Leeds IMC 2026

Bodies in Time: Temporalities of Embodiment Across the Medieval World

Series Abstract:

This three-panel series, organised by Bodies and Being, explores the entanglements of body and time in the medieval world. Responding to the IMC 2026 theme of Temporalities, the sessions examine how bodies—whether hybrid or mutilated, disciplined or ritualised, imagined or material—were constructed across shifting temporal frameworks. From Viking hybridity and Pictish monstrosity, to Benedictine funerary rituals and allegories of flesh, to cross-cultural case studies from China, India, and Persia, these panels reveal the body as a temporal medium: a site where past, present, and future converged. Bringing together global, interdisciplinary perspectives, the series asks how medieval bodies were made to signify across time, and how embodiment shaped cultural memory, ritual practice, political power, and identity. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of temporality to the embodied experience of the medieval world, while advancing Bodies and Being’s broader aim of rethinking medieval bodies in all their diversity and complexity.

Panel 1: Fragmented, Fluid, and Hybrid: Rethinking Bodies and Power in the Medieval North

Chair: Francesca Squitieri

The medieval North offers a strikingly rich array of bodies—human and non-human, divine and monstrous, living and dead— which feature in a range of temporalities and cultural spaces. This panel brings together four papers that interrogate how bodies in the Viking and Pictish worlds were conceptualised, represented, and manipulated, highlighting the fluidity, hybridity, and political stakes of embodiment in pre- and post-conversion contexts.

The first paper examines the tenth-century Uppåkra amulet depicting the mythic smith, Völundr, whose splayed, hybridised form unsettles categories of human and animal, ornament and figure. This case challenges modern habits of interpretation and instead proposes a cross-disciplinary approach to grasp pre-Christian ontologies of bodiliness. The second paper expands this framework to Viking Age practices and artefacts, from tooth-filing and cosmetics to figurines and burials, arguing for a vision of Viking bodies as unbounded, entangled assemblages that exceed modern dichotomies of subject and object. The third paper turns to the Papil Stone, where axe-bearing birdmen balance a severed head in their beaks. Far from a simple borrowing of Irish iconography, this hybrid imagery functioned within Pictish visual culture as a didactic warning in a moment of religious conversion, embodying both monstrous alterity and the perils of paganism. Finally, the fourth paper considers the mutilation of Magnús inn góði in the Kings’ Sagas, tracing how deliberate violence upon the body not only redefined individual personhood but also transformed political legitimacy and reshaped narratives of dynastic power. Together, these papers demonstrate the centrality of the body as a site where meaning, identity, and authority were negotiated. Whether through hybrid imagery, bodily modification, mortuary practice, or political mutilation, bodies in the medieval North emerge not as fixed entities but as mutable, dynamic, and charged with social, spiritual, and political significance. This panel thus calls for a re-examination of medieval embodiment across disciplinary and regional boundaries, foregrounding the body as a primary locus for understanding cultural anxieties, negotiations of power, and the porous boundaries between human and non-human worlds.

Andrea Snow PhD, Independent Scholar: Strange Body: Reading Hybridity in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Art

In late 2011, a layer of stones was uncovered between the remnants of an elite lodge and a cult house at the famed settlement of Uppåkra, Scania, in southern Sweden. Fragmented, cracked, and burned, they had been used to prepare large amounts of victuals such as meat and ale. Amidst their scalded remains was a spectacular and perplexing item: a gilded copper amulet in the form of a winged man. Likely produced during the second half of the tenth century, the object is thought to depict the mythic metalsmith, Völund, as he was imagined in Þiðreks saga. The object is a spectacular find, and few aesthetic parallels have been found—largely among scabbard chapes that are in comparatively poor condition, as well as two bodily adornments—none of which model the body to the same dimensional extent or in such detail. Here, it is a splayed form that melds human and animal elements with ornamental motifs, obscuring any formal delineations between such categories. This paper offers a focused examination of the Uppåkra Völund and the ontological perceptions of bodiliness that were carried by pre-Christian Scandinavian communities. Proposing that scholars must eschew the replication of the seen world as the entrance point into an image and instead replace it with an imagistic experience relational to that of being in the world, in a particular way, and alongside particular forces, it advocates for the assemblage of cross-disciplinary methodologies that will reveal more about the semantics of the premodern North’s visual vocabularies.

Emma Thompson and Brad Marshall, University of Leicester: Unbounded: The Multiplicity of Bodies and Beings in Viking Worlds

The Vikings have been characterised as one of the most stereotyped past cultures. This paper challenges static representations of Viking bodies by exploring their diverse and referential body-worlds. We propose a more dynamic view where Viking bodies could be fluid, unbounded, and entangled with human and non-human entities. Using a more-than- representational approach and concepts of body-worlding, we move beyond conventional categorisations and dichotomies to reveal the complex network of bodies and beings populating this period. We first address practices of body modification (e.g. tooth filing and cosmetics) which reveal how bodies were deliberately altered to affect perception, status, and selfhood. Second, we examine an Odin figurine from Lejre to explore ontologies of bodily difference and sensory augmentation, where altered sight becomes a conduit for extended, more-than-human cognition. Finally, a tenth-century burial at Fyrkat unravels the temporality of bodies and objects, showing how graves can act as citational assemblages. Through these three case studies, we argue that Viking bodies encompassed unique ontologies that differ profoundly from modern perspectives. We aim to rethink the Viking past on terms closer to its own and expand the range of bodies, persons, and subjectivities we are willing to see.

Harriet Clark, PhD, University of Nottingham: The Good, the Bad, and the Mutilated: the Case of Magnús inn góði

According to the Old Norse Kings’ Sagas of Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna, and Heimskringla, Magnús inn góði began his rule as a handsome young man full of physical promise. Following defeat by his uncle, however, Magnús is said to have been blinded, castrated, and have had his foot cut off. The present paper will explore how the deliberate infliction of physical mutilation to Magnús served to divest him of political power, and how the Kings’ Sagas use the descriptions of Magnús before and after his mutilations to convey the political changes of the time and the lamentation of a lost future. The paper will examine how political capability and physical capability were supposed and understood through the twelfth century (building on the works of Adams, Bagge, Gade, Sextan, and Sørensen), and how the sagas demonstrate the overlap and divergence between the two. Most importantly, the paper will consider the difference between a natural injury and a deliberate mutilation, and how the political repercussions of mutilation influenced the depictions of both Magnús (the victim) and Haraldr gilli (the aggressor) in the Kings’ Sagas.

Rachel Sweeney, PhD Student, Case Western Reserve University: Aberrant Pagans, Devout Clerics: The Pictish Papil Stone and the Hybridization of the Human Body

This paper focuses on a little-studied Pictish cross-slab from Papil depicting two axe-wielding birdmen that balance a disembodied human head between their beaks. Previous scholarship suggests that they may point to iconographic traditions from Ireland, and that they represent mythological Irish battle demons. The slab’s execution, however, is distinctly Pictish in nature, and I propose that the Papil birdmen should instead be considered within a broader pre-Christian Pictish tradition of the “aberrant man” motif. Here repurposed for the construction of a “monstrous people,” located simultaneously within and without the bounds of Christian society, the motif presents a deliberate hybridization of the human body couched in the visual language of pre-Christian Pictland. Considering the hierarchical nature of the cross-slab’s program, I contend that the Papil Stone, positioned in St. Laurence’s Churchyard, served a didactic purpose, suggesting not only the promise of salvation afforded by conversion to Christianity, but also a warning against the perceived threat of paganism dwelling therein. These figures are therefore brought forth from the pagan past into the immediate Christian present, reflecting anxieties surrounding the cultural moment of religious conversion.

Panel 2: Embodied Temporality: Ecclesiastical Dialogues and the Medieval Body

Chair: Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson

This panel, explores how medieval bodies were constructed, disciplined, and represented across diverse cultural and historical contexts, with particular attention to the temporal frameworks that shaped these understandings. The papers examine how bodily practices and depictions mediated the flow of time—whether by creating continuity with the past, disciplining present experience, or projecting future possibilities.

The first paper considers early Benedictine monastic contexts, showing how the deceased body was integrated into ritual and liturgy in ways that transformed the rupture of death into a coherent and sanctified temporal order, extending communal bonds across mortality and eternity. The second paper turns to twelfth-century allegories of the body as a horse, charting how metaphors of training, restraint, and discipline reframed monastic bodily ideals within lay preaching, and how these metaphors configured the body as simultaneously weapon, obstacle, and site of temporal struggle. The third paper examines thirteenth-century Castilian chronicles, where depictions of Muslim corporality were charged with emotional and symbolic force. These representations constructed the Muslim body as temporally Other—rooted in an imagined, deviant past, or as an ever-present threat—while also revealing tensions in Christian identity-making over time. By narrating the alignment or disruption of gender norms through the body, these accounts shaped the reputations of historical figures and offered retrospective judgements that influenced contemporary understandings of legitimacy and order.

Taken together, the panel highlights the temporal elasticity of the medieval body: as a vessel for eschatological hope, as an instrument of moral discipline, as a rhetorical tool in polemical representation, and as a performative site through which gendered and political identities were contested. The body emerges not as a static entity, but as a temporal medium—shaped by ritual, allegory, polemic, and performance—through which medieval communities negotiated their past, present, and future.

Cherry Chan, PhD, China Graduate School of Theology: The Opus Dei of Death: Temporal Disjunctures and Ritual Cohesion in Early Benedictine Monastic Practice

This paper interrogates the pre-modern body by examining its temporal and ritualistic construction within early Benedictine monasteries (c. 7th-9th centuries). Through a close textual analysis of the Rule of St. Benedict, early customaries (e.g., St. Gall), and hagiographical sources, this study argues that the monastic deceased body was not a source of temporal disjuncture but a locus for ritual practices that cohered loss into a sanctified temporal order. The presentation will trace the body’s journey from its immediate post-mortem state, where communal vigils and funeral rites physically and liturgically manage decay, to its ultimate eschatological fate. It will explore how perpetual intercession, institutionalised through necrologies, forged a trans-temporal community that defied the finality of death. This research illuminates how a structured ritual-temporal framework provided a collective, theological response to the body’s inherent fragility, transforming sorrow from an individual crisis into an enduring communal practice.

Grant Jones, PhD, Durham University: ‘Ride Upon the Beast That Is Our Flesh’: The Body as a Horse in Twelfth Century Spiritual Thought

This paper explores the allegorising of the human body as a horse in two twelfth-century religious texts on spiritual warfare: the Similitudo militis associated with Anselm of Canterbury (d.1109), and Book I of Ralph Niger’s De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane (c.1188). In both texts, the rational mind is portrayed as a knight who must arm himself with virtues and control the horse of his body to successfully defend against demonic assault. Equipment including the bridle, saddle, and spurs are moralised as the means by which bodily impulses should be disciplined and directed by reason. By analysing these depictions of the body as a horse, the paper demonstrates how monastic conceptions of bodily discipline were redeployed in a new context of lay preaching over the course of the twelfth century. Further, it highlights the tension inherent in presenting the body as part of the soul’s spiritual arsenal against the devil, when flesh was simultaneously regarded as one of the spirit’s enemies. In doing, it suggests allegorical treatments of the body not only instructed audiences in self-control, but also reveals broader continuities and adaptations in perceptions of the body across different audiences and settings.

David De Pablo, PhD student, Charles University: Sins, and Legitimacy: Representations of Muslim Corporality in 13th-Century Castilian Sources

Through an analysis of 13th-century Castilian chronicles, this paper explores representations of the Muslim body, sexuality, and behaviour, probing their underlying social meanings and integration into the Christian cognitive framework. Amidst the Kingdom’s ideological conflicts—against both Muslims and rival Christian powers—these portrayals were rooted in emotional and symbolic systems that weaponised morality. The body, its practices, and its perceived virtues or vices became focal points for constructing the Muslim Other, a strategy laden with emotional power. This process mirrored broader 13th-century trends of enemy- making, reinforcing dual identities and delegitimising Muslim authority through tangible (aesthetic, physical) and symbolic means. Muslims were systematically demonised, juxtaposed against Christian ideals like whiteness, beauty, and chastity, while being ascribed traits like blackness, ugliness, lust, and deceit. Such depictions anchored them to evil, embedding spiritual and emotional stigma. Yet non-negative representations also existed, complicating this narrative. By examining both polemical and ambivalent portrayals, the paper reveals how these tropes served Castilian political and cultural agendas, while also hinting at fractures in the dominant discourse.

Panel 3: Temporal Bodies in Global Contexts: Medicine, Materiality, and Myth

Chair: Francesca Squitieri

This panel examines how pre-modern bodies were constructed, perceived, and represented across cultural traditions from China to Europe, South Asia, and Persia, foregrounding the theme of temporality. Each paper highlights how bodies became sites of negotiation between continuity and change, nature and culture, and the individual and community.

The first paper analyses medical discourses in pre-modern China, tracing how androgyny, sexual difference, and deviant bodies were conceptualised within the qi and yin-yang framework. These models not only inscribed patriarchal hierarchies but also established a racialised temporality that positioned foreign bodies as abnormal, reinforcing cultural identity across centuries of medical writing. The second paper turns to sixteenth-century European anatomical texts, examining fugitive sheets and pop-up paper figures as playful yet pedagogical devices that invited a broader readership to engage with embodied knowledge. By mediating between elite medical discourses and popular audiences, these material forms reshaped how bodies were encountered and understood over time. The third paper investigates the Meitei eta laiphadibi doll from Northeast India, a cultural artefact that both idealised and disciplined the female body. From rituals to folklore, the doll’s enduring presence demonstrates how gendered ideals were materially inscribed and transmitted across generations, embodying both continuity and transformation. The fourth paper explores the Shahnameh’s tale of Zal, the “old infant,” whose white hair at birth and upbringing by a mythical bird locate him simultaneously within and outside human temporality. His exposure, survival, and eventual reintegration into courtly politics reflect how bodily difference could be mobilised to negotiate Persian identity in the wake of conquest.

Taken together, these papers demonstrate the body’s centrality as a temporal medium: a site through which ideals were projected across generations, knowledge was circulated, cultural identity was defined, and narratives of continuity and rupture were inscribed. By bringing together case studies from across the medieval and pre-modern world, this panel situates embodiment as a global and cross-temporal phenomenon, revealing how cultures continually reinvented what it meant to be human.

Ying-hsiu Lu, PhD, Tunghai University: Androgyny, Sexed Bodies, and Deviant Bodies in Pre-Modern Chinese Medical Discourse

This paper examines medical constructs of the human body in pre-modern China, exploring concepts ranging from androgyny and sexed bodies to deviant bodies as envisioned in The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (ca. 1 st century), The Compendium of Materia Medica (16th century), women’s medicine (fuke), and sexual manuals. Conceptualizations of the human body in the traditional Chinese qi and yin-yang framework demonstrate that, like gender, bodily sex is contextualized and produced through discourses. Although different traditional Chinese medical texts depict the body and male-female attributions variously — particularly in relation to bodily materiality, sexuality, and reproduction — they nevertheless conform to and reinforce Confucian gender and sexual hierarchies. Moreover, implicit in qi and yin-yang medical thinking is a racial hierarchy that situates Chinese people as superior to non- Chinese people, whose bodies are associated with animalism and deformity. Bodies matter, and qi and yin-yang medical theory fundamentally suggests a biopolitics that not only upholds patriarchal dominance but also strengthens a Chinese cultural identity by conflating “foreignness” with physical abnormality.

Madeleine Killacky, PhD student, Bangor University: Understanding the Pre-Modern Body through Pop-Up Paper Figures

This paper is interested in exploring how pop-up paper figures found in sixteenth-century anatomical texts reveal changing perceptions of how people understood and approached the pre- modern body. By examining the scientific discourse surrounding the study of anatomy through its printed embodiments, I suggest that pop-up paper figures (properly known as fugitive sheets) were a vehicle for the transmission of information that was usually reserved for an intellectual elite or specialised audience to the general population. Fugitive sheets were, then, a creative response to the demands of an expanding readership interested in their own bodies and the natural world more broadly. By examining the paratexts that accompany late medieval and pre- modern anatomical writings, I suggest that these texts and interpretations of the body have much to tell us about the changing social context of the pre-modern era. As knowledge about the human body was shaped, augmented, and reworked via paratextual layout and design, ordinary people, who could not access knowledge about the human body through any existing class of publication, were invited to engage tangibly with this knowledge through these paper surrogates. This paper, therefore, contributes to our understanding of how artistic interpretations of the pre- modern body reveal assumptions about the body in their own era.

Sophia Lisam, PhD, Jawaharlal University: The Embodied Gaze: Disciplining the Meitei Female Form through the Eta Laiphadibi Doll

In an exploration of body and being, this paper analyzes eta laiphadibi, a traditional doll from the Meitei community of Manipur, a state in Northeast India. This tangible cultural artifact, a vessel of collective memory, anthropomorphises and the prevailing societal gaze and idealisations of the female form. The doll’s anatomy defined by long and straight black hair, a pristine white cloth symbolising an obsession with fair complexion, and a narrowed waist, reflects a culturally inscribed ideal of womanhood. The intentional flattening of the breasts and the purposeful hollowness of the lower body serve to censor and sanitize female sexuality, thereby underscoring its societal regulation. This analysis situates eta laiphadibi within the broader discourse of the pre-modern body, a symbolic lineage stretching back to ancient Meitei manuscripts. Eta laiphadibi presence from time immemorial is evident through its use in various rituals, from coronation ceremonies to funerals, and its role in folklore and as a guardian figure in Meitei shrines and temples. While its material form has undergone shifts across epochs, the doll’s enduring presence testifies to both the continuity and transformation of how the body is symbolically constructed. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of embodiment, material culture, and the politics of representation, this paper argues that eta laiphadibi functions as a pre- modern cultural text. It is a conduit through which societal ideals are inscribed and transmitted across generations, offering profound insights into the intricate nexus of body, being, and materiality within Meitei society. This study employs a qualitative, ethnographic approach, analysing the doll’s material form and its socio-historical context through an examination of Meitei manuscripts, cultural practices and object analysis. The findings reveal that the doll is not merely a toy but a powerful cultural artifact through which gendered norms and bodily ideals are inscribed, disciplined, and transmitted across generations.

Samantha Stringer, PhD student, University of California: Zal the Old Infant: Politics of Exposure in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh

In the Shahnameh, an eleventh-century mytho-history of Persian kings from mankind’s first political community to the Arab conquest of Sasanian lands, Ferdowsi tells the miraculous story of Zal, son of the empire’s foremost warrior, Sam. When Zal is born with white hair, his father, interpreting this perceived physical defect as a divine punishment, exposes the boy at the top of a mountain. The infant Zal is rescued by a simorgh who nurses and rears the boy until his father repents of his actions, retrieves his now-grown son, and brings him back into the fold of human society and courtly politics. In “Zal the Old Infant,” I explore how the uncanny developmental trajectory that becomes central to Zal’s identity (his very name meaning “old”), as well as his non-human upbringing, informs how he functions in the public, political sphere. I argue that this orphaned noble’s out-of-timeness allows him to overlook his familial and ancestral history in his eventual romance with Rudabeh, an Arab descendant of the demon Zahhak. I conclude by suggesting that this exposure story is one mode through which Ferdowsi explored Persian identity in the wake of conquest.