Jill Burke
Cultural and Art Historian, University of Edinburgh
I am a professor of Renaissance visual and material cultures at the University of Edinburgh. I am a cultural and art historian and occasional curator, with a research focus on Renaissance Italy. I am interested in how human bodies (and the ways individuals think about, represent and modify their own and others' bodies) are affected by large-scale historical change. I am a 2008 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. I am currently also thinking about how we can understand history through the body, using reconstruction and other hands-on techniques in teaching and research.
I am the author of three books: How To Be A Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (2023), The Italian Renaissance Nude (2018) and Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (2004).
EXPs by Jill Burke
The Renaissance is a period of massive change in lots of different ways, and that includes the way that the body is understood.
When you reconstruct anything from a recipe in the past, you have to understand that much has changed, so the ingredients that we use, our bodies, our understanding of our relationship with the world is completely different to that of a person in the 16th century.
In the Renaissance, particularly for women, but also to a lesser extent for men, there are very specific and unforgiving beauty ideals. These are promulgated in many different areas.