Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Claire Richter Sherman

ISBN 10: 0295980729 / ISBN 13: 9780295980720

Published by Trout Gallery/Folger Shakespeare Library, Carlisle, PA and Washington DC, 2001

About this Item

Distributed by the University of Washington Press, 277 pages, bibliography, indexes, b&w illustrations throughout. Slight shelf wear. Text clean. Themed around the centrality of the hand to the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. Seller Inventory # 002622

Bibliographic Details

Title: Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in ...

Publisher: Trout Gallery/Folger Shakespeare Library, Carlisle, PA and Washington DC

Publication Date: 2001

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis:

This text focuses on the hand as a meeting place for matter, mind, and spirit. More than 80 images, dating primarily from the 15th to the 17th centuries, concern the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge from such diverse realms as anatomy, psychology, mathematics, music rhetoric, religions, palmistry, and alchemy. The book also addresses the relationship between the hand and the brain, sensory perception, the rhetoric of gesture, early forms of finger-spelling for the deaf, morality, and spirituality. It reintroduces early modern conceptual frameworks for learning, remembering, and recalling practical and abstract concepts by means of the hand. Throughout the text, images of the hand play a vital role in interpreting the search for achieving knowledge of the self and interpreting universal human experience.