Drawing Gestures: Investigating Bodily Knowledge in Mechanical Arts Encrypted in Words and Images (C14–17th)

Delivering a sword blow, riding a horse, or dancing are bodily techniques (Mauss 1935) that were put in words and images in a heterogeneous corpus of non-fictional literature during the late Medieval and early modern periods. This corpus—constituted thematically—is heterogeneous in its material support (manuscript, print) and in its genre (technical literature, pragmatic literacy), as well as in its various auctorial projects and intended audiences (personal notes, didactical work, dedication work). Investigating the role of the artists in the modalities of production of those works will shed a new light in the concepts and changes in movements’ notations in the nonfictional literature (manuscript and print) on bodily techniques, as well as in the bodily knowledge circulation between learning by doing and learning by reading.