Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (review)

Reviews 195 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Egmond, Florike and Robert Zwijnenberg, Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture,Aldershot,Ashgate 2003; cloth; pp. 235; 27 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 0754607267. This book is one of a growing collection of essays and monographs that focus on ‘the body’ as an historical entity. The ‘the’ is important here as it highlights the detachment of the physical from any individual identity or personage. The representation of the body as something apart is, in some ways, an extreme version of the mind/body split. Such a separation has, of course, provided opportunities for some creative rethinking of historical issues and there have been some significant, interesting and useful studies that have arisen from these approaches. The Early Modern period seems to have been particularly fruitful for such enquiries, perhaps in part due to the existence of such a mind/body split in this period and the resulting ramifications from this. The editors draw parallels between this loosely defined period and contemporary preoccupations. In particular, the focus here is on the body in extremis. While the editors’ listing of modern manifestations of this interest includes body art, piercings and tattoos, cosmetic surgery, forms of sport, drug usage and eating disorders, the Early Modern examples are of a different character: monstrous births and physical deformities, body snatching, public dissections, public punishments and judicial torture and religious phenomena that ‘we would now describe as eating disorders or psychosomatic symptoms’. Interestingly, what distinguishes this latter set of categories is the accident and the institutional, operating less through choice than imposition. The topics covered in this collection are wide-ranging, from body-snatching and public executions and torture, to circumcision and crypto-Judaism in Spain. The approaches taken are similarly eclectic. The editors write that the volume ‘concentrates on cultural themes, yet it cannot be classified as a product of traditional cultural history’ (p. 2). They reject the ‘strict boundaries of modern academic disciplines’ such as literature and art history, yet the majority of essays do not read as a radical diversion from contemporary scholarship in such areas, at least in their theoretical underpinnings. It could be argued, however, that those essays which most closely resemble more straightforward scholarship in these fields are the least successful. All but two use images as their catalyst and this perhaps reflects the growing uneasiness with the application of literary theory to the visual, which so often seems to exclude or ignore the particularities and peculiarities of visual knowledges. While I find the editors’justifications for their 196 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) reluctance to be confined within disciplinary boundaries ultimately unconvincing, I cannot help wondering if this defence is more a reflection of current European debates rather than those in the English-speaking world. The essays come out of a project supported by the Huizinga Institute in the Netherlands. In some ways, the introduction was a lost opportunity to explore more fully the themes and issues that emerged from the project. The essays themselves are very rich and highlight the value of interdisciplinary approaches. Florike Egmond’s essay ‘Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A Morphological Investigation’ and Esther Cohen’s ‘The Expression of Pain in the Later MiddleAges: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy’stand out as particular highlights. Egmond points out that corporal punishment gradually replaced blood money and fines during the Early Modern period, together with judicial torture, with the transition to inquisitorial procedures in criminal trials. She also argues that there was some connection between the emergence of these practices and debates in the natural sciences concerning observation, experiment, truth and evidence. Public dissection and execution are also more closely intertwined than might be expected. Apart from the use of executed criminals as the source for the subjects of dissection, in both areas there is a clear equation between physical integrity and honour, or rather the lack thereof. The rituals and representations of both in art also highlight the similar attitudes to them. Cohen’s essay is similarly fascinating. She traces historical attitudes towards pain, pointing out the shifting perceptions of the role of pain and its...