The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture [Paperback]

Jonathan Sawday (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415157196 | ISBN-13: 978-0415157193 | Publication Date: November 17, 1996

An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge.
Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture.
A richly interdisciplinary work, The Body Emblazoned re-assesses modern understanding of the literature and culture of the Renaissance and its conceptualization of the body within the domains of the medical and moral, the cultural and political.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Throughout, The Body Emblazoned is beautifully written. While being learned, and soaked in all manner of modern theoretical currents, the writing is lucid, alert, direct, entirely free of jargon, and a pleasure to read...a most absorbing and convincing work of scholarship, rich in insights, carefully argued and highly illuminating...it will be a major event in the cultural history of the early modern era.
–Roy Porter, The Wellcome Institute

An astonishing piece of cultural history...Sawday recaptures the continuity of Renaissance knowledge in prose that is elegant and clear and that moves with equal facility through the history of literature, art, and science. This is a monumental work--one that will captivate scholars and general readers alike...A brilliant book.
–Mary Poovey, Johns Hopkins University

. . . a fascinating, learned and intelligent investigation of the culture of dissection in early modern Europe. . . . Sawday's fusion of wide-ranging scholarship with thoughtful analysis of poetry, art and cultural material will be useful to all students of the Renaissance.
–Early Modern Literary Studies

Numerous scholarly disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives. have been utilized in the creation of this fascinating account, which goes well beyond academic etiologizing and systemization and also conveys, in many places, a vivid sense of life as lived during this period. [I]n his provocative book, the heuristic richness of which I can only intimate in the sketchiest of ways, the author offers a fresh, often compelling perspective on the Renaissance and the early-modern period.
–The Italian Quarterly

...no one interested in the Renaissance should miss The Body Emblazoned.
–Studies in English Literature

About the Author

Jonathan Sawday is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Southampton.

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (November 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415157196
• ISBN-13: 978-0415157193
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #732,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Renaissance anatomized, November 28, 2000

By 

Mr. Stuart Heath (Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Paperback)

The Body Emblazoned is a wide-ranging History of what the Author terms the Renaissance Culture of Dissection. In so doing, its medical, scientific, philosophical, sociological, legal and artistic aspects are opened and cut up for our perusal. The Author demonstrates how the nature of the practice of anatomy changed over the period from, in his analogy, a voyage of discovery to a kind of colonisation through taxonomy, a classification and naming of parts. We are shown a sea-change in understanding, as the prevailing model for the body's inner workings was transformed from Microcosm to Mechanism. Along the way, we learn of the many difficulties in obtaining cadavers for dissection, of the curious architecture of anatomy theatres, and of how Rembrandt and Descartes might have met in the butchers' shops of 17th century Amsterdam. Mr. Sawday's Lit. Crit. background serves him well in his penetrating analyses of anatomical reference in the works of Spenser, Donne, Carew, Cavendish and Traherne, among others, but elsewhere it seems obtrusive, in the guise of barely relevant references to Freud, Deleuze and Joyce, for example, and in a somewhat irritating overuse of inverted 'commas'. Another irritation is the Author's heavy-handed moralizing: he is too anxious to spell out how oppressive, or misogynist, or cruel are the opinions and actions of the anatomists and their ilk: in my opinion such observations have more force when readers are left to draw their own moral conclusions. That said, one by no means has to agree with a book in order to enjoy it, and this one never lost my interest. It is a most intelligent and stimulating work, skilfully presented and nicely illustrated too.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book significantly changed how I perceive the human body., July 18, 2010

By 

Brown Tabby Tomcat (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Paperback)

I work in the physical sciences, not biological or medical sciences, but I absolutely loved this book. We live in these clumsy things, but most of us rarely appreciate our bodies, much less appreciate those who initially undertook the gruesome task of deciphering our anatomy long before the advent of formaldehyde or other preservatives. This book places their efforts, along with the work of those who illustrated and published their discoveries, within a sensible and coherent historical (social, religious and scientific) context. I recommend it very highly!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 Stars for an Interesting, Yet Neglected Topic, March 23, 2009

By 

Bonam Pak (Berlin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Paperback)

I read the 1996 revised paperback edition of the 1995 book. However, only a small number of minor errors has been corrected and two paragraphs have been added to the preface. The book has some 370 pages, which include 32 black and white picture pages, 44 footnote pages and 270 regular text pages.

Many interesting facts and analyses are offered for both, professionals and lay readers. Most of all on the beginning of modern European dissection in the Renaissance and its surrounding circumstances such as procurement of corpses, the ultimate punishment of public dissection after execution, dissection theaters and artistic representation of the procedures e.g. by Rembrandt. But also the parallel discovery of the world in colonialism and the discovery of the human body. And the invention of the dividing and subdividing of body units. Bonus information shed light upon missed knowledge opportunities not transported via historical motion pictures: for example that all women at Elizabeth (Spotlight Series)s court had to walk around bare breasted unless married with the queen's consent and that the executed coup plotters of Valkyrie (Single-Disc Edition) had (once again) been given for dissection for extra punishment (a procedure which was refused by the university).

You may be interested in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers on modern anatomy and other uses of human corpses.