The Theatre of the Body
Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London
By (author) Kate Cregan
This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment – as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons’ domination of the practice of dissection in London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist: Or the Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power, the book contends, is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House, and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier, ‘traditional’ interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized ‘modern’ body.
This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment – as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons’ domination of the practice of dissection in London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist: Or the Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power, the book contends, is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House, and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier, ‘traditional’ interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized ‘modern’ body.
- By (author) Kate Cregan
Other Titles in this Series
Disciplined Dissent in Western Europe, 1200-1600
Political Action between Submission and Defiance
Volume 29
The Ghost of Boccaccio
The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background
Volume 7
Rituals, Images, and Words
Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Volume 3
Sedition
The Spread of Controversial Literature and Ideas in France and Scotland, c. 1550-1610
Volume 28
Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers
Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444)
Volume 4
Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution
Deference, Difference, and Dissent
Volume 25
Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons
The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700
Volume 17
Similar Books
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Staging the Spectacle of Majesty
Ceremonial, Courtly Space, and Collecting under the Spanish Habsburgs
Volume 9
Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425-1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 1
Volume 17
The Embodied Court in the Premodern World
Understanding the Physicality, Performativity and Lifecycle of Bodies at Court in Europe and Beyond, 1400-1800
Volume 4
The Sacred and the Secular in Renaissance Florence
Vallombrosan Exorcisms and the Rise of Observant Mendicancy
Volume 31
Tradition, Interpretation, and Change
Developments in the Liturgy of Medieval and Early Modern Ashkenaz
À la recherche des normes de traduction
Textes spécialisés dans le monde hispanophone et francophone (1450–1850)
Briefe einer Fürstin aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg
Die Korrespondenz der Kaiserin Maria aus den Jahren 1629 bis 1645
Die Lutherbibel (1541) des Seidenstickers Hans Plock
Eine buchbiographische und kulturhistorische Untersuchung
Volume 89
