Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres. XVIe-XVIIe siècle (review)

This interesting collection of conference proceedings that focuses on the depiction of the suffering body in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe holds for its unifying premise the importance of interdisciplinary research. As it moves between the many different examples or states of the body in pain, in suffering or in death, the importance of the need to "cerner le sens" of these representations in their "société donnée" (9), in their specific contexts, is paramount.

The first part of this collection considers the changing representations of the suffering body in the light of new anatomical discoveries, taking among its examples the portrayals of martyrs and cabinets of curiosities, to demonstrate the conflicts arising between, on the one hand, a demand to capture the aesthetic beauty of the body in pain and, on the other, vraisemblance, as depictions of the body were becoming more mechanical. A desire from authority, but also from the artists (visual and theatrical) themselves, to increasingly control these changing representations, highlights the delicate issues at stake in maintaining a balance between pedagogical efficacy and artistic expression, and shows how a failure to do so could achieve quite the opposite and the possibility of scandal.

The second part, which gathers essays under the heading the "corps de l'âme," seeks to analyze, first, through poetical depictions of suffering, the ties between the body and soul in the works of d'Aubigné, Drayton and Malherbe. Interesting issues are raised about how macabre depictions of the destruction of the individual body, through love or war, reflect a wider destruction of the collective, for example, in those countries effected by the Wars of Religion. Studies on the nature of penitential poetry follow, bringing into question the different forms of the suffering body in the imitation of Christ and the emergence at the beginning of the seventeenth century of a focus on the ordinariness of the suffering body as opposed to the spectacular.

The third part looks in detail at how boundaries of suffering during this period were established, demonstrating how the staging of suffering, judicial or theatrical, had to work alongside social expectations: a suitable representation of suffering, that was still of utility, had to be found in between the bearable and the excessive. Contrasted examples are given of the French justice system, which utilized the suffering body through a process of dehumanization, "l'exercice de la cruanté" (177), and of the freedom found in theatrical representations, including the performance of histoires tragiques that hoped to reform the spectator. These studies all seem to point to the commonplace representation of violence on stage at the beginning of the seventeenth century, therefore not only on the Elizabethan stage, but also through the popularity of Shakespearean tragedy in Germany and Spanish hagiographical theater.

The essays concluding this volume are united by questions concerning the religious and political goals of utilizing the suffering body. The emotional power of the body, tied to royal ideology, is seen through Hardy's staging of royal corpses, and as the body takes center stage in propaganda publications, demonstrated through the utilization of the Guise brothers' corpses and the assassination of Henri III, we see how the body becomes the "cadavre politique" (14). The interdependent relationship between the victim and the executioner is then examined in an analysis of the Jesuits' desire for martyrdom, before looking at how the body is religiously manipulated in an attack against Catholic missionaries, through depictions of cannibalism and the subversion of barbaric and civilized norms in the engravings of Théodore de Bry. Finally, the volume pertinently closes with a study of the reception of the suffering body over time, of Caron's Les Massacres du Triumvirat, revealing the extent of the different constructions of meaning possible.

What becomes clear at the end of this collection is that the various individual contexts that form the backdrop to these very specific studies, whether religious (the Wars of Religion), medical (the new anatomical...