Tillmann Taape – The Striped Layman: Visual Culture and the Politics of Vernacular Medical Knowledge in Early German Print

Speaker: Tillmann Taape, Columbia University

The visual and rhetorical trope of the ‘striped layman’ began to appear in print in the Southern German lands in the late fifteenth century. Taking as its starting point the numerous woodcut illustrations in the works of the surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, some of the earliest medical books printed in German, this lecture explores the striped layman as a social and intellectual in-betweener, suggesting how we can read woodcuts which appear interchangeable and merely decorative as visual arguments intervening in contemporary debates about lay education, vernacular print, and medical practice.

Tillmann Taape is a historian of science working on craft knowledge, medicine, and the occult in the early modern period. After a Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences specializing in Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he turned to the history of science and discovered the sixteenth-century German surgeon and apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, whose printed books became the subject of his recent PhD thesis. Tillmann is currently a lecturer in the Department of History and a postdoctoral scholar at the Making and Knowing Project. His research interests include the history of knowledge, the human body, and print culture.

This event is free and open to the public.

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:
New York University
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Columbia University in the City of New York
City University of New York
The New York Academy of Sciences
The New York Academy of Medicine