The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture

by Jonathan Sawday

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Renaissance, Art History, Science

372 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Jennifer deBie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating!

Because my research focuses on Frankenstein, I've long held this rather erroneous belief that human dissection didn't really become a widely visible "thing" until the late 18th/19th century and Sawday has completely upended that notion.

Philosophers, poets, artist, and scientists all grappled with the human body and the results of those grapplings, it's truly mind boggling. Thoroughly research and engagingly written, if dense and very Cartesian, this is one I'm glad I read and only wish I'd read before actually writing my thesis!

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sawday’s book from 1995 adds to the ongoing academic project of historicising the body by framing it via the concepts of anatomisation, dissection and partitions. Treating these both literally and metaphorically, it explores constructs of the human body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the body wasn’t viewed through a medical-scientific discourse, but in more diverse ways: via cosmology, theology, and the vexed struggle of body and anima.

Sawday’s material is broad, from the anatomical theatres of early modern Europe to the poetry of the metaphysicals. His argument about the body being mapped as a cognate to the cartographical explorations of the period is especially useful though, contrary to the title, his engagement with the blazon is rather startlingly unoriginal.

All the same, a fascinating and elegant analysis.