Flesh and Stone The Body and the City in Western Civilization

by Sennett, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780393313918
• ISBN10: 0393313913
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-03-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life'”how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love'”all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone , Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city'”the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. 11
Introduction: Body and City	p. 15
The Passive Body	p. 16
The Plan of the Book	p. 21
A Personal Note	p. 26
Nakedness: The Citizen's Body in Perikles' Athens	p. 31
The Citizen's Body	p. 35
The Citizen's Voice	p. 52
The Cloak of Darkness: The Protections of Ritual in Athens	p. 68
The Powers of Cold Bodies	p. 70
The Suffering Body	p. 82
The Obsessive Image: Place and Time in Hadrian's Rome	p. 87
Look and Believe	p. 92
Look and Obey	p. 101
The Impossible Obsession	p. 121
Time in the Body: Early Christians in Rome	p. 124
The Alien Body of Christ	p. 125
Christian Places	p. 134
Nietzsche's Hawks and Lambs	p. 146
Community: The Paris of Jehan de Chelles	p. 151
"Stadt Luft macht frei"	p. 151
The Compassionate Body	p. 159
The Christian Community	p. 170
"Each Man Is a Devil to Himself": The Paris of Humbert de Romans	p. 186
Economic Space	p. 188
Economic Time	p. 200
The Death of Icarus	p. 207
Fear of Touching: The Jewish Ghetto in Renaissance Venice	p. 212
Venice as a Magnet	p. 217
The Walls of the Ghetto	p. 222
A Shield But Not a Sword	p. 241
The Miraculous Lightness of Freedom	p. 249
Moving Bodies: Harvey's Revolution	p. 255
Circulation and Respiration	p. 255
The Mobile Individual	p. 271
The Crowd Moves	p. 275
The Body Set Free: Boullee's Paris	p. 282
Freedom in Body and Space	p. 285
Dead Space	p. 296
Festival Bodies	p. 304
Urban Individualism: E. M. Forster's London	p. 317
The New Rome	p. 317
Modern Arteries and Veins	p. 324
Comfort	p. 338
The Virtue of Displacement	p. 349
Civic Bodies: Multi-Cultural New York	p. 355
Difference and Indifference	p. 355
Civic Bodies	p. 370
Notes	p. 377
Works Cited	p. 399
Index	p. 415
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