The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture

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Routledge, Oct 16, 2013 - Art - 372 pages
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.

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Contents

FROM COLONIZATION
16
THE BODY IN THE THEATRE OF DESIRE
39
INSIDE
54
SACRED ANATOMY AND THE ORDER OF REPRESENTATION
85
THE UNCANNY BODY
141
DISSECTING PEOPLE
183
ROYAL SCIENCE
230
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Jonathan Sawday

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