Margit Thøfner

Abstract

This essay focuses on a musical instrument, an organ purpose-built for the Lutheran convent church at Kloster Lüne near Lüneburg in present-day Germany. This instrument is used to explore what it might mean to write histories of bodies without privileging textual evidence. Particular attention is paid to the display pipes, which are decorated so that their openings appear to be fish mouths. In this way, the essay shows how the organ sat at the nexus of a whole range of embodied practices that served to constitute the monastic community as a corporation, a body combining a wide range of entities, some human, some not, and spanning conventional oppositions and temporalities, such as the terrestrial and the celestial and the past and the present. The broader purpose is to show how fruitful it can be to draw on the widest possible range of source materials when studying early modern bodies.

Keywords: Kloster Lüne, Benedictine, nuns, organ, pipes, fish

Full text: Picturing Bodies_7_Thøfner

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2025w07

Biographical note 
Margit Thøfner is a senior lecturer in the history of art at the Open University. She took her BA and MA in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute and her DPhil at the University of Sussex.