Includes bibliographical references and index.

pt. 1 : Introduction / Michel Feher -- Dim body, dazzling body / Jean-Pierre Vernant -- The body of engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinical tradition and the Kabbalah / Charles Mopsik -- Indian speculations about the sex of the scarifice / Charles Malamoud -- The body: the Daoists’ coat of arms / Jean Leví -- Divine image, prison of flesh: perceptions of the body in ancient gnosticism / Michael A. Williams -- The face of Christ: the form of the church / Marie-José Baudinet -- Antirrhetic II / Nicephorus the Patriarch -- The female body and religious practice in the later Middle Ages / Caroline Walker Bynum -- The consecrated host: a wondrous excess / Piero Camporesi -- Holbein’s Dead Christ / Julia Kristeva -- Hungry ghosts and hungry people: somaticity and rationality in medieval Japan / William R. LaFleur -- Metamorphosis and lycanthropy in Franche-Comté, 1521-1643 / Caroline Oates -- The chimera herself / Ginevra Bompiani -- The inaminate incarnate / Roman Ppt. 2 : Therefore, Socrates is immortal / Nicole Loraux -- Reflections of a soul / Eric Alliez and Michel Feher -- The face and the soul / Patrizia Magli -- The ethics of gesture / Jean-Claude Schmitt -- The upward training of the body from the age of chivalry to courtly civility / Georges Vigarello -- Geerewol: the art of seduction / Carol Beckwith -- Love’s rewards / René Nelli -- Between clothing and nudity / Mario Perniola -- Tales of Shen and Xin: body-person and heart-mind in China during the last 150 years / Mark Elvin -- The natural and literary history of bodily sensation / Jean Starobinski -- Some simple reflections on the body / Paul Valéry -- The three-body problem and the end of the world / Hillel Schwartz -- The ghost in the machine: religious healing and representations of the body in Japan / Mary Picone -- The end of the body / Jonathan Parry -- Celestial bodies: a few stops on the way to heaven / Nadia Tazi

pt. 3 : Head or heart? The political use of body metapohors in the Middle Ages / Jacques Le Goff -- The art of pulling teeth in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: from public martyrdom to private nightmare and political struggle / David Kunzle -- "Amor veneris, vel dulcedo appeletur" / Thomas W. Laqueur -- Subtle bodies / Guilia Sissa -- Semen and blood: some ancient theories concerning their genesis and relationship / Françoise Héritier-Augé -- Upanisad of the embryo -- Note on the Garbha-Upanisad / Lakshmi Kapani -- Bodily images in Melanesia: cultural substances and natural metaphors / Bruce M. Knauft with photographs by Eileen M. Cantrell -- Older women, stout-hearted women, women of substance / Françoise Héritier-Augé -- Personal status and sexual practice in the Roman Empire / Aline Rousselle -- The social evil, the solitary vice and pouring tea / Thomas W. Laqueur -- The bio-economics of Our mutual friend / Catherine Gallagher -- The meaning of sacrifice

"The first approach can be called vertical since what is explored here is the human body’s relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. The second approach covers the various junctures between the body’s "outside" and "inside": it can therefore be called a "psychosomatic" approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of soul and the expression of emotions through the body’s attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death. Finally, the third approach ... brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions ..."--Foreword Part 3