La raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiéval

Jean-Claude Schmitt

This book explores the history of gestures in the West, from late antiquity to the heart of the Middle Ages. Unlike the ethnologist or sociologist, the historian has no direct access to the gestures of the past, but must deal with texts or images only, the representations of gestures, which rely on the interpretation of gestures made by the culture that created the representations. Thus the historian's investigation is driven by these questions: What does it mean to "make a gesture" in medieval Christian society? How was the body, its movement, and its attitudes understood in that era? Did a theory of gesture exist?

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