Visual Culture, Emotion, and the Body in Early Modern Europe
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "Visual Arts".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 6 September 2026 | Viewed by 564
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue, “Visual Culture, Emotion, and the Body in Early Modern Europe,” seeks to gather new research on the intersections of visual culture and early modern conceptions of the body, its faculties and human emotion. As scholarship in the field has shown, the study of the body became increasingly central to early modern artists’ work. Exploring the body was not only a scientific and artistic endeavor, but a framework for understanding perception, memory, judgment and humanity.
We are particularly interested in how representations of the body conveyed things unseen about the human condition, or worked to directly affect viewers morally, psychologically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, or mnemonically. How did anatomical thinking inform the ways early modern viewers saw, remembered, or interpreted images? How did anatomical thinking affect artists’ compositional choices, mediums and techniques? In what ways did bodily theory—of organs, senses, humors, or faculties—condition the production or reception of art? How did representations of the body reflect or affect human emotions—in the bodies depicted or in their viewers?
This Special Issue welcomes papers that uniquely explore the relationship between emotion, the body and material culture in early modern Europe and across a wide range of themes, such as vision and optics, cognition and judgment, emotional expression, memory and mnemonics, the moral and political body, pain and mortality, disability studies, gender and sexuality, the sacred and secular body and more. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, as are proposals from fields outside of art history.
We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, Dr. Rebecca M. Howard (rmhward2@memphis.edu) or to Arts editorial office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.
Tentative completion schedule
- Abstract Submission Deadline: 8 March 2026
- Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 30 March 2026
- Full Manuscript Deadline: 6 September 2026
Dr. Rebecca M. Howard
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- physicality
- anatomy
- medium
- sensory
- embodiment
- mortality
- emotion
- perception
- memory
- materiality
- agency
- humanism
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