The Body Emblazoned

An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge.
Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture.
A richly interdisciplinary work, The Body Emblazoned re-assesses modern understanding of the literature and culture of the Renaissance and its conceptualization of the body within the domains of the medical and moral, the cultural and political.

Traces the Renaissance "culture of dissection" which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly 200 yrs. This is an interdisciplinary, remarkable book of which Roy Porter has said:`it will be a major event in the cultural history of the early modern era' and Mary Poovey has called `a brilliant book..powerfully written and deeply moving as well as a model of rigorous scholarship.'

Booknews

Argues that the emergence of a new image of the interior of the human body during the 16th century, along with new techniques for studying it, left its mark on all forms of cultural endeavor in the period, radically transforming people's understanding of themselves and their identity, of the relationship between their minds and their bodies, and of their location in human society and the natural world. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)