1555, physician Bernardino Tomitano was called before the Venetian Inquisition on the basis of an anonymous denunciation. He was not alone; at least sixteen physicians would be summoned to defend themselves before Venice’s Holy Office during the sixteenth century, including at one point the city’s entire College of Physicians. While this might seem to indicate that physicians were particularly sympathetic to the Protestant cause, since they were rarely convicted my research suggests an alternative explanation.
Renaissance physicians often sought rapid social advancement as courtiers, and trials before punitive tribunals like the Inquisition were frequently triggered by retributive denunciations resulting from high-risk strategies gone awry. Indeed, at that same time, Tomitano had been engaged in a very high-profile published debate about whether the plague epidemic rampant at that time might actually be contagious, a controversial theory challenging Venice's other resident illustrious physician (and Tomitano’s powerful rival), the galenist Nicolò Massa.
Thus debates typical of what has been called the "medical renaissance of the sixteenth century" were staged in (if not a direct product of) the same cultural arena generating Italian Renaissance itself, the court and its rules of cortesia. In the process, Italian physician-courtiers were driven to innovate new medical theories or defend old ones as part of the often risky courtly art of discutere (to discuss, argue, converse) and the influential medical ideas and knowledge developed would then be exported throughout a Europe on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution by the vast publishing empire of Venice."
15th Annual Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Interdisciplinary Symposium
(University of Miami, 2006)