Fat Worlds II - Between Excess and Asceticism. Constructions of Collective and Individual Bodies in Pre-Modern Times (France; Italy)

• Applicants: Dr. Roberta Colbertaldo; Professorin Dr. Christine Barbara Ott
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431101838

The desire for a life of abundance, a world without hierarchies, is probably as old as humanity. In the course of the European Middle Ages, specific narratives emerged for it: the journey to the land of Cockaigne; the battle between carnival and Lent. At the same time, Christianity developed the figure of the potbellied glutton as the personification of greed. Excess and asceticism, fat and lean bodies have so far been captured by research primarily in binary models of interpretation. In contrast, we no longer want to ask primarily about a positive or negative evaluation of fat or thin bodies, of a lavish or frugal lifestyle, of a (Bakhtinian) affirmation of the body and physiological processes or a disciplining of the body. Instead, we turn our attention to literary texts that defy one-sided attributions (popular vs elitist; conservative vs subversive) and to the desires, fears and needs that manifest themselves in the constructions of individual and collective bodies we investigate. Thanks to our research within the project “Fette Welten” (Fat Worlds), we were able to create three extensive corpora on the thematic complexes of Cockaigne/ Carnival and Lent/ Fat Bodies, which contain entirely untapped sources. In the continuation proposal, we aim at a decidedly comparative expansion of the project, which will enable us to, 1) present for the first time an international reference work in the form of a multi-volume critical edition of European Cockaigne texts. Instead of the originally planned mere collection of texts, the sources we have discovered will be critically edited and commented; together with colleagues from German, English and Romance studies, a fundamental work on the European mythology of the land of Cockaigne will be presented. 2) The monograph to be written by Christine Ott, “Körper von Gewicht. Dicksein in der frühen Neuzeit” (Being fat in the early modern period), which, contrary to the original restriction to Italy and France, examines the discourse and construction of corpulence in the Italian, French, Spanish, German and English early modern periods on the basis of prominent literary and pictorial examples 3) as well as the interdisciplinary research volume Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe, co-edited by C. Ott (expected 2024 by Routledge), are equally to be considered as fundamental works, providing an in-depth analysis of Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe for the first time. 4) An abundance of unknown sources is also opened up by Roberta Colbertaldo's monograph on “Carnival and Lent. Literary and Pictorial Figurations of Collective Bodies in French and Italian Pre-Modernity”. Previously discussed (if at all) in the context of folkloristic studies and read referentially a corpus of mainly literary texts is analyzed with regard to genre traditions and specific strategies of textualization; at the same time, the texts are carefully contextualized and related to contemporary religious, medical, dietary and social discourses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants