RENAISSANCE forum Volume 1 Number 2, September 1996: Martin Leach

Jonathan Sawday. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London and New York: Routledge. xii + 327 pp. 33 illus. ISBN 0-415-04444-8. Ł35.00

Jonathan Sawday's book sets out to trace the 'culture of dissection' in early-modern Europe; the apparent flowering of the lust to anatomize all things that 'stretched into all forms of social and intellectual life' (3), epitomised in England by Robert Burton's An Anatomy of Melancholy. Sawday argues compellingly that this 'culture of enquiry', the urge to dissect, was a fundamental tenor of the period, underlying 'the great literary, scientific, artistic and architectural achievements of that age' which his book sets out to examine in an 'unfamiliar light. . . . through the refracting prism of . . . the science of human anatomy' (viii).
It is a fact that the science of human anatomy has a historical centre of gravity in the European Renaissance: specifically with the publication of De humanis corporis fabrica in 1543 by the Belgian physician Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564). This was the point in medical history at which 'ocular proof' finally began to take precedence over the slavish adherence to scholasticism and, in particular, the writings of the Greek anatomist Galen, which had been followed blindly since the second century. This particular moment constituted, with other great Renaissance achievements, a more general revolution in the 'whole panoply of investigative process' (65), 'one that professed to rely on the experience of phenomena rather than the experience of textual authority' (64). Prior to this moment no systematic dissection of human cadavers had been possible and Galen and those who followed him had largely been forced to rely on inferences from animal dissections and on untested theories. As this system of knowledge was gradually appropriated by Christianity it was increasingly taken as evidence of the belief that the order of nature was an expression of divine purpose. Galen's word thus became an authority to be brandished by the Church and not to be questioned. This factor essentially crippled the development of anatomy as a science until the time of the Renaissance. Vesalius' book therefore did for anatomy what Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium did for astronomy (both books were published in the same year) and Sawday seizes on this 'remarkable coincidence in the history of discovery of both the macrocosm and the microcosm' (70).
It is Sawday's argument that our innate fascination with human anatomy --'that sense of fear or mystery at the prospect of our own interior demesne' (266) -- exerts a powerful control over all our other endeavours, that the 'patterns for our ways of thinking about the world 'were derived from the human body' (3). It is as if the historical coincidence of a relaxing of the taboos surrounding the use of the dead for scientific investigation at the time of the other revolutions contained by the Renaissance was to act as a catalyst which brought the fact of our interior world more sharply into focus and transformed 'entirely people's understanding not only of themselves and their sense of identity or "selfhood", but of the relationship of their minds to their bodies, and even their feeling of location in human society and the natural world' (ix). Thus Sawday is essentially exploring the birth of a particularly modern fascination grounded in this new knowledge of our own interior world, a fascination which is still with us today, 'a fear and horror . . . based on the knowledge of our own mortality, a knowledge we share with the men and women of early-modern Europe' (266).
Since his true theme is the history of our fascination with ourselves, especially of our own interiority, Sawday is free to roam considerably far afield from his central reference point which is the two-hundred-year span from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries. This facet of the book takes in such subjects as the social effects of a veteran's war wounds after the Falklands war (13), or a contemporary surgeon's meditations on his hierophantic role as a modern Perseus protecting his patients from the Medusa's head of our interior geography (one glimpse of which would 'render blind the presumptuous eye' [8]). We hear also of the 1970s scandal of Heidelberg University 'using human corpses in order to test the reliability of dummies in car accident tests' (268). It even allows him to give interesting readings of a 'postmodern text' such as the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage.
All of these anecdotes, and there are many more culled from all manner of sources, make this potentially heavy-going book entertaining reading. However Sawday's main business lies with unravelling his themes from a number of Renaissance figures (both major and minor) ranging from Spenser and Donne to Descartes and Rembrandt. Particularly interesting is his argument that the specific concerns of Cartesian dualism--that fragmentation of the self not only into a soul and a body, but also of the mind into a self that can observe itself thinking--were already 'in the air' before Descartes came to formulate his own position. Was this already an evolving Weltanschauung in the period which began to achieve hegemony only after Descartes became the first to offer a systematic account with the publication of his Discourse on the Method in 1637 and Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 (146-7)? This is an interesting question and asking it allows Sawday to produce a technically anachronistic but convincing 'Cartesian' reading of Rembrandt's famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). Sawday places Descartes in Amsterdam (by then becoming one of the major centres for anatomy in Northern Europe) during the early 1630s at exactly the same time as Rembrandt, and allows the ghost of a possible meeting between the two deliciously to haunt his description of the centrepiece of Rembrandt's painting:
. . . Tulp's forceps are delicately probing the flexor digitorum muscles of Adreaenszoon's [the name of the cadaver, an executed coat-thief] left hand. By pulling on these flexor muscles, the (dead) fingers are made to curl, a gesture which Tulp echoes with his own (living) left hand. . . . One intellect (Tulp's) has animated two bodies, one of which is living, and the other is dead. In the dead body, the will--voluntas--has been extinguished, but the mechanism--'the laws of mechanics' which, Descartes was to explain . . . inhabit all of nature--was still in operation. In the extinction of Adreaenszoon's will, lay the triumph of Tulp's intellect. (153)

Descartes was then in the middle of his own anatomical investigations, studying the works of Vesalius, probably attending dissections in the anatomy theatre, and scouring the butchers' stalls purchasing carcasses for his own dissection (148). It is entirely possible that the Cartesian notion of the body as a machine animated by the soul was inspired by the 'culture of dissection' itself. This opens up interesting perspectives on the origins of the modern European world outlook and is just one of the many delights of Sawday's rich, dense but highly rewarding book.
Sawday elaborates on many other 'moments' in this culture. There are detailed discussions of the allegorical symbolism of the anatomical illustrations of the time(of which a generous selection is reproduced); analyses of the links between state power and the medical profession via the uneasy relationship between execution and the anatomy theatre (there is a marvellous vignette of the disguised anatomist's agents--hovering like vultures around the scene of a public execution--being recognised by the crowd with the horrified cry 'we know what you are' and a violent fray over the fate of the fresh corpse ensuing); and there is also an interesting examination of the changing metaphors of the body and how these influenced our ways of making sense of the world. However it is the overarching metaphor of our body-interior as a Medusa's head (whose horror we can only safely encounter through the looking-glass of the various scientific and religious tropes that were formulated at this time) which gives this book its power to fascinate. The historical moment when we first began to peer into the 'eerie unfamiliarity' of the body-interior and were confounded by 'the knowledge that this unfamiliar geography is also part of ourselves' (160) was to set up resonances which we still feel today. Sawday's book will be of tremendous use to academics keen to explore this previously neglected rich cultural vein of the Renaissance. However, in the end, the overwhelming impact of this book comes from the opportunity to explore the shadow 'cast by our own fascination with the structure and function of our own bodies--the fragile carapace in which we live our lives' (6), to spend time in, as the little-known seventeenth-century poet Phineas Fletcher would put it: 'A place too seldome view'd, yet still in view;/ . . . A forrain home, a strange, though native coast' (180).

MARTIN LEACH
DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY