Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (review)

Richard Sugg’s Murder after Death is a highly readable, often stimulating effort to bring something new to recent studies addressing the vital interchange between post-Vesalian anatomy and English culture from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration. From sonnets to sermons to obscure sensationalist drama, literary engagements with medical science function for Sugg as more than mere “tropes,” exemplifying, rather, anatomy’s “invasion” of popular intellectual life. The book both benefits and suffers from its acknowledged indebtedness to its forerunners, most notably Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned (1995). At the least, Sugg provides a thought-provoking addendum to that work; at his best, he transcends it. Focusing on the uniqueness as well as the transitional status of the era under discussion, Sugg emphasizes the wonder with which late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century versions of anatomy regarded the human body before more mechanized Enlightenment attitudes prevailed.

To prior analyses of the link between the scaffold and the dissecting slab, chapter 1, “Between the Skin and the Bone,” adds consideration of the fluctuating and novel status of anatomy at the borders of “fact” and “fiction.” Popular theatrical and literary representations of écorchés and skeletons, Sugg suggests, as much stimulated the scientific and legal aspects of anatomy as vice versa. Chapter 2 explores another liminal aspect of early modern anatomy: its curious association with cannibalism. Here Sugg links the anthropological meanings of New World ritual cannibalism to the Eucharist and the practice of medicinal cannibalism in Europe, showing how both worlds blurred the line between the flesh and the “spirit” supposedly being consumed. Often adept close readings of both obscure and canonical texts reveal a tendency to characterize dissective practices and anatomic conceits as “honorable cannibalism” (49). Here, too, Sugg emphasizes the wonder with which pre-Enlightenment anatomic science imbued the fragmented, spatialized human corpse.

Chapter 3, “The Body as Proof,” begins to shape the book’s fairly familiar central argument charting the rise and fall of this sense of wonder in the aftermath of the Vesalian “revolution.” At first, he argues, an anatomic understanding of the body allowed direct correlation between matter and spirit, so that, for example, a man’s courage could be assessed by the size of his heart. However, this focus on the material operated at the eventual cost of traditional paradigms. Chapter 4 adds anatomic context to the frequently treated Cartesian split, including an intriguing reading of Donne’s literary career along an anatomical axis, which begins more or less in favor of the new anatomy, but culminates in sermons denying the ultimate knowability of the body’s interior spaces. After the coherent trajectory of the chapters that precede it, chapter 5, on vivisection, feels a bit superfluous. It discusses live dissection as an extreme instance of the anatomical impulse, likewise preoccupied with the violent feminization and dehumanization of its subjects. Here the argument begins to strain in its psychoanalytic contortions, at one point attributing Drayton’s impulse toward poetic self-dissection to the Renaissance child-rearing practices of wet-nursing and excessive swaddling.

Throughout the book, Sugg does not give much consideration to the crucial continuities between Vesalius and his predecessors, other than asserting that Galenic humoral theory “was resituated and revivified by its association” with the “very new” rhetoric of the anatomized body (127). For instance, he does not take into account Galen’s highly individualized conception of organs with their localized “faculties” of retention, propulsion, etc. In a brief but provocative coda, Sugg ends by considering the fate of what he calls “the anatomical soul” — that is, a pre-Cartesian understanding of a soul embedded in “the heart or brain, or certain important ventricles within either organ” (126). Strangely, here he does not acknowledge the importance Galenic ideas would have played at this time in the notion of an embodied soul.

Within a profitably narrower scope than Sawday’s highly inclusive...