Call for Chapters: Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense, and Proof in the Early Modern World
Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense, and Proof in the Early Modern World
Editors: Dr Mary Katherine Newman and Dr Rana Banna
What counted as evidence in the early modern world?
How did language itself – spoken, written, translated, or performed – shape conceptions of proof?
And how did sensory experience lend authority, or uncertainty, to what language claimed as true?
We invite chapter proposals for an edited volume examining how encounters through language and the senses shaped the production of evidence in the early modern period (c.1492–1700). Building on the interdisciplinary reading group Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies held at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies, the volume considers how early modern thinkers understood the interplay between linguistic practice and sensory experience in the making of knowledge and truth.
From translation and foreign tongues to sacred utterance, magical speech, the rhetoric of governance, the emerging idioms of science, and the ambitions of poetic language, the early modern world was marked by intense reflection on how words could signify, persuade, and prove. At the same time, theorists and practitioners across domains – from physicians and natural philosophers to theologians, travellers, jurists, and dramatists – debated the evidentiary authority of the senses: what could be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled as proof?
We seek contributions that illuminate how words, sounds, and sensations became sites of truth, persuasion, or belief, and how embodied perception shaped practices of verification, uncertainty, and doubt. Proposals may explore texts, performances, rituals, objects, archives, or embodied practices, and we welcome work that bridges disciplinary boundaries.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Language, translation, and sensory perception: as instruments for verifying truth and negotiating authority in colonial and cross-cultural encounters
- Poetic and literary explorations of evidence: how language and embodied experience imagine or question the conditions of proof
- Material texts and visual proofs: scripts, diagrams, maps, and other graphic traces that make evidence visible
- The search for a perfect or universal language: across poetic, philosophical, scientific, occult, and theological traditions, as a pursuit of linguistic certainty and epistemic clarity
- Legal and theological forms of testimony: confession, revelation, and witnessing as practices of verbal and embodied proof
- Theology and religious treatises: revelation, prophetic vision, and the moral or divine authority of evident speech
- Magical and occult philosophies: alchemy, astrology, divination, and demonology, and their verbal and sensory conjuring of hidden or divine evidence
- Scientific and empiricist efforts to produce evidence: the use of plain rhetorical style, sensory observation, and experiment, alongside continuities with poetic and magical idioms of proof
- Medical and anatomical observation: the witnessing of bodies, wounds, and symptoms as persuasive demonstrations of truth
- Bodily proofs: the senses and bodily perception as modes of testing and demonstrating truth
- The evidentiary status of sound: sermons, songs, chants, oaths, spells, and other vocal acts that establish, challenge, or authenticate belief
- Sensory epistemologies in science and natural philosophy: the interplay of observation and description in producing credible knowledge
- Deception and error: illusion, mistranslation, and doubt in the interpretation of sensory or linguistic evidence
- Pedagogies of the senses and of speech: the training of bodies, tongues, and minds to discern reliable evidence
- Afterlives and continuities: the persistence and transformation of early modern sensory and linguistic epistemologies in later practices of proof
Interdisciplinary approaches welcomed, including, but not limited to:
Literature | History/History of Science | Religious Studies | Art History | Translation Studies | Sensory Studies | Legal History | Theatre & Performance | Philosophy | Anthropology | Colonial & Global Studies | Linguistics | Book History | Musicology
Submission details:
- Title
- Synopsis/abstract (300-400 words)
- Author biography (100-150 words)
Deadline for submissions: 12th April 2026
Please send proposals (300-400 words) with short author biographies (100-150 words) to Mary Newman.
Full chapters (6,000–8,000 words) will be due in April 2027
Dr Mary Katherine Newman and Dr Rana Banna
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London