The Body Emblazoned

Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture

Jonathan Sawday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134526420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Volkskultur in der Kunst

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.

1
THE AUTOPTIC VISION

INTRODUCTION: SOMATIC SCANDALS

Dissection might be thought of as a self-explanatory term, though that is not entirely the case. In its medical sense, a dissection suggests the methodical division of an animal body for the purposes of ‘critical examination’ (OED) – a neutral investigation of the morphology or structure of the object of study. But the metaphoric sense of the term leads us to an historical field rich in cognate meanings. Thus, a dissection might denote not the delicate separation of constituent structures, but a more violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment of people, things, or ideas. This violent act of partition tends to be associated with the related term (speaking conceptually) of ‘anatomization’. In the literary sphere, dissection and anatomization have come to be associated with satire, and hence with a violent and often destructive impulse, no matter how artfully concealed. A literary/ satirical dissection, then, may be undertaken in order to render powerless the structures within which the dissector’s knife is probing. Anatomy, too, is an act of partition or reduction and, like dissection, anatomy is associated primarily with medicine. But, just as in the case of dissection, there lurks in the word a constant potential for violence.

Where did these cognate terms originate, and how did the modern, ostensibly neutral, scientific sense of ‘dissection’ or ‘anatomization’ come to be the predominant meaning of the word? In the early-modern period, and throughout Europe, a violent, darker side of dissection and anatomization was a constant factor in metropolitan culture. A ‘science’ of the body had not yet emerged. Instead what was to become science – a seemingly discrete way of ordering the observation of the natural world – was, at this stage, no more than one method amongst many by which human knowledge was organized. The darker sense of dissection, however, can be traced through a vast field of human knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To this extent, in this enquiry, we shall virtually have to reconstruct the cultural ‘map’ of knowledge within which men and women once worked. But scientific culture, especially in its infancy, cannot be separated from other cultural forms. In particular, in exploring the history of the body, we will have to trace the fear (or desire) which the prospect of anatomical knowledge of the body’s interior seems to have excited.

Paradoxically, the very violence of dissective culture was a factor in the production of some of the more familiar structures of great beauty and vitality which we associate with the term ‘Renaissance’: epic and lyric poetry, drama, art, and, above all, architecture. But underpinning these aesthetic creations is the darker side of a dissective culture. Thus, in the sixteenth century, for example, we find the puritan propagandist John Foxe speaking of the Roman mass being ‘anatomized with the abominations thereof.¹ In deploying this precise, technical term, Foxe was not only hewing into pieces a rite which he despised, and thus reducing it (he hoped) to a powerless jumble of fragments, he was also constituting a form of words and a ritual as an organic body. Once this process of ‘embodiment’ was complete, then, rather than tilting at something as insubstantial as a rite, Foxe had created an adversary. The threat or the reality of violence runs through all Renaissance anatomizations, dissections, partitions, and divisions, whether we encounter the term in a medical sense or in a looser metaphorical set of registers. This is not surprising since dissection is an insistence on the partition of something (or someone) which (or who) hitherto possessed their own unique organic integrity. But dissection or anatomization is, as Foxe shows us, an act whereby something can also be constructed, or given a concrete presence. In medicine, anatomization takes place so that, in lieu of a formerly complete ‘body’, a new ‘body’ of knowledge and understanding can be created. As the physical body is fragmented, so the body of understanding is held to be shaped and formed. In medicine, too, anatomization takes place in order that the integrity and health of other bodies can be preserved. The anatomist, then, is the person who has reduced one body in order to understand its morphology, and thus to preserve morphology at a later date, in other bodies, elsewhere.

To deploy a phrase such as the ‘culture of dissection’ is to suggest a network of practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding this production of fragmented bodies, which sits uneasily alongside our image (derived from Burckhardt) of the European Renaissance as the age of the construction of individuality – a unified sense of selfhood. But, the ‘scientific revolution’ of the European Renaissance encouraged the seemingly endless partitioning of the world and all that it contained.² Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621), with its vast superstructure of divisionary procedures (a text divided into parts, then subdivided into sections, members, and subsections), is a late but nevertheless paradigmatic textual example of this delight in particularization. Once the process had been embarked upon it was, strictly speaking, endless. Who would call a halt to the ever more intricate investigation of nature? Burton’s Anatomy, indeed, as it grew and grew throughout the seventeenth century, represented the panoptic, telescopic, proto-scientific imagination at work.³ Far from being an intellectual aberration, as Burton has often been (mis)understood, the Anatomy is absolutely of its age. But partition stretched into all forms of social and intellectual life: logic, rhetoric, painting, architecture, philosophy, medicine, as well as poetry, politics, the family, and the state were all potential subjects for division. The pattern of all these different forms of division was derived from the human body. It is for this reason that the body must lie at the very centre of our enquiry. And it is in this urge to particularize that ‘Renaissance culture’ can be termed the ‘culture of dissection’.

The emblem of this culture was the reductive deity of division Anatomia, whose attributes were the mirror and the knife. Those attributes were derived from the story of Perseus, the mythical hunter of the Medusa. In this book, the image of the Medusa – or rather her petrifying glare – is a constant theme. The Medusa stands for fear of interiority; more often than not, a specifically male fear of the female interior. But, as I hope will become evident, once the body has been partitioned and its interior dimensions laid open to scrutiny, the very categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ become fluid, even interchangeable. The attempt at conquering the Medusa’s realm with the devices of Anatomia involved a confrontation between an abstract idea of knowledge, and the material reality of a corpse. And such a confrontation encountered one of the oldest taboos known within human culture. It meant violating that special domain which belongs to the dead. We still acknowledge this taboo, even when we claim to be subordinating such seemingly archaic, mythic, beliefs to the demands of science. But we are not always clear about its continuing existence.

The question of the status of the dead human body is a fraught one. It is particularly fraught since, throughout the world, many indigenous peoples have ceased to tolerate the western habit of ‘acquiring’ human remains for scientific (and sometimes non-scientific) investigation. This habit of ‘acquisition’ began in the period covered by this book, though it was not so much, in the initial stages at any rate, a case of western scientific culture appropriating the human remains of non-western cultures. Rather, some Europeans looked to the marginal members of their own societies – the criminal, the poor, the insane, suicides, orphans, even, simply, ‘strangers’ – as potential ‘material’ upon which they could legitimately practise their own researches and investigations into the human form. With the process of colonization in the ‘New World’ a new source of human bodies became available, though it never entirely superseded the traditional sources (as Ruth Richardson has shown in her book dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) which supplied the European anatomy theatres.⁴

All this might seem to be of only marginal interest to this study. Indeed, given that we, in the west, are all beneficiaries of the ‘anatomical Renaissance’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it might be considered more tactful simply to keep quiet about the whole matter. However, the foundations of a western ‘science’ of the body were laid in the period which is our concern, and many of the academic institutions which fostered the study of the body may be thought of, themselves, as being ‘Renaissance’ foundations. Take, for example, the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Royal College of Surgeons is derived from the unified Barber-Surgeons Company. This company had been founded in 1540 and, together with the College of Physicians, had operated as one of the regulating bodies for health care in early-modern London. The College’s collections of human material originated with the Hunterian Collection formed in the mideighteenth century by John Hunter. These collections, then, form part of that taxonomic process of categorization and classification which began in the sixteenth century, but only reached its full extent in the years after the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. As Cressida Fforde has written, amongst the collections of the College can be found the enormous skeleton of ‘The Irish Giant’, Charles Byrne, who died in June 1783, in terror lest his body would be turned over to the anatomists. In order to thwart their desires, he requested that he be buried at sea. The request was in vain. The undertakers were bribed by the surgeons, and the body turned over to the anatomists: ‘Byrne’s skeleton today still forms the centrepiece of the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of the Surgeons of England.’⁵

What unites this sad story of a frightened Irishman and a Renaissance foundation is this: the ‘culture of dissection’ was devoted to the gathering of information and the dissemination of knowledge of the ‘mystery’ of the human body. As such, its ends were proclaimed as being both ‘useful’ and ‘noble’. But the ‘culture of dissection’ also promoted the beginnings of what Michel Foucault has analysed as the ‘surveillance’ of the body within regimes of judgement and punishment. The ‘heroic age’ of scientific discovery, initiated in Europe in the sixteenth century, was not a neutral or disinterested arena. It was a voracious consumer of the vestiges of the human frame. Within the ornate achitecture of the Renaissance and Baroque anatomy theatres, the body was produced (in a theatrical sense) as the flimsy vehicle for a complex ideological structure which stretched into every area of artistic and scientific endeavour in the early-modern period. The positive role of this new structure of knowledge was, undoubtedly, the establishment of a regime which was to spread incalculable benefit throughout the population of early-modern Europe (though not, it has to be said, in equal proportions). The story of its heroic triumph has been told often enough. But in telling that story we should not neglect the darker side – which features a frightened dying man, a will whose provisions were ignored, and a surgeon bribing an undertaker.

Of course, such cavalier treatment of a dying man’s wishes would no longer be tolerated. Or would it? In 1994 a scandalous story began to circulate in the Danish press.⁶ At the University of Copenhagen, it seems, the practice of exhibiting corpses in the University’s prestigious laboratories of forensic medicine to interested (and paying) members of the public had been flourishing since the early 1980s. Sensation-seekers (each paying fifty kroner) had been ushered into the laboratories to look at, and touch, the dead. Films and slides had been shown. Coffee had been served. The revelation of this (illicit) practice caused the University authorities deep embarrassment, and a police investigation was ordered. But was such voyeuristic manipulation of dead human bodies simply an aberration, a perverse footnote to the work of ‘science’? Or was it the presence of a taboo that made it possible to demand an entrance fee (the price of a cinema ticket) for a very special kind of display?

In what follows, we shall be tracing other examples of such activity, but tracing them within a cultural and historical matrix. Within that matrix, it will soon become apparent that the Copenhagen ‘scandal’ (which is how we now understand such exhibitions) is by no means unusual. In fact, the very roots of a modern, scientific, western, understanding of the body, stretching back into the European Renaissance, united imaginative desire and voyeurism, together with complex patterns of religious belief, to produce, eventually, the ideal of a ‘disinterested’ field of investigation. It was only with the triumph of ‘science’, in its modern sense, during the later seventeenth century, that certain ways of understanding and looking at the body began to be categorized as perverse examples of morbid eroticism. Prior to that moment, events such as those which are alleged to have taken place in Copenhagen, would have been seen as a perfectly legitimate means both of funding the scientists’ endeavours, and satisfying public curiosity. Indeed, science once actively encouraged such public displays of the dead. But the difficulty has been (and remains) how to understand such manifestations of what, now, is consigned to a different field of understanding, which borders on the criminal. In essence, we have lacked a history of the creation of the body as a cultural field of enquiry in the European Renaissance. Accordingly, in what follows, we have to move, often rapidly, between such disparate evidence as poetic texts, anatomical works, the historical record of the rituals of investigation, visual representation of the body, and philosophical accounts of the formation of modern frameworks for understanding not only the body, but knowledge and (even) the very sense of selfhood. At the same time we have to move backwards in time, starting with our own sense of interiority, but tracing that sense back to its foundation, in the anatomy theatres, the courts (both legal and monarchical), the paintings and sculptures, the poetry, and the religious meditations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But looming over all these different cultural spaces and artifacts is a long shadow, which it is the task of this account, if not to dispel, then at least to explain. That shadow is cast by our own fascination with the structure and function of our own bodies – the fragile carapace in which we live our lives.

THE MEDUSA’S HEAD

AUTOPSY 1. Seeing with one’s own eyes, eye-witnessing; personal observation or inspection. 2. Inspection of a dead body, so as to ascertain by actual inspection its internal structure, and esp. to find out the cause or seat of disease; post-mortem examination.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

When did the interior of the modern body make its appearance? The question asks us to focus on the nature of the conceptual tools with which we have come to understand our own bodies. Those tools are historically specific. To think of the body as a ‘design’, for example, is a peculiarly western, late twentieth-century form of response to the body’s interiority, which is conditioned by a variety of technological and psychological factors: the role of modern medicine, the individual’s disease history, the importance of computer technology, even the experience of ‘planned’ systems in our everyday lives.⁷ Of course, the body has no ‘design’, but, looking into the interior, it is hard to shake off the impression that the body’s internal organization is the product of careful thought, and even economical arrangement. Witnessing a modern post-mortem, Michael Dibdin has written:

The Argument from Design has long been discredited, but its seductive attractions are evident when you look inside the human body. Everything seems so lovingly packaged and arranged, like a cabin trunk stowed against breakage with just those items necessary for the voyage.⁸

When we apply our habitual modes of thinking to the prospect of our body-interiors, certain elements soon begin to appear as ‘natural’. Is there anything, we might think, that is less fashioned or fabricated than the disposition of our internal organs? Yet, our understanding of those organs takes place within a larger mental framework which may be a product of culture just as much as it is a function of biology. Is even corporeality itself a constant? Whilst we might agree with the statement that ‘the architecture of both men’s and women’s bodies is largely hammered into place by genetics’, nevertheless the body seems to possess its own specific forms of history which are ordered by a network of social and religious codes.⁹ Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that medieval records of what we might call ‘body-behaviour’ at least beg the question of whether or not the body is the product of a cultural history. For the record of the body in pre-modern societies is one which is composed out of disturbingly unscientific phenomena: ‘stigmata, incorruptibility of the cadaver in death, mystical lactations and pregnancies, catatonic trances, ecstatic nosebleeds, miraculous inedia, eating and drinking pus, visions of bleeding hosts.’¹⁰

What are we to make of such a divergent sense of corporeality? Is the body a carefully stowed cabin trunk, or is it, as here, a mysteriously chaotic entity? Is this divergence just a question of people’s observing the body’s internal processes within different cu...