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

During the Renaissance, interest in human anatomy and the inner recesses of the body profoundly impacted literature and culture. Richard Sugg of the University of Durham explores this influence in a meticulous examination of anatomical rhetoric found in all genres of English writing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Beginning in the 1570s, use of dissective language in titles, dialogue, and allusion became “not merely fashionable but highly compulsive.” Sugg asserts that many authors employed anatomical terms to reinvent the idea of violence and the image of death in their poems, sermons, and stories. Dramatists in particular could splash both pages and stages with fluids from the newly perceived interior body. Skeletons on parade provided shock value for theatre-goers who might not otherwise have attended a mediocre play, like Henry Chettle’s 1603 revenge drama, The Tragedy of Hoffman. References to dissection in the works of famous and obscure writers alike packed more lurid punches than remarks about death itself, as the fear of being anatomized provided a powerful source of “unconscious fantasy.”

Another obsession Sugg has unearthed concerns cannibalism, grounded perhaps in Christian worries about chewing the consecrated communion host, Christ’s body, or in the actual consumption of “mummy” or corpse medicine to cure specific ailments. Even the staid royal College of Physicians included mummy in its 1618 Pharmacopoeia. John Webster’s White Devil, along with other less familiar Jacobean dramas, references “mummia . . . [as an] unnatural and horrid physic.” Generally, however, Sugg concludes that European medicine, emphasizing health benefits to the public good, raised the concept of dissection above barbarism; science eventually trumped fear. Stressing the technical, rational nature of anatomical studies also led to the usurpation of female midwives by confident and detached accouchers.

The vocabulary of anatomy can be found outside of literary works, although Shakespeare and John Donne, the latter the subject of Sugg’s previous scholarship, occupy much of his attention. Mary I, disappointed by the loss of England’s last French stronghold, supposedly remarked during her final illness in 1558 that “when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying upon my heart.” Usually, however, royal postmortems produced less drama and more straightforward information. Both the son and wife of James I were autopsied in business-like fashion by senior physicians, their findings a natural source of evidence about important passings. Lesser luminaries, even the carcasses of animals, were dissected to find the cause of death, often before a curious public. Local authorities regularly supplied the bodies of criminals to anatomists or surgeons-in-training who hoped to learn more about muscles, bones, and viscera. The best corpses for dissection were victims of drowning, since little damage could be found on the surface; hanged men displayed too much injury. No wonder that so many conversations included talk about bodies. Sugg also argues that association with the anatomized cadaver rejuvenated humoral discourse, long a part of everyday chatter.

One of the more absorbing portions of Murder after Death concerns vivisection, a term that entered the English language around 1700. “Live anatomy” performed on pigs and dogs perturbed hardly anyone, since it was assumed that animals had no souls and therefore no feelings. While there were some accusations of actual human vivisection, most references can be located in fiction, such as Thomas Nashe’s novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (London: The Verona Society, 1930), which ties the terror of experiencing death to ritual murder and vivisecting Jews. Additionally, Sugg reminds readers that in the Renaissance, it was thought that animals and females had more in common than males and females, the latter lacking the degree of rationality in their souls associated with men. Because of that prejudice, “live anatomy” seemed more horrible when performed on victimized men. At the same time, “actual and metaphorical dissection might well have appealed to men” who fixated on female sexuality.

Murder after Death contains a host of important images that likely...