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• W3184880118 abstract "Reviewed by: Lecturas del cuerpo. Fisiognomía y literatura en la España áurea by Folke Gernert John Slater Gernert, Folke. Lecturas del cuerpo. Fisiognomía y literatura en la España áurea. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018. 571 pp. As readers, we learn early that a character's physical description is shorthand for her disposition. Eyes set wide or close, nose aquiline or bulbous, forehead low or high; by these signs, authors encode temperament and often adumbrate destiny. Literary characterization is, as such, applied physiognomy. Physiognomy is the system by which we organize beliefs about the legibility of the body: it presupposes that physical variations are signs. Both literary characterization and physiognomy entail a system of naturalized signs and conventions; both cause uneasiness because they historically suggest that physical features, often racialized—swarthy or fair—might be an index of fitness and virtue. However, there had always been, in my own mind, a difference between characterization [End Page 482] and physiognomy: conventionalized physical description in literature could encode abhorrent values but was fundamentally redeemable; physiognomy, on the other hand, was a destructive pseudoscience whose last gasp was eugenics. As comforting as I found that distinction, literature and physiognomy are not quite so easily parsed, as Folke Gernert demonstrates in her invaluable new study of physiognomy and literature. At the heart of the book is the history of a paradox: that physiognomy has been both nearly ubiquitous and partly esoteric for millennia, enduring if always slightly dubious. Physiognomy endures, Gernert shows, to the current century; scientists continue to hypothesize—and perhaps, as a consequence, to find—that physical features, such as the ratio of the height to the width of a face, might predict anti-social behavior. These sorts of studies are objectionable while simultaneously adorned in trappings of science. That uncomfortable simultaneity is a feature of physiognomy's history: sifting apart licit from illicit interpretations of physical signs has always been part of the thorny debates that surround physiognomy. It is precisely the permeable boundary between the social acceptability and rejection of physiognomy that Gernert traces over five centuries. The book is learned, exhaustively documented, and marvelously useful. Lecturas del cuerpo will be the standard point of departure for literary scholars who seek to understand the histories of physiognomy, chiromancy (palm reading), and metoposcopy (interpretation of the lines on the forehead), as well as the literary representation of these practices. The first two sections, roughly half of the book, are dedicated to the history of physiognomy and an analysis of its diffusion and social acceptance. Chiromancy and metoposcopy were generally divinatory; physiognomy (called variously fisiognomía, fisonomía, fisionomía, filosomía) helped to discern temperament. As a tool of what came to be known as differential psychology, physiognomy (unlike chiromancy) enjoyed wide acceptance from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth. Gernert skillfully distills the history of physiognomy from antiquity, including works spuriously attributed to Aristotle, through the 1660s. These sections will be immensely useful to anyone who wants to understand the status of knowledge practices and disciplines during the medieval and early modern periods. The history of physiognomy is, like physiognomy itself, full of signs at once familiar and difficult to interpret. The case of the Neapolitan physiognomer and natural historian, Giambattista Della Porta, indicates why. Seen from one angle, Della Porta is the picture of orthodoxy: he dedicates a book to his king, Philip II; he is admitted to a prestigious academy, the Lincei; in 1608 the Vatican's Apostolic Camera publishes his De destillatione, a book that features not only laudatory poems in languages from Armenian to Old Church Slavonic but also a portrait of Della Porta that alludes to his renown as a physiognomer. In Gernert's telling, on the other hand, Della Porta struggles to find social acceptance and is hounded by Rome until 1610. Readers will find Gernert open to these various perspectives, even as her history attempts to establish a clear narrative. The plural of Gernert's title—Lecturas—should be taken very seriously; physiognomy and its proponents [End Page 483] are never fully vindicated nor entirely denounced. It is a field of knowledge, Gernert shows, being constantly repositioned. The second half..." @default.
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• W3184880118 title "Lecturas del cuerpo. Fisiognomía y literatura en la España áurea by Folke Gernert" @default.
• W3184880118 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2021.0035" @default.
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