Prepositional Bodies: Sensation and Translation in Manchu

This talk will introduce the Jesuit use of Manchu as a medium of translation in the history of science and medicine through an exploration of The Manchu Anatomy (ge ti ciowan lu bithe), an early eighteenth-century text on the human body and its contents and discontents. The Manchu Anatomy was simultaneously intended as a Jesuit conversion tool and a translation of bodily knowledge into a Qing context. Prof. Nappi will present work in progress from a new project devoted to a history of this critically important Manchu text, using the book as an anchor to open up a broader study of the significance of Manchu as a mediator of bodily encounter across early modern Eurasia, and proposing a way to think about bodies and their translations not as collections of parts, but instead as sites of conversion, mediated by the kinds of prepositional and proximal experience that generate materiality.

Prof. Nappi is the Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her main research fields are the histories of science and medicine, early modern (Ming-Qing, late imperial) China, translation (broadly conceived), and Manchu studies. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009), used a compendium of materia medica as a playground to explore what it looked like to understand and argue about creatures and their medicinal uses in sixteenth-century China.

Sponsored by The Religious Studies Program; The East Asian Languages and Cultures Department; The East Asian Studies Program; and The Medical Humanities Program. For more information please contact religiousstudies@wustl.edu.