Il cadavere (The corpse). Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali (Nature, sciences, and medieval societies) (review)

Catherine Chène, et al., eds. Il cadavere (The corpse). Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali (Nature, sciences, and medieval societies), Vol. 7. Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999. 552 pp. Ill. E50.00 (paperbound).

The corpse as cultural phenomenon in the Middle Ages provided an unexpectedly lively topic for a colloquium held in Lyon in 1997. Scholars from a variety of disciplines studied the subject as it figures in surviving artifacts of medieval culture—for example, medicine, art, literature, history, royal burial customs, and embalming practices, to name the most prominent covered in the colloquium. Nineteen papers from the colloquium, written in English, Italian, German, and French, were published as a special issue of the Italian/Swiss review Micrologus. The volume provides the single most comprehensive book devoted to this subject, so far as I can determine, and a very good one it is.

The noted scholar of medieval spirituality André Vauchez sets the intellectual agenda for the volume in his introduction. He notes that the recent scholarly preoccupation with the body (perhaps as a result of the confluence of psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and feminism, on the other) has focused principally on the "living" body. It was only a matter of time before the logical next step would be taken: namely, to devote the same attention to the dead body. In Western Europe, death—be it that of the king, of the criminal hanged publicly as a spectacle, or of Christ, or of a saint—played a crucial role in daily life.

Given the involvement with the subject of theologians, philosophers, physicians, and lawyers, each having different reasons to study the dead body, it is no wonder that new words came into use to express their various interests. The word cadaver, for example, began to circulate in the fourteenth century, roughly at the time of one of the first relatively well-documented pandemics, the so-called black plague. This word, and others referring to the corpse, signaled the newly recognized importance of material bodies: physicians began to find clues to causes of death in them, while theologians, from Saint Thomas Aquinas on, asserted the integrity of body and soul as a "sacred" unit. Salvation theory began to insist on the resurrection of the body as integral to Christian theology. Cemeteries accordingly acquired new social significance, as families sought to mark the graves of their beloved as part of the link between life and afterlife.

Space does not permit discussing individual articles in this volume. The range of information conveyed, however, is impressive and fascinating. The first paper is a study of the phenomenology of the corpse and its effect on the later medieval metaphysical conception of paradise. Others discuss the status and concept of the cadaver in Greco-Roman antiquity, the religious concept of the dead body, relics and martyrs viewed as different from "ordinary" corpses, new concepts of tombs as socially integrated architecture, the jurisprudence of the cadaver, the folklore and magic of the dead body (including the concept that the wounds of a murder victim would bleed in the presence of the killer), the relation of demons to corpses, cadavers in art, and the theme of worms that consume the flesh of the dead in lyric poetry of the late Middle Ages. Indeed, the corruption of the material body is a constant throughout the book—suggesting that it greatly preoccupied our medieval forebears, who lived openly with death and the dead in ways we can scarcely imagine.

It is rare that one finds a subject that has been treated equally well by scholars from widely varying disciplines. The corpse is one such subject, however, and this volume provides a model for bringing history, science, and the humanities into fruitful collaboration.