Körperidealen trotzen

From the poet Laura Battiferri to the naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, history has long tied female intellectual brilliance to an unattractive appearance. But what if 'ugliness' was not a curse, but a strategy? This groundbreaking study is the first to critically explore how literary and painted portraits of women in science and the arts - including philosopher Marie de Gournay and painter Rosalba Carriera - challenged conventions by deliberately staging unconventional beauty as a tool of emancipation. The book exposes the hidden negotiations between appearance, intellectual legitimacy, and artistic ambition in early modern Europe. Through vivid case studies, it uncovers the interplay between gender, the body, and creative genuineness, revealing how these remarkable women redefined female authority on their own terms.

Sofina Dembruk, literary scholar and romanist, University of Stuttgart. She studied French and English literature at the Universities of Göttingen and Rouen. Her doctoral research explored Christian aesthetics and the literary representation of physical ugliness in French Renaissance literature. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Romance Literatures I, University of Stuttgart, where she is working on a project about theatre around 1900. Fabienne Huguenin, art historian, earned her doctorate from the University of Tübingen with a dissertation on the aesthetics of ugliness in pre-modern portraiture. She was research assistant on the digitization project DigiPortA at the Deutsches Museum, where she also compiled the inventory catalog for the portrait collection. As project manager and lecturer in collection and provenance research at the University of Tübingen, she led initiatives in cultural heritage studies. Since 2024, she has directed a digitization project on "Transformation of Wiedergutmachung". Daniele Maira, Professor of French Literature at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Trained in French literature at the Universities of Basel, Paris Sorbonne, and Hamburg, he specializes in French Renaissance literature, the history of books and reading, and gender and masculinity studies. His new monograph, Mollesses masculines: éthiques de l'efféminement, d'Érasme à Montaigne (Droz, 2026), explores effeminate and soft masculinities in humanist literature.