Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England 9781501729973

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Murder after Death

Murder after Death

Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England

Richard Sugg

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 2007 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2007 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Design by Scott Levine Liln'ary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sugg, Richard, 1 '!69Murder after death : literature and anatomy in early modern England/ Richard Sugg. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4509-5 (cloth: alk. paper) I. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-History and criticism. 2. Human dissection in literature. 3. Human anatomy in literature. 4. Literary anatomies. I. Title. PR428.H78SS4 2007 820.9'3561-dc22 2006035654 Cornell University Press strives to usc environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-hee papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellprcss.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1

For Carola (1946-2002), in memory of much laughter and much courage

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

IX

Acknowledgments

XI

Introduction: The Invading Body

1

1. Between the Skin and the Bone: Anatomy, Violence, and Transition

12

2. "I'll eat the rest of th'anatomy": Dissection and Cannibalism

36

3. The Body as Proof

87

4. The Split Body

130

5. Vivisection, Violence, and Identity

160

Conclusion: The Anatomy of the Soul

206

Appendix 1. English Literary Anatomies to 1650

213

Appendix 2. Anatomy Allusions in Dated London Sermons to 1642

217

List of Abbreviations

219

Notes

221

Index

251

ILLUSTRATIONS

l. Dissection scene from johannes de Ketham, Fasciculo de Medicina (Milan, 1509)

74

2. Dissection scene from title page ofVesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basle, 1543)

75

3. Drawing of a gravida from Ketham, Fasciculus Medicinae (Venice, 1491)

76

4. Muscle figure from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basle, 1543)

77

5. Brain figures from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basle, 1543)

78

6. Brain and head from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Falnica (Basle, 1543)

79

7. Dissection from Lorenz Fries, Spiegel der Artzny (Mirror of Anatomy) (1518)

80

8. Self-dissecting muscle figure from Berengaria da Carpi, Commentaria (Bologna, 1521)

81

9. Muscle figure from Lancisi, Tabulae Anatomicae (Rome, 1714)

82

10. Dissection of the brain from Lancisi, Tabulae Anatornicae (Rome, 1714)

83

11. Vein figure from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis F'abrica (Basle, 1543)

84

x

Illustrations

12. First skeletal figure from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basle, 1543)

85

13. Nerve figure from De Humani CorporisFabrica (Basle, 1543)

86

I am very grateful to Durham University Library for permission to reproduce figures 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13 (Kellett; Cosin T.l.6); and to Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel, for permission to reproduce figures 2, 7, 8, 9, and 10 (1 Med. [3], Mb 8, Mb 2o 8 [2 Abb.], 3 Phys. [2]).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For advice and assistance with illustrations I am very grateful to Ann Robinson and Dr. Sheila Ringley of the Palace Green Library at Durham University, and to Barbara Ravelhofer and Christian Hogrefe of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbiittel. Tom Dawkes offered invaluable support at Cardiff University's Arts and Social Studies Library. For much generous technical assistance I am extremely grateful to Shawn Martin at Early English Books Online, University of Michigan. Slight as the gesture is in the circumstances, I would also like to register my gratitude to those who are keyboarding texts for the EEBO project. This project, and the time spent on it, have been informed and enriched in a number of ways by Anthony Archdeacon, Anke Bernau, Mishtooni Bose, Natasha Davies, Faye Hammill, Gerald Hammond, Paul Hammond, Daniel Hartley, Paul jump, Louise Leigh, Richard Maher, Christopher Marlow, Peter McCarthy, Annabelle Mooney, Richard Newell, Stephen Pender, Mareile Pfannebecker, Alison Shell, Vic Shillito, and Claire Townhill. I am especially grateful to Bob Cummings, Paul Innes,John Peacock,Joel Rasbash,Jonathan Sawday,.and Keir Waddington, and to the late Inga-Stina Ewbank, for their intellectual support, inspiration, and generosity. I would also like to thank the three anonymous readers for Cornell University Press for their comments and encouragement; as well as the two anonymous readers for Social History of Medicine, who commented on some material later incorporated in chapter 2 of this book. Many thanks to Scott Levine and Karen Hwa at Cornell University Press, and especially to Bernhard Kendler and Roger M. Haydon at Cornell for their encouragement and assistance across many months and many miles.

Murder after Death

Introduction The Invading Body

This book traces the cultural uses of a body whose contours, convolutions, recesses and intricacies were shot through with an excitement peculiar to the Renaissance. Such excitement cannot easily be defined. In one sense it partakes of the uneasy thrill of strangeness still provoked by the sight of the human interior. In the Renaissance, however, the inner body had a more potent novelty than that conferred by its universally secretive quality. For hundreds of years, the human organism studied by elite medical professionals had been composed not of bone, muscle, and tissue, but of books. These books were chiefly those of the classical Greek anatomist Claudius Galen (131-ca. 200 CE) or innumerable commentaries on him. With the appearance in 1543 of the monumental De Humani Corporis Fabrica, by the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, a newly vigorous, assertive, undeniably three-dimensional body at last began to force its way out from beneath the accumulated weight of venerable but often inaccurate anatomy texts. 1 As Jonathan Sawday has pointed out, the Vesalian stance is forcefully clear from the book's title page alone. 2 Just thirty-four years earlier, in 1509, we see an essentially medieval dissection scene, the eminent lecturer reading from an ancient text and wholly (indeed proudly) divorced from the manual labor conducted by the surgeon beneath him (figure 1). 'l In a neat parable of the period's seemingly counterintuitive, prescientific attitudes to the natural world, the latter figure demonstrates the statements of a text based on very I have silently modernized early modern spelling and removed italics from primary quotations.

1

2

Introduction

flawed and partial experience of actual bodies. Present practice must somehow be distorted and flattened into the confines of classical theory. On Vesalius's title page (figure 2)-rightly described by Sawday as a manifesto for what a transformed practice of dissection might achieve, rather than a simple reflection of its actual state in 1543-we see the figures of the reader and the surgeon collapsed into one sole investigator. From now on, old claims will be tested, and new ones introduced where necessary. Perhaps no less important than this fusion of thought and action is the changed attitude of the spectators. Where once the dissected body seemed to be a kind of peremptory gesture, coolly acknowledged by only some of the bystanders in the 1509 image, it now floods an unstable charge of intellectual energy out through the packed ranks of dazzled and wondering spectators. The anatomical revolution of the European continent-something which Vesalius patented, rather than began-will be the broad frame of reference for this book. The more precise focus is the impact of anatomy on English literature and culture.

The Rhetoric of Anatomy As so often, this new phenomenon took some time to cross the channel. Henry VIII granted four criminal bodies for dissection to the Company of the Barber-Surgeons in 1540. In 1545 Thomas Geminus issued a pirated (and partially illustrated) Latin epitome of De Fabrica, Compendiosa Totius Anatomie Delineatio. Yet neither this, nor the English versions of Geminus's work in 1553 and 1559, left any trace beyond the immediate circles of medicine. With the 1570s, matters changed dramatically. A precise direction of cause and effect is intriguingly hard to plot. The first conspicuous pieces of literary rhetoric (of 1576) preceded the important anatomy book of thereformist rov.AR.'l'IJJV,s

POSITORVM

SVA,QVE

EX.

latcrc delincatio.

GENIO, C.AETER..A MOR., TIS ER.VNI'.

12. First skeletal figure from Vcsalius, De Humani Corporis Falrrica (Basle, 1543).

85

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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

I I I I I I I I

The Body as Proof

On a hot summer's night in 1308, four Augustinian nuns at the convent ofMontefalco cut into the body of their recently dead abbess, Sister Chiara. Their actions were originally motivated by a desire to avoid male embalmers profaning the corpse of an especially pious woman. Yet having done so, they found that her heart was unusually large ("larger than an infant's head") and decided to keep it, rather than bury it along with the other organs. Presently, hm~ng recalled that Sister Chiara had "more than once" stated "I bear the crucified Christ within my heart," they decided to make a closer inspection of this strikingly capacious organ. Within, they found a nerve in the shape of a crucifix. Excited by this special proof of the unusual piety for which Sister Chiara had long been known, they searched further and discovered another nerve, clearly representing the whip that had scourged Christ. Higher church authorities were not so readily convinced of these wonders. And yet, despite traveling to Montefalco with the express purpose of denouncing the supposed fancies, the bishop ofSpoleto and several other ecclesiastical dignitaries who examined the heart later observed not only the cross and the whip, but also "other mysteries of the Passion, to wit the pillar, the crown of thorns, the three nails, the spear and the pole with the sponge." 1 This tale, recounted in Piero Camporesi's invaluable study of the early modern body, The Incorruptible Flesh, gives us an especially vivid glimpse of how thoroughly pious wonder might saturate the raw substance of human flesh and tissue. 2 Even for those already well convinced both of their faith in general, and their associate's exalted character in particular, the strangely

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intimate thrill of confirming or heightening them as they held up these sacred exhibits in tremulous and bloodied fingers must have been remarkable. What, though, does the incident tell us about the relationship between human identity and anatomical interiority hundreds of years later, and several hundred miles north, in the English Protestant world? These were, after all, Catholic women who had devoted their entire lives to Christianity. Thev lived in the early fourteenth century, and in a country where a reasonable number of modern believers still expect each year to see a vial of saint's blood liquefY in a Neapolitan church. 3 Yet it remains clear that, for some years during the early shock waves of anatomical culture, many Protestant writers very frequently regarded the interior body in a broadly similar wav. During the first European zenith of the new anatomy, the Protestant educational reformer Philip Melanchthon began promoting a fresh approach to natural philosophy. In particular, Melanchthon responded to the startling images ofVesalian anatomy in a number of intriguing ways. In 1!'140 he published the first edition of his De Anima (On the Soul), a work which was nominally a commentary on Aristotle's book of the same name, but which effectively departed from what Melanchthon saw as the sterile attitudes of existing, mainstream Aristotelians. The 1540 I )e A nirna is itself no ticca bly indebted to recent and ongoing work in anatomy, with a large amount of it devoted to the body; its numerous subheadings ("De Ventriculo," "Omentum," "Pia Mater") make it look at a glance like an unillustrated anatomy book.~1 But it is in the second edition of 1552 that the impact of the new anatomy is most evident." By this time Melanchthon had prompted his colleague, Leonhard Fuchs, to produce his own anatomy textbook, following Vesalius; had acquired a personal copy of De Falmca; and had, consequently, incorporated Vcsalian work in to the revisions of his new De Ani maY In a broad sense, Melanchthon's two editions already suggest a permeable relation between anatomy and the soul, and tend to foreground the former by the sheer novelty and rigor of the sources on which the author draws. This confluence comes into hu sharper and more arresting focus, however, at certain moments. Melanchthon appears by temperament to have been more mystical and more emotionally spontaneous in his religious belief than many of his Protestant colleagues. 7 In keeping with his strong preference for sensually immediate apprehensions of spirituality, Melanchthon seems attracted to a potentially immediate relationship with the divine (one active and even sensed within the fibers of his own body). In chapter 2 we saw how the distinctive nature of Renaissance physiology, with its fine spirits of blood blurring the zone between body and soul, lent itself to the spiritualization of otherwise degraded human flesh. And it is this Christian physiology that appeals especially to Melanchthon. As D. P. Walker states, Melanchthon's "conception of the relation of medical spirits to the soul and to the Holy Ghost" is highly unusual, and at times "leaves it an open ques-

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tion whether or not the human soul is identical with the spirits." 8 The passage to which Walker refers appears early in Melanchthon 's revised De Anima and derives from Galen, who "says ... that either these spirits are the soul, or they are the immediate instrument of the soul"-to which Melanchthon ambiguously responds, "This is certainly true."9 Still more dangerously, he then proceeds to assert that "in pious men the divine spirit itself is mixed with these very spirits, and makes them shine more brightly with divine light. "10 As Walker stresses, this curious equivalence is not "mere analogy. "11 It is, indeed, a Protestant version of the special piety so precisely identified in Sister Chiara over two centuries earlier. In both cases the underlying logic is similar and essentially orthodox-the soul conditions and physically alters the body-but, in the latter especially, the notion is vividly resituated in a new context of empiricism, sensuous exactitude, and interior complexity. Walker's caution as to what we might take for "mere analogy" is a vital motto for the at times seemingly whimsical uses of the body found throughout this chapter. Part 1 uses the surprisingly creative diagnoses of actual autopsies as a cautionary frame for the nominally more metaphorical parallels between identity and anatomy seen in parts 2 and 3. The second of these looks at the relationship between anatomy and identity in general. Because this tacitly normative identity is almost exclusively male, part 3 focuses specifically on constructions of female identity. At times the notion of human character traits as arising from, or sinking through, the organs, blood, and bones of a particular individual is indeed manifested in an undeniably factual manner. At others, its expression probably is more metaphorical than empirical-but even then must be understood to hold the peculiar weight which metaphors once commanded when guaranteed by God, rather than being conjured simply from the imaginations of writers and poets. We begin first, though, with the most strikingly literal cases of"embodied" truth. What did surgeons and physicians find when they opened and inspected those bodies of the dead whose demise-unlike the .executed felons of didactic anatomies-was a subject of uncertaintv? 12

Autopsy and Pathology Mter the death of James I on 27 March 1625, rumors began to circulate. It was claimed that the duke of Buckingham, the notoriously corrupt favorite of the king, had poisoned James with a "black powder" and a plaster applied to his head. 13 Consequently, in addition to the ordinary preparations for embalming,James's body was presently subjected to the inspection of senior physicians. On "about the 29th of March" his head was effortfully broken open "with a chisel and a saw" and found "so full of brains as they could not,

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upon the opening, keep them from spilling." 14 This heavy flood of cerebral matter was thought by one observer to be "a great mark of his infinite judgement," while the fact that his "lites [lungs] and gall [were] black" was 'judged to proceed of melancholy." Finally, Simonds D'Ewes gave his own amateur diagnosis. Hearing thatJames's heart was "great but soft," he found this consistent with a king "as very considerate, so extraordinary fearful." 1s We do not know, in this case, whether the first assessment (of the king's brains) was that of a physician or layman. The second observation seems to have belonged to the physicians, and is indeed a fairly straightforward medical diagnosis for the period, given that melancholy was understood to proceed from an excess of black bile in the sufferer's body. It may well be, though, that all these interpretations were inflected, at least partially, with a desire to more fully and finally know James, at some convincingly solid, deterministic archaeological level. If so, the impulse was not wholly dissimilar to that of the amateur dissectors in the Italian convent. In each case the discoveries or judgments were in part a result of preexisting opinions: Sister Chiara was known to be exceptionally holy, and James was noted for his wisdom and his inclination to peace. Notwithstanding the possible influence of such preconceptions, the autopsy of James's character was consistent with contemporary medical opinion. The link between the king's timidity and the softness of his heart directly echoes William Harvey: "a hard heart [indicates blunt] sensibility, and a softer one, keen sensibility." 16 Although its size was explicitly related to James's being "very considerate" (big-hearted), that too could have been seen as confirming timidity. Harvey in fact thought that mankind in general was a timid species, contrasting the large human heart with that of most animals: "In quantity the heart of man is large, wherefore timid." 17 Conversely, it was a professional physician and anatomy lecturer who, after "the embowelling and embalming of Duke Hamilwn and the Lord Capel," noted "that the heart of the former was the largest, the latter the least he had ever beheld, inferring hence, that contracted spirits act with the greatest vigorousness," because the small-hearted Capel was more specially renowned for his courage. 1H In the present case, though, it seems that D'Ewes is doing more than just recounting a widely held anatomical belief. For he had been present throughout most of Harvey's three-day dissection of the entire body two years earlier, across 27-29 March 1623, and must have heard Harvey's theories on the heart even as he saw it sliced open by the dissector's blade. 19 Roughly midway between these two cases, there occurred a postmortem examination of a heart remarkable not for its size, but for its contents. The original account, given by a royal physician, Edward May, was published in 1639, and referred to an autopsy of 7 October 1637 on John Pennant, the day after his death. 20 May's report will be considered below. Here we are concerned with one particular response to it. In a letter of 2 May 1640 to Sir Kenclm Digby, James Howell writes:

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91

It was my fortune to be in a late communication where a gentleman spoke of a hideous thing that happen'd in High Holborn, how one John Pennant a young man of 21, being dissected after his death, there was a kind of serpent with divers tails found in the left ventricle of his heart, which you know is the most defended part, being thrice thicker than the right, and in the cell which holds the purest and most illustrious liquor, the arterial blood, and the vital spirits. This serpent was it seems three years engendring, for so long time he found himself indisposed in the breast; and it was observ'd, that his eye in the interim grew more sharp ... and fiery, like the eye of a cock, which is next to a serpent's eye in redness; so that the symptom of his inward disease might have been told by certain exterior rays and signatures. 21

Much of this appears to have been drawn from May's recently published pamphlet. 22 Mter his almost slavishly faithful beginning, however, Howell continues in a very different vein: "God preserve us from public calamities; for serpentine monsters have been often ill favoured presages. I remember in the Roman story, to have read how, when snakes or serpents were found near the statues of their gods, as one time about Jupiter's neck, another time about Minerva's thigh, there follow' d bloody Civil War after it." Going on to link this to more general and contemporary signs of disorder, Howell concludes: "I doubt not but that you heard of those fiery meteors and thunderbolts that have fallen upon sundry of our churches, and done hurt. Unless God be pleas'd to make up these ruptures 'twixt us and Scotland, we are like to have ill days" (235). Howell's fears were of course more than justified, and his speculations can to some extent be grouped with the numerous other ill omens perceived in abnormal weather, meteoric phenomena, and malformed births in this period. 23 Although it is not, then, quite the same kind of "diagnosis" as those limited solely to the individual under examination, its extrapolation beyond straightforward medical pathology offers us an intriguing contrast to the original account penned by May. At the same time, it is worth noting a potentially quite tight fit between medical theory and Howell's evil omens: by emphasizing the "purest and most illustrious blood" of the cell containing the serpent, Howell implies a contemporary belief that the soul itself was located in the capsula cordis. He could therefore have inferred a kind of demonic possession of Pennant's soul, attested outwardly by the sharp, fiery reptilian eye. A further case of autopsy tinged with overtones of "proof" beyond the strictly medical was that made upon "une damoiselle maure" in Paris by a . French physician, Hardin de St. Jaques, on 15 July 1605. 24 There do seem to have been reasonable medical grounds to justify this postmortem (St. Jaques having found in the woman's body a tumor the size of "a pigeon's egg"). Yet there are also clear indications that the corpse of a Moorish woman was an object of distinct racial curiosity. David Harley has argued that

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voluntary postmortems (requested by noble or privileged families after the death of kin) acquired an increasing legitimacy only after that made upon Henri IV on 15 May 1610. 25 In these terms, even the date of St. Jaques' examination increases the likelihood that some effort had been made to secure the Moorish woman's body as an object of particular medical interest. Details of the report appear to confirm this. While the brain is passed over briskly and neutrally (being "entirely sound" in substance and in color), the heart is claimed to be "very large, and out of proportion to the other parts. "26 Most notably of all, "as for the uterus or womb," St. Jaques has never seen "anything so monstrous"-it being, again, abnormally large (more than four times normal size) and bizarrely formed. We are not, of course, able to verify the accuracy of these descriptions. But, in addition to the hint of exaggeration in a womb "four times" average size, there is the telling word "rnonstreux. "27 As Margarita Zamora has emphasized, this term had a very distinct Renaissance sense, arising from Aristotelian notions of the composition of organic matter. 28 For Aristotle, an in-forming soul was necessary to "a natural organised body. "29 While even plants had souls of a kind, the crucial question was how fully the soul "organised" or "in-formed" its particular body. 30 "Monsters" were creatures in whom the material principle heavily dominated the formal. Crucially, however, their abnormality could be seen as one of degree. Life was graded along a continuum, with more or less "normal" humans differing appreciably in the balance of form and matter they comprised. European male Christians stood at the summit of a hierarchical ranking of life-forms, as creatures in whom form heavily dominated and organized raw matter. In the period's theory of conception, this material aspect was supplied by female seed, and form by the male. Equally, women had a greater share of matter in their composition than did men. 31 Within anatomy, the "monstrous" could also be seen as a more emphatically aberrant category. As Roger French notes, anatomists would sometimes marvel "that Nature had made a mistake in her routine work of generating animals" (the blame being put conveniently on "Nature" to sidestep any hint of the fallibility of God). However, as French adds, "At the philosophical level, Aristotle explained monstrous births as a failure of the mechanisms of generation, perhaps a lack of heat or appropriate matter. "32 This lack of heat neatly matches the intrinsically colder constitution of the female. Moreover, in the present case the subject was not simply a rare "mistake" but someone already expected to sit further down the spirit-matter continuum. Although St. Jaques' description does indeed seem to contain a genuine edge of surprise, it also fits the peculiar Renaissance notion of an organic hierarchy based on the relationship between form and matter. A large proportion of humanity was understood to be much closer to the "monstrous" than were the white European Christians who maintained and imposed such defini-

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tions. The distinguishing features of the woman's anatomy (the great size of heart and womb) conform with the routinely greater fertility and physical vitality of the "primitive" world, where people, animals, and flora were noted above all for their powers of growth. 33 Indeed, even St. Jaques' characterization of the extra bodies attached to the woman's womb may well have a certain significance, his own cultural expectations about her intrinsically greater fertility having, gestalt-fashion, rendered these automatically as resembling wombs ("toutes lesquelles figures en forme de matrice"). This kind of "holistic" view of the relation between biology and identity was not the only approach to autopsy in the period. Nevertheless, it must for many writers have formed an authoritative, quasi-scientific basis upon which to evoke anatomically grounded, verifiable images of character. To paraphrase the useful view of D.P. Walker, such images were indeed far more than "rnere analogy. "3 4

Anatomy and Identity Gut Feelings: The Body as Proof In Richard Selzer's remarkable collection of twentieth-century memoirs on the practice of surgery, Confessions of a Knife, there occurs one particularly disturbing tale. Making a routine check on a female patient, Selzer surprises her in a bizarre act of self-exploration: The woman is naked. She sits on the toilet, bent forward, her pale white feet floating on the jammy floor. Nearby, a razor blade dropped from one painted hand. The other hand cannot be seen; it is sunk to the wrist within the incision in her abdomen. Bits of black silk, still knotted, bestrew the floor about her feet .... The elbow which points out from her body moves in answer to those hidden fingers which are working ... working. 35

One might, in another context, devote several pages to the brief few paragraphs in which Selzer relates, creates, and interprets this incident. At present I want only to offer it as a modern-day parable, echoing and illuminating the efflorescence and gradual decay of anatomical self-knowledge occurring across the Renaissance and seventeenth century. In the light of what has been claimed about the gendering of the vivisected body in particular, and of science as a whole, what is perhaps most swiftly obvious about the story is the sharp confrontation between male and female. 36 The literal sexes of the two chief protagonists are of course themselves important. But compounding these are two other factors: behind and to some degree within Selzer is

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the whole impersonal apparatus of the medical world whose ultimate foundations are those of male science. Notwithstanding the nuances of gendcring that world contains, what we meet here is a brusque, robustly commonsensical attitude to the delicacies of private experience. Selzer's initial knock on the outer room door is, he admits, "only a gesture," while he is able to slide open the lavatory door on spying blood beneath it because "in a hospital the doors cannot be locked" (32). Most notably of all he states, a few lines after the description quoted above: "For a moment I cannot move or speak .... But then she sees me. And her face leaps back across vast distances. Now she is a woman surprised at her most secret act" (33). A second issue concerns these "vast distances"-the sense that the body and mind between them can conjure limitless space, freedom and mystery. And yet, at the same time, within its mysterious cavities seems to lie, almost within reach, something certain, essential, and controllable. Puzzled, initially, at the woman's faintly resenth1l explanation- "I almost had it"(33)Selzer goes on (whether rightly or not) to conclude: "All at once I know what it was, what she was reaching for, deep inside. It was her pain! The hot nugget of her pain that, still hissing, she would cast away" (34). Finally, what is no less crucial to this tale-and to the numerous pieces of Renaissance metaphor that it so vividly punctuates-is Selzer's concluding analogy: "Like a raccoon, I think. A raccoon whose leg is caught in a trap. A raccoon will gnaw through his thigh, cracking the bone between his jaws, licking away the blood and the fur.... Now he turns his beautiful head to glance back at his dead paw. His molten eyes are full oflonging" (34). In some ways this comparison is not apt to my argument or (arguably) to the woman's actions and experience. It is in fact crucial-at least in the Renaissancethat these interior delvings should not be purely utilitarian. 37 But what is broadly accurate about Selzer's parallel is its evocation of a powerful animal instinct-an instinct at least partly extrarational and involuntary, and fired by an urge to assert, rediscover, or produce a quite literal identity, a seamless fusion between self, body, and some ultimate truth about the world itself. What were the distinctive shapes that the urge for integrity took in the lifetimes of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, and William Harvey? Although the period's various metaphors of anatomical truth offer a potent revitalization of existing religious psychology (an undeniable, solidly immediate harmony-or at least potential harmony-between self, body and world), certain versions of the metaphor already contain elements that will increasingly come to undermine a dominant, monolithic religious outlook. The following examples, therefore, are ordered not chronologically or by author, but in categories which progressively radiate away from that once more secure Christian belief in the meaningful structure of all created matter.

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Piety Unsurprisingly, negative images of the body were popular with fervent Christians. In Lent 1627/28, Theophilus Field, the bishop of St David's, insisted that "if I should make an anatomy of this body, I could discover in every limb, in every vein and artery, an inlet for sin and satan."38 Others prefer to emphasize the body's sheer capacity and appetite. Donne, for example, warns against "the belly, the bowels ofsin,"which, "in sudden surprisals, and ebullitions, and foamings of our concupiscencies," are subject to mankind's old enemy. 39 Richard Younge, in his 1638 assault on The Drunkard's Chararte;; has to admit that such a subject is one that "I may rather wish, then hope to un bowel, or anatomize: for man, saith St. Augustine, is a great deep" (684). In two of those cases anatomy is explicitly signaled, while Donne is known to have been especially fond of dissective imagery throughout his lifetime. Another way of effectively paying tribute to dissection was to evoke precise corporeal details. For the preacher and royal chaplain John Denison, "the heart of a man is little in quantity but large in desire ... the whole circular world cannot fill the triangular heart of man. "40 In general terms, Denison here reinforces ancient theological wisdom with the findings of modern anatomical study. Similarly, he reflects elsewhere that "Saint Chrysostome hath well observed with the anatomists, omnia Deus dedit duplicia, God hath in the frame of the body given a man two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet and the like: that the failing of one may be supplied by the other." By contrast, Denison warns, "he hath given him but one soul; so that if it be lost, there is no supply to be had" (38). This kind of anatomically grounded theology might prompt us to wonder: is Denison using "triangular" simply as an abstract rhetorical counterpoint to the "circular world"? 41 Other evidence suggests not. In William Rowley's 1620 play, All's ],ost by Lust, the character Antonio states that he "would fain know I What kind of thing a man's heart is." 42 His servant Lazarillo promptly demands: Were you never At Barber Surgeons' hall to see a dissection? I'll report it to you, tis a thing framed With divers corners, and into every corner A man may entertain a friend. 43 Antonio goes on to respond dismissively that "tis not the actual heart but the unseen faculties" with which he is concerned. Other evidence suggests that this exchange does not, however, simply demonstrate that the joke falls essentially on the simple serving man, Lazarillo, unable to distinguish between the physical and the abstract. V\'hat I wish to emphasize here is the concrete particularity of this reference to the heart-one which, indeed, a broadminded Londoner could have heard spoken shortly before or after they attended Denison's sermon.

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One of the most impressive evocations of a tortuously involved human sinfulness is conjured via what is (at least potentially) the noblest organ: the brain. 44 On 25 March 1610, Alexander Chapman preached at the Collegiate Church in Westminster. He tells us: Anatomists do write, that in the brain of man, there is a rete rnirabile, an admirable net, that is, a heap and clod of arteries, that for the many windings, and turnings, and intricate infoldings, can not be anatomized; and so indeed, as if this of the body were for to signify that of the mind; in the brain, and the wit, and the wisdom of man, there is a rete mirabile, an admirable net, a heap and clod of manifold infolded subtilties; that for the windings and turnings, and intricate ckvices, can not be anatomized; with which admirable net, we do catch the poor fish and fowl that we do deal withal: of these it is, I exhort you to repent. 45

Notwithstanding Chapman's metaphorical aims-the net is as deviously contrived as the "subtle inventions" of erroneous human knowledge (ibid.) -much of this is clearly highly concrete. The force of the passage depends heavily on his auditors knowing how famously intricate the rete is (or was supposed to be). Again, he talks of how such a structure "cannot be anatomised," emphasizing practice rather than theory. In a sense Chapman carries off the palm for creative use of the body. Given how distinctive the rete was thought to be, it was hard to rival this evocation of intellectual subtlety and spiritual frailty. But other preachers and religious writers proved strikingly resourceful in charting God's precise wishes via the details of the human interior. The body contained intriguing clues pointing the way to salvation-at least, if one was ingenious enough to read them: "God in the creation of the tongue ... [hath] made it tender and soft, to signifY our words should be of like temper ... [and] hath tied it with rnany threads and strings, to restrain or bridle it." So explained the anonymous author of the 1603 tract Thr Anatom)' of Sin, warning readers against the perils of misusing the tongue as an instrument of "reproach. "46 Perhaps still more creatively, in 1595 the preacher Thomas Playfere noted that "the eye it self (as anatomists write) hath twice as many dry skins, like sluices, to dam up the course of the tears, as it hath moist humours, like channels, to let them flow forth. "47 As the construction of the tongue indicated how God desired it to be used, so the design of the eyes showed not only that excessive sorrow was discouraged, but that the Creator had carefully weighted their systems of irrigation and desiccation, so as to assist the maintenance of a dry eye (and, no doubt, stiff upper lip). A little less imaginatively, but with notable precision, the preacher George Benson emphasized in 1609 that "there is given unto man (as the anatomists do observe) one muscle in the eye, more than in the

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eye of a beast, to teach that men are born to look upward (in token of thankfulness) rather than beasts. "48 Such elaborate parallels were not as marginal or purely idiosyncratic as might first be imagined. As we have seen, even the heart-perhaps the most popular, and almost certainly the most ambiguous, part of the body as far as preachers were concerned-could be freshly evoked in this period. Preaching at the summer assizes at Nottingham on 5 August 1614, William Worship exhorts an unusual effort of attention from his congregation: "About the heart (saith Columbus) are two ears, a right one, and a left, both thinskinned, and anfractuous: whose use, in reason, is to preserve the hollow and arterial veins from bursting; in divinity, to teach us to draw up our hearts to our ears, that the word may pierce both at once."49 Like Benson, Worship cites Realdus Columbus, successor to Vesalius's anatomy chair at Padua, and the source for Banister's textbook ofl578. 50 Elsewhere in the sermon heremarks, with tellingly exact respect for sensuous detail, that "when the body receives a wound, at first you see nothing but a white line: forthwith comes out blood in great abundance." Similarly, "deep grief for sin is a while intestate, at last it yields tears, more sparingly at first, but after plenteously" ( 19).

Worship's creative interpretation of the human body is complemented by the reflections of Henry King just over a decade later. Like several of those cited above, King spoke during Lent, the period when the physicians' public anatomies were typically conducted. 5 1 He argues that "anatomists would have the soul learn to contemn the world from the very figure of the heart, which is dilated upward, but pointing and narrow below, to show we should touch the earth only, in puncto." "Our meditations," accordingly, "must rather glance, than fix upon the business of the world" ( 14). Here we again meet that precisely visualized heart whose shape and "corners" now so often threatened to blot out the metaphor they should carry. Already familiar even to humble serving men such as Lazarillo, we find it described as like "a nut-kernel" in an extended, probably eyewitness description of the London anatomy lectures in 1633. 5 ~ It would certainly be misleading, though, to simply claim that King's lines involve only the rawly visceral qualities of the heart. For what he precisely says is that "anatomists would have the soul learn." There is a strong chance, then, that his argument is founded on the popular (though not unanimous) notion of the immortal soul as localized within the heart. In the new culture of dissection this age-old belief had been typically re-presented by reference to minute empirical detail. For Edward May it was especially notable that the serpent should be found in the left ventricle of Pennant's heart. This was the most securely defended region of that organ, and arguably so well defended just because the soul, the very seat oflife, was situated in that spot." 3 In 1612, the preacher William Hull exemplified not only this belief con-

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cerning the seat of the soul but the tendency to prove one's claims with reference to anatomy: "It is found by experience in anatomies, that in the heart is contained a certain vapourous body exquisitely hot: which by the pipes of the arteries is transmitted thence into the whole body of the living creature."54 Although Hull does not openly refer to the soul, he does insist on the central and pervasive nature of this "secret vital spirit" (likening it in a common parallel to the sun of the microcosm) in a way which effectively confirms that for him the heart is the body's spiritual, as well as physical, center (53r-v). From the point of view of anatomy, his explicit opening phrase is repeatedly echoed by language that instructively shades from the plausibly to the outrightly dissectivc. He notes quite precisely that "the heart for matter is a peculiar kind of flesh," is "in form not fully round," and "is environed round with a closure of sinews." He talks of the name 'Jehovah" as consisting of "five vowels, the sinews and as it were the common quills and instruments of sound to all tongues." A false argument is 'join tless ... without blood or juice"; and sin is depicted as a "wound," clotted with "filthy putrefaction. "55 Loosely echoing The Anatorn_'Y of Sin, he also notes how "the learned in anatomy affirm, that the tongue is tied to the root of the heart by certain secret strings: as if nature would teach us not to move the tongue, before it self is moved of her first mover the heart." 56 Hull's fondness for contemporary anatomical authority, however, does not limit the range of his somatic metaphor (a problem which did befall other religious writers around this time). Having emphasized the vital power of the heart, he goes on to draw various precise morals from its organic design. For one thing, "the heart of every creature ... is without a bone, and consequently penetrable: onlv the heart of an horse hath an overthwart bone" (Hull rigorously acknowledges) "for a shore to support it." Therefore, 'The convert's heart is tender, fleshy, a feeling and bleeding heart. It trembleth at the word, is pricked when it is rebuked, and inflamed with burning zeal when it is instructed: whereas the impenitent hath a stout and stubborn heart, a bony and stony heart, which the Lord abhorreth." 57 Immediately after this spiritual anatomy lesson, Hull anticipates King's reflections on the heart's shape: "The heart pointeth upward, but poiseth downward. So the good Christian liveth on earth but hath his conversation in heaven. "58 That analogy, then, seems to have been sufficiently compelling to have struck two different writers with remarkably similar effect. 5 9 Finally, in a separate sermon delivered in or before 1612, Hull cements his faith in the heart's spiritual uniqueness by reasoning that "man's heart is too narrow for God and Satan to cohabit there together. It hath but three cells or little receptacles, that the three persons of the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, may dwell there bv the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity." 00 Again, although this clearly has a considerable metaphorical side to it, it seems likely that Hull's insistence on the heart as

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seat of the soul or vital spirit would cause metaphorical and actual to blur, at least in his own mind. 61 All the above cases share one broad feature. They manipulate anatomy at a time when the authority and excitement surrounding it can be readily exploited for a wide-at times seemingly infinite-range of uses. For centuries Christians had talked of bones, marrow, blood and heart in spiritual contexts. Yet in England it was only in the years after the Lumleian, after Banister, and in the ascendancy of Harvey that they suddenly threaded in all the intricacies of corporeal structure now spread upon dissecting tables or across the folios of textbooks. Allied to and underpinning these nuances were various forms of authority. Not all of these were empirical, but it is possible that the empirical aspects-the skill of public dissections, the assessments of autopsies, Harvey's vivisective experiments, and the meticulous graphic art of the textbooks-may have dominated through their sheer novelty. Those empirical qualities are frequently signaled by the writers quoted here. Benson and Worship cite Columbus, and Playfere's marginal note refers the reader to Vesalius. More tellingly still, invoking not only recent anatomical books but the ongoing activities of dissectors themselves, King talks of "anatomists" and Hull of how "it is found by experience in anatomies. "62 That last phrase only intensifies with especial clarity what all these writers admit to varying degrees: the anatomical body is now an immediate ground of proof for one's claims, not simply about physiology and morphology, but about spiritual truth itself. Once more, anatomy as a rhetorical source is too irresistible to be ignored, even by that class of men who will come to find its attitudes and conclusions drastically altering existing religious thought. To paraphrase King: the preachers may intend only to glance at the body, but others-and possibly those in the audience-will become increasingly fixated on its worldly presence. Love Most of us, at some time or other, experience feelings so strong, seemingly so undeniable and foundational, that we spontaneously cleave to the body in order to assert their truth. Even now, these experiences are not 'just metaphors" in the sense of being idly fanciful or meaningless. The intensity and the expression of such feeling itself holds a certain truth value. (Indeed, if one insisted on some measurable index of this truth, then temporary disruptions of ordinary physiology, such as pulse or brain chemistry, would probably supply it.) What we should recognize, though, is that the value and the shape such moments of spontaneous embodiment have for us is often very different from those available to the Renaissance. Typically, when insisting to ourselves or to others that something flows in our blood, lies in our heart, or is rooted in our bones, we are likely to be talking about people,

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things, or events that have been formatively vital to us. Centuries before, pious Christians may at times have refracted their feelings still more urgently through the substance of the body, in cases when its solid immediacy offered a reassuring contrast to the ethereal labyrinths of sin, conscience, and salvation. What would have been less common was an individual prepared to openly and persistently allude to a fusion of personal and bodily identity that was purely personal, and wholly independent of any divine authority. Did the language of anatomical interiority offer a covert route between those two poles (the cosmically and the personally meaningful), particularly when focused on the subject of love? Back in the mid-sixteenth century, Queen Mary was famously supposed to have reflected on her sorrowful state of mind during her last, fatal illness. When her lady-in-waiting suggested to Mary that her sorrow was due to the absence of her husband, Philip II of Spain, Mary responded, "Not only that, but when I am dead and opened. you shall find Calais lying upon my heart. "63 The fact that this relatively early dissective assertion of love was made by a Catholic monarch may well be significant.Ei4 Oddly, though, despite Mary's notoriety as a persecutor of England's early Protestants, the preacher Stephen Marshall was happy, in 1641, to compare that "love of the ark ... in the heart of the wife ofPhinebas, who died for grief when the ark of God was taken" with the fact that "Calicc is said to have been in Queen Mary's, who affirmed, that if her body were opened Galice would befound in her heart. "6 " Marshall's precise phrasing may be purely accidental. But it is interesting to consider that, while "when I am dead and opened" could easily refer to the ceremonies of embalming, "if her body were opened" is a formulation that more readily implies anatomy, and that is certainly echoed several times in claims of dissective proof. Mary's early version of amorous interiority already gives an appreciable wrench to the timeworn claims of the beloved pictured in one's heart. Elsewhere, and from as early as the 1580s, the metaphorical screw would be twisted still more vigorously or ingeniously. In Astrophil and Stella-a sequence known for its at times self-conscious rhetorical iconoclasm-Philip Sidney tells of a fish, by strangers much admired, \Vhich caught, to cruel search yields his chief part: (With gall cut out) closed up again by art, Yet lives until his life be new required ...

Similarly, the poet claims, I did impart My self unto th'anatomy desired, In stead of gall, leaving to her my heart. 66

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While the foregoing comparison here may be no more than standard rhetorical embellishment, one is inclined to wonder, in light of the subsequent "anatomy," if it does not have something of the status (albeit still whimsical) of quasi-scientific "proof": given that the fish can survive, then ... 67 It is left to Donne, however, to startle the reader most deftly. Playfully intensifYing the notion of lovers' partings as a kind of death, the speaker of "The Legacy" recalls that, at the last separation, he had arranged to be "mine own executor and legacy." He continues: I heard me say, "Tell her anon, That my self," that is you, not I, "Did kill me," and when I felt me die, I bid me send my heart, when I was gone; But I alas could there find none, ~11en I had ripp'd me, and search'd where hearts should lie; It kill'd me again, that I who still was true, In life, in my last will should cozen you. Yet I found something like a heart But colours it, and corners had, It was not good, it was not bad, It was entire to none, and few had part. As good as could be made by art It seemed; and therefore for our losses sad, I meant to send this heart instead of mine, But oh, no man could hold it, for 'twas thine. 5 8 It is possible that even the slight phrase "it was not good, it was not bad" carries a slyly irreverent edge, as if to say "it was simply human." And Donne is certainly using the rhetoric of anatomical proof in "The Legacy" in ways which already imply tension with religious attitudes. On one hand, the poem effectively fleshes out and rejuvenates an old conceit by its trick of defamiliarization-not insisting that someone would find, if ... , but happening to find it more or less by accident. 5 9 In terms, then, of its witty ingenuity, its use of anatomy as a badge of modish savoir faire, and its partly legal conceit (implying a cliquey address to the coterie audience of young lawyers among whom it first circulated), it is a piece that constructs and announces a very worldly self-presentation. 70 On the other hand, despite those relatively unsentimental qualities, the modish shock tactics of the piece do seem to coexist with some degree of genuine emotion. Indeed, if in a weak moment one would ever be tempted into thinking that any of Donne's love poems arose from personal feeling (or even precise incidents), then this-along with certain of the Valedictions, and "A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day"would be a strong candidate.

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Leaving aside such heretical speculations, it can still be said that, personal or not, the poem attempts to convey a genuine sense of the at times peculiarly "internalized" force oflove. In doing so, it betrays a certain fascination with the new, viscerally relocated (and thus certain or guaranteed) emotion it depicts. It therefore uses a religiously grounded anatomy for notably secular, individualistic ends. This itself would not be especially significant, were it not that much of Donne's poetry has been viewed as avant-garde in its construction of a relatively modern, secular self. In terms of the love poems, that selfhood is often conveyed via the allegedly self-sufficient worlds of two lovers. A kind of amorous solipsism has most frequently been located in pieces such as 'The Ecstasy," "The Sun Rising," and 'The Good Morrow.'>71 Yet "The Legacy," with its conceit of switching what was arguably the most integral bodily organ between the lovers, also provides one more way of asserting those unique amorous intertwinings of body and soul that make "both one, each this and that. "72 The desire to prove love both internally and externally is conveyed with especial subtlety in "The Funeral": Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm :\lor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control, And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.

From the initial "wreath of hair" given by his lover, and taken as a bracelet into the grave, the speaker shifts to the internal, physiological unity of matter and spirit: For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall Through every part, Can tic those parts, and make me one of all; These hairs which upward grew, and strength and art Have from a better brain, Can better do it ...

Like someone shaking out a bright net in the darkness, the speaker plunges, imaginatively and syntactically, through the space of the new Vesalian body, with its delicate filigree of nerves ramifying into a kind of fibrous skeleton (see figure 13) .73 Already remarkable for this, the poem is still more extraordinary in its seamless movements between inside and outside, cosmic and personal. Looking carefully at the parallel between the speaker's nerves and

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the woman's hair, we find the pair intertwined almost like some peculiarly inextricable Siamese twins. Donne's "sinewy thread" falls from his brain; the beloved's hair grows (it seems) from her brain. Accordingly, in a climate in which anatomy still so easily overwhelms the visual imagination, we are offered a bizarrely hybrid fusion of bodily fibers, the brain scattering fine webs within and without, knotting the lovers through this mysterious center of self and soul. In one sense this kind of dazzling slippage from one conceit to another typifies the mercurial nature of Donne's poetic talent. It also seems to at once vivify and potentially marginalize the traditional Christian soul. Mter the briefest reference to it ("to heaven being gone") we shift to the coil of female hair, and presently through the wondrous dispersal of inner fibers along which that soul fires the heated vapors of spirituous blood, making the speaker "one of all." We could certainly argue that this netlike diffusion of spirit arises from a pious impulse: a genuine yearning to more fully know what is at once theologically central and cruelly elusive. And yet, with such images exquisitely teasing one out of thought into a bedazzled, holy contemplation, there remains also the risk that the mind is too thoroughly lost in this entangled maze of the new inner body. Again, the eye becomes fixated on, rather than merely glancing at, the uncanny structures of the material world. Such a stance might of course be more acceptable within Catholic tradition, with its numerous material foci for devotion. And there is indeed good reason to see the bracelet of hair as a kind of Catholic icon? 4 Donne himself recognizes this with a briefjoke: "since I am I Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry." But that self-conscious aside is an understandable defense from one in his precarious situation, and one that does not simply neutralize the Catholic overtones of the piece. 75 Given this essentially iconic status of the hair token, we might wonder (recalling Harvey's sensuous devotion to the human brain) about the parallel with the nerves. The elaborate tracery of the sinewy thread which appears with so little prompting, and which threatens by its dazzling novelty to edge out the ethereal soul that it should serve, might also then be taken as a covert substitute for all those Catholic icons at once so pleasingly tangible and so heavily charged with spiritual wonder. But it is, of course, only a substitute for something now rendered illegitimate. Accordingly, lacking a general religious anchorage for his selfhood, the poet who made such an ambiguous shift from Catholic to Protestant faith at some point in the 1590s is forced to seek a more personal and amorous foundation. We find then that the anatomical wonder of the poem is no simple tribute to divine artifice. Rather, the febrile pulse of the spirits coils inward, drawn by the force of a secular love, along the pathways of an increasingly secular body. Just as certain of Donne's poems have been viewed as early glimpses of a recognizably modern, secular selfhood, so the body, as it moves ever more

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securely into the hands of anatomists and physicians, is a transitional zone well suited to the process of sealing the individual off from the wider cosmos. Donne's contemporary, Jonson, also found various uses for anatomy. What is particularly telling about Jonson's anatomical expression of love is that it occurs in a context in which the ostensible issue is the mutual permeation not of two bodies, but of two souls: 0 that you could hut by dissection see How much you are the better part of me: How all my fibres by your spirit do move, And that there is no life in me, but love.7 6

Jonson's central conceit is that the woman's soul has become that of the poet also. But this claim is again "proved" by recourse to anatomy and physiology. Given that the soul is what unifies and drives the whole organism, it would be possible to see this governing force pulsing through the minutest fibers of the speaker's body. Although it may be going too far to say that the soul is validated here by the body-rather than vice versa-it is certainly the dissective twist of the lines which dominates the otherwise overfamiliar trope of interdependent souls. The precise use of the term "fibres" is further supplemented by the special amorous "life" with which the beloved infuses the poet's body; in this period that latter word carried the technical sense of "spirit" or "soul," which itself implied physiology. 77 This internalized "breath oflove," then, inspires the speaker both spiritually and physiologically. It can be argued, however, that this spiritual principle is more secular than sacred. We have seen how the holy Sister Chiara displayed a heart anatomically consecrated to the memory of her Savior. Similarly, Philip Melanchthon believed that one's living physiology might (in theory) offer a measurable index of piety. Yet, where Melanchthon (and perhaps also Donne) hoped that the "better part" was emphatically spiritual in a Christian sense, Jonson claims that this "better part" (meaning both physically and morally greater) is the soul of his mistress. The cosmic, then, has at least momentarily collapsed into the private. Others might usc anatomy to gain a dramatically heightened, intimate sense of the hand or breath of God stirring their very being: Melanchthon's heretical contemporary Michael Servetus seems, for example, to have believed that human physiology was literally galvanized and sustained by God's breath. Jonson, by contrast, uses anatomy to conjure a pervasively intimate union with a woman whose influence soaks his every fiber.n; The very openness of this religious or amorous experience, passively yielding the speaker up in a trembling deliquescence of emotion, implies a notably feminized sensuality. This implicit gendering can itself be related to the effectual slippage from the divine to the amorous thatJonson implies. In his "Elegy for the Lady Digby" he had evoked a fiercely masculine divin-

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ity, whose omnipotent gaze pierced unsparingly through every particle of the human individual: Who knows the hearts of all, and can dissect The smallest fibre of our flesh; he can Find all our atoms from a point t'a span! 79

Here he allows a woman to effectively usurp that role, invading his every atom or "fibre" with a potent life force. 80 In this sense, aside from the general shift of the spiritual into the worldly, the faint gender inversion of the anatomy conceit comes across as a kind of indulgent sensuality, mingling a feminine passivity with a note of privacy which, in the Renaissance, could easily be viewed as a dubious retreat from the emphatically public world of male competition, aggression, and honor.

Identity, Knowledge, and Control In King Lear; the increasingly distraught protagonist at one point gestures to an anatomical investigation offering a certain minimal but definite explanation for his otherwise mystifying and chaotic plight: Then let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? 81 Here, as when he tears off his clothes on the stormy heath, Lear cleaves to the hope of some stark but finally irreducible truth. Interestingly, both these quests for truth involve the body. They attempt to spin the centrifugal chaos of the tragedy, and of the subject's unraveling self, back to some localized, contained focal point. In one case, the deposed king recognizes (perhaps with a certain grim satisfaction) that man is "no more than this" (3.4, 100)an essentially fragile and naked body. The satisfaction comes from a certain, almost Cartesian foundational belief: this, if nothing else, is true and dependable. In the other, Lear imagines not only the undeniably present and tangible substance of the body, but the certainty of a localized material cause for what at present remains bewilderingly inexplicable. It is of course probable that this hope to somatically reduce, encapsulate-and therefore in some degree control-the problem of evil is intended as dark tragic irony, a comprehensible yet fantastically desperate hope in desperate circumstances. Yet Lear's wish was far less fanciful than it might first appear. William Harvey himself seems to have judged an individual's sensibility by the softness or hardness of their heart (either in autopsies or dissections); while Simonds D'Ewes took a similar view of the autopsy of James T. R2 What Lear adds to the existing medical theory is that

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charge of aggression so h1miliar from numerous dissective polemics. Like the psychology of cannibalism (and not unlike the more fiercely literal interrogation of the adulterous heart in Painter's tale), his imagined inquiry combines an attractive fusion of immediate knowledge and immediate violence, reducing his adversary in more senses than one. In still broader terms, it is a form of justice and of explanation which matches the oft-remarked godlessness of the play only too well. 83 What better, in this bleakly amoral world, than that new mode of anatomical enquiry that insists on actively, forcibly seeking out truths that others consider beyond the just scope of human knowledge? If it is indeed no accident that the seemingly godforsaken Lear turns to the germ of emergent science for answers where religion has failed him, then his case is intriguingly (if obliquely) mirrored by a real-life incident that occurred just a few months after the play's first staging. 84 On 4 August 1606,Joanne Harrison and her daughter were condemned and executed as witches at Hartford assizes. Their story was allegedly rather different from those of the thousands who were to suffer in this way, as the seventeenth century succumbed to the witch craze instigated by James 1. 8 " ~'bile the extreme physical torments that Harrison in particular was supposed to inflict were essentially the product of sympathetic magic (the early modern equivalent of voodoo), the age-old technique was here aptly refined, in a kind of occult tribute to Vesalius and Harvey. For the most damning evidence in the case was that, Harrison's house being searched, "there was found in a chest of hers ... all the bones due to the Anatomy of man and woman, and under them hair of all colours that is customarily worn." Nor was this all. The chest also contained "a parchment lapped up in a compass no bigger than a groat, but being open, was in breadth every way two spans; in the midst of this parchment was coloured (in the purest colours) a heart proportionable to the heart of a man; and round about fitting even to the very brim of the parchment, were coloured in several colours very curiously divided branches"-these supposedly forming "the whole joints and arteries of a man." 86 As with Lear, a mere human arrogates supposedly divine powers to herself. In a curious parable of the limits of earthly knowledge and the Faustian overreachers of medical science, we find the heavily tabooed realm of unnatural magic meeting that of the Royal College ofPhysicians. We do not know exactly what Harrison herself thought about her collection of bones and her parchment. Even allowing, however, that the notion of anatomically grounded witchcraft was imposed on her, we cannot deny that anatomy has once again produced a wholly new category of experience. The crimes and their agent are, to those prosecuting, all the more chilling because a new level of exactitude can be derived from the complex ramifications on the parchment, along with the empirically faithful heart, "proportionable to the heart of a man" and rendered in "the purest colours." The consequent suf-

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ferings Harrison is able to mete out, "by the help of her spirits" and "by pricking the point of a needle in that place of the parchment, where in his or her body she would have them tortured," are "so restless, that a present death had been more happier" (C3r). One way to evade the anatomical aggression of an external agency, whether human or divine, was to make a preemptive self-dissection. Around 1634, in the amateur play Love in its Fcstasy, the character Charastus, bewildered by the simultaneous affections of two different women, demands of himself, Do I yet live? remain my senses perfect? Oh I could rave, tear out my traiterous eves, Dissect my heart, and rend affection from affection. 87 Relatively light as this instance is, the sudden impulse, in a moment of bewildering frustration, to forcibly grasp some single unit of blame, is not wholly alien to the more urgent demand, around forty years earlier, of Romeo Montague: 0 tell me, friar, tell me, In what vile part of this anatomy Doth my name lodge? offers to stab himself. 88

Romeo appears to be commenting ironically on the absurd notion that a social accident (the Montague-Capulet feud) should be construed as essential to his personal identity. Nevertheless, while he may feel that this social label distorts his true self~ that label is in practical terms a very real one. The move inward is therefore not merely ironic, but also a desperate bid for freedom from otherwise intolerable constraint. The diffuse and stubbornly unassailable social structures that frustrate Romeo's desires and evade his energy are wishfully coalesced into some definite nugget of evil that, like the woman's pain, can be rooted out and "still hissing ... cast away." Rather than being simply a threat of suicide, his gesture again betrays a desire to isolate something which might accordingly be eliminated. Again, while Romeounlike Lear-is imagining his own destruction, the underlying psychology of his desperate proposal is not simply suicidal. Rather, in a way broadly resembling those pious Christians who set their will to dissect the sins of their corrupted bodies, Romeo's speech implies a real self that, rising above corrupt earthly wrongs, can violently excavate the merely contingent, parasitical tumor of his social identity. The phrase "beside yourself" here gains a peculiarly fresh and meaningful charge. Romeo might, however, be described as a picture of integrity and selfcontent by comparison with a more obscure dramatic contemporary. In

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John Stephens's 1613 tragedy, Cynthia's Revenge, the scheming avenger Pheudippe passionately insists that his plot against the king's life cannot fail, underwriting his assertion with the following vow: If a design so mature, so conceal' d, So rich in expectation, so oblig'd, May now mis-carry, and repugnant prove; I'll sure prevent the heads-man, hang my self v\'ith expedition, hire a mounte-bank, Some noted empr'icke, to anatomise My politician corpse, dissect my skull, Boil tongue and heart together in my blood, Effuse them into broth made of my brains, In which, my unctuous kidney-lease dissolv' d \vith my more luscious marrow, may compose A poultice, which will speedily contrive The down-fall of erected favorites, Enflamc desire-then disanull the ends Which that affection gapes for: I resolve Thus to bequeath my members, to the sect Of those, who narrow inquisition make After each mystic virtue, physical; If our attempts prove not effectuaL (3,4, 22-40)

As sometimes happens, a more obscure and less skillful writer is able to convey the compulsive early thrill and strangeness of anatomy precisely because he lacks the rhetorical scruples that would transform his raw materials into a tightly integrated and harmonious feature of his work. By comparison with Shakespeare, Stephens here allows anatomy to write him, rather than vice versa, and it is just that raw, relatively unprocessed quality which makes the passage valuable. At the same time, Stephens has achieved something genuinely remarkable. What he gives us, beyond the sheer visceral energy of a still wondrous anatomy, is a poetic version of the more uncanny, mesmerizing, and dangerous promises that anatomical enquiry could at this stage still offer. As we will see presently, another of the play's characters, Amilcar, uses anatomy to threaten seemingly limitless physical torments. Yet Pheudippe's equally ferocious statement implies a secret desire which is far more transgressive than the proposed torture of one individual. The most obvious rhetorical purpose of this speech, besides its drama, is again to offer an undeniable guarantee. The vengeful anger ideally directed outward on the king implodes-with no less force-through the speaker's own physiological core. A displacement of thwarted violence fuses with arenewed assertion of power, suitably derived from the revenger's own spec-

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tacular visceral sacrifice-the "poultice" that "will speedily contrive I The down-fall of erected favourites." This threat of self-annihilation therefore has a peculiarly positive quality. In keeping with the distinctively performative nature of swearing in this period, the potency of Pheudippe's vow derives from its sheer length, detail, and sensuous insistence on viscous bodily substance: "broth ... of my brains," "unctuous kidney-lease," "luscious marrow." Stephens's precision and thoroughness are themselves sufficient to shift the passage beyond the otherwise similar anatomical boast of Toby, whose promise to "eat the rest o'th'anatomy" simultaneously asserted that he need not in fact do so. Yet both Toby and Pheudippe converge, not only in the implied guarantee, but in a vital sensuous immediacy. The latter asserts this by thrusting his fingers with a decisive squelch into the dense slime and fiber of his own body; the former by his fantastic, but far from arbitrary threat of cannibalism. As argued, an important feature of Toby's proposed anatomy is the way it dovetails so neatly with his Machiavellian exploitation of Aguccheek throughout the play. Pheudippe seems to take the poised, calculating exploitations of the dissector still further. For his claim is not simply a wild, uncontrolled, and bestially savage matter. Rather, the key to it concerns an endeavor often presented as fundamentally, distinctively human. He will bequeath his members to the sect Of those, who narrow inquisition make After each mystic virtue, physical.

What provokes and underpins this remarkable outburst is precisely that recurrent, tantalizing sense that the physicians and surgeons will finally, absolutely pierce to the heart of the matter: will show how and where the outer is rooted and located in certain innermost recesses of the still penumbrous human interior. The ultimate focus of this tantalizing quest is, of course, the soul itself; and it is no accident that the ambiguous figure of Descartes should finally propose a workable new relation between matter and spirit, succeeding that which had become so problematic and potentially unorthodox in the age of Harvey. For the "narrow inquisition" of which Pheudippe speaks is elsewhere explicitly linked to the figure of the unrepentant, materialistic atheist. It is hardly surprising, then, that Pheudippe is an evil character. One of the closest comparisons to his cannibalized poultice indeed derives from a speech by a still more demonized figure, the Jew Zadoch, in Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Banished from Rome by papal edict, Zadoch fantasizes about poisoning all the Christians in the city, presently swearing in his rage that he should be "more happy than the Patriarchs" if, when "crushed to death with the greatest torments Rome's tyrants have tried, there might be quintessenst out of me one quart of precious poison. "H 9 Similarly, in Pheudippe's case it is this dark liminality which

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corresponds so well to the uncertain new territory on which he trespasses. For his promise is, ultimately, an anatomically refracted version of Faustus's ambitions. 90 The difference is that now there is no transcendent external agent, good or evil-only a man, obliquely dreaming of a curious immortality and potency wholly sealed within his own defiant shell, and rejoicing in the allegedly limitless evil which can be wrenched from him, effecting his desires even after death. That fantastic dream of equivalence between feeling and flesh clearly has a reality that future ages will not be able to recapture. It depends in part on just that intrinsic potency of the body which could be either poisonous or medicinal, and which also underpinned belief in medicinal cannibalism. (Here, intriguingly, we have something resembling "auto-medicinal-cannibalism"-albeit for a negative rather than positive end.) Back in the first zenith of continental anatomy Berengaria da Carpi, one ofVesalius's most important predecessors, had warmly commended the efficacy of a plaster surprisingly like Stephens's poultice. This remedy for ailments of the head derived from an old family recipe of the Carpi clan, which originally kept one or more mummified heads in the house to supply a vital ingredient in the recipeY 1 And, from the precise details of Pheudippe's speech, we also know that the sensuous rapture into which he all but dissolves is the result of that early anatomical strangeness, rather than being a piece of merely calculated and artful rhetoric. As the hint of cannibalism ("broth of my brains") confirms, the lines are galvanized by a finally real belief in the possible unity of sensuous and cosmic experience: not simply to know the soul, but to chew or swallow it, as in the anthropophagous rituals of the New World or the eucharistic or medical ones of the Old. And yet, it may be that the faintest whisper of uncertainty is already heard here. As Howard Marchitello astutely noted, an anatomical interest in "the essential nature of the body" could be seen as a violation of the "temple of the soul." But, perhaps worse still, it could show "the temple ... opened to reveal its utter emptiness, the lack ... of an interior certainty or meaning."9 ~ Does Stephens dimly realize that the narrow inquisitions will not verify, but instead dissolve, those intriguing religious hopes which like all religion, contain a fundamental grain of the impossible? Does he in fact poetically encode this fearthe impossible hope meeting harsh reality-in his curious description of the visceral poultice that will "Enflame desire-then disanull the ends I Which that affection gapes for"? Impressive as Pheudippe's promise of self-directed violence is, however, it is not here that the most enticing secrets of anatomical endeavor are felt to lie. The most determined pressures of dissective rigor are reserved for a domain whose elusive mvsteries seem to make the violence of Stephens's play as effective as trapping the wind in a net. For the final secret, inevitably, was woman.

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"So Irregular a Passion": Dissection and Female Sexuality As Marie-Christine Pouchelle notes in her important study of medieval surgery, "the first official dissection ever performed in the West, in 1~15, was carried .out on the corpses of some women." While Pouchelle acknowledges that this may have been "no more than a historical accident," later events during the Renaissance suggest otherwise.'l 3 From the very first flourish of the new Vesalian anatomy the message was unequivocally clear. On the title page of De Fabrica, Vesalius, as both lecturer and dissector, engages directly with the secrets ofthe womb (see figure 2) .94 Both the surrounding crowd, with its simmering charge of wondering eneq.,ry, and even the building itself, with its circular classical form folding in upon that central point, all converge upon the dissector and the sole female figure privileged to partake in this creative image of early scientific investigation: a dead, anonymous woman whose skin is peeled hack to reveal the site of gestation and reproductionY" As I will try to show, the undoubted vulnerability of this figure is at times countered by a compelling, magnetic power of ambiguous attraction-a quality already symbolized here by the attention that the woman's body commands. Vesalius's wish for that attention to take an increasingly anatomical, and ultimately scientific, form would gradually he fulfilled. The English literature considered below, however, was written before Harvey's monumental study of reproduction, De Generatione (1651). In this period, then, female sexuality was doubly shrouded in mystery from a male point of view: as well as lacking a systematic anatomical account, it was enclosed, during the time of gestation and birth, by an entirely female community.

"Obscene Art": Early Modern Midwifery How, a rape~ Weak and immodest shift: Were Aretine alive: or had I brought A crew of midwives here; whose obscene art Might warrant the distinction good (William Davenant, The Cruel Brother, 5.1, 50-53).

Until well into the late seventeenth century, the practical side of midwifery was an almost exclusively female one.% Although men wrote books on this subject, they had very little empirical experience. As Elaine Hobby notes, Nicholas Culpeper, in his 1651 A Directory for Midwives, gives no description of an actual birth, "explaining that he had never attended a delivery" (xviii). Similarly, in 1678 the physician john Shirley first recognized that "if the birth succeedeth happily, the chirurgeon ought to leave the delivering of the party to the midwife," and then recommends that, should complications necessitate a surgeon, "to perform the operation more modestly, a warm double linen cloth may cover the natural parts and thighs of the

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labouring woman." 97 According to Dorothy Evenden, even the spouses of surgeons used female midwives, thus implying that women were actively chosen for emotional or practical reasons, when a male operative might at least have offered free services.m; Midwifery was therefore remarkable for this era, as an area of considerable importance almost entirely controlled by women. From a male viewpoint this sense of control and autonomy was probably heightened by the fact that the midwives themselves formed just one element in the special, wholly female community of "gossips" (originally, "god-sibs" or "god-sibling") surrounding the mother before, during, and after the birth. ' 19 The barest outlines of this situation indicate that midwifery was a phenomenon which must have considerably exacerbated the already powerful charge of secrecy surrounding female sexuality in the male imagination. Images of midwives themselves further confirm that suspicion. In 1638, in Thomas Nabbcs's comedy, Covent Garden, Dorothy notes to Mistress TongaJI that "your friend would make an excellent midwife; he can keep secrets"a seemingly proverbial association which could here be taken to reflect the secrecy of the female birthing community, the allegation that midwives were agents in illicit sexual dealings, or perhaps both. 100 The second of these was certainly a popular topic, with midwives often being characterized as bawds. 101 In The Rellrnan of London ( 1608), Thomas Dekker learns from this eponymous guardian "to what secret villainies (brought to bed in darkness) he was compelled to be (though not the midwife) yet a gossip, present at the labour and delivery" (E3r). Although Dekker might have specifically wanted to heighten the voyeuristic appeal of his account of the London underworld by this strategy, what he also implies is that midwifery was perceived as a threatening, if not quite criminal, practice-mention of the associated "gossip" only confirming that it was the impenetrable solidarity of a female community which aroused especial discomfort. As Hobby suggests, the labeling of midwives as bawds may have been partly due to anxiety about their unusual professional and financial independence (xi). One suspects, also, that male writers at times wished to provide a reassuringly low, demystified version of a figure which they themselves had overcharged with significance.

Anatomy and Pornography As the association between midwives and bawds implies, the interior or anatomized body-notwithstanding its supposed role as an intricate and dignified display of God's artifice-was often perceived as sexuaJiy shameful and as somehow pornographic. Perhaps most famously, Helkiah Crooke, author of Microcosrnographia, had a particularly fractious brush with the authorities of the Royal College of Physicians because he wrote in such explicit detail about the sexual organs of the female body. Between November 1614 and

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its publication the following year, Crooke's original Microcosmographia was the subject of considerable scandal owing to its explicit discussion "of the natural parts belonging to generation" and of "the history [and birth] of the infant." 102 These indecencies had been brought to the attention of the College by John King, the bishop of London, and the physicians had upheld King's objections to publication (with the College president threatening to burn any unaltered copies of book 4 that might be published) .10 :1 Despite this, not only did Crooke defy the College with apparent impunity, but in typically audacious fashion he hit back, stating that the College itself "in public dissections exhibited the human body of either sex to be seen and touched and that they cut up indecent parts and explained each separately in the vernacular." 104 Crooke seems, intentionally or otherwise, to allege that the College was offering the body up as a kind of lurid, quasi-pornographic peep show, rather than as education of any kind. In Microcosmographia itself Crooke first enumerates the various benefits to be gained from better knowledge of female anatomy. He then goes on to recognize, in telling language, that "on the contrary there was only one obstacle"-this being that: "to reveil the veil of Nature, to profane her mysteries for a little curious skillpride, to ensnare men's minds by sensual demonstrations, seemeth a thing liable to heavy construction." 10 " He decides, however, that the advance of learning cannot be held back by the individual misuses of impure readers: "Shall we therefore forfeit our knowledge because some men cannot contain their lewd and inordinate affections?" ( 197). What does this kind of controversy suggest about the "scientific" status of anatomy more generally? One way to approach this question is via Linda Williams's distinction between soft- and hard-core pornography. As Sawday notes, Williams "follows Foucault and Gertrud Koch in arguing that film pornography is part of a 'drive for knowledge."' He goes on to quote Williams's belief that: "In contrast to both mainstream fictional narrative and soft-core indirection, hard core tries not to play peekaboo with either its male or female bodies. It obsessively seeks knowledge, through a voyeuristic record of confessional, involuntary paroxysm, of the 'thing' itsclf." 106 Both the scandal of Crooke's indecent chapters, and his own construction of the physicians' lectures, suggest that Renaissance anatomy in fact failed to exercise the unflinching gaze of hard-core pornography-that peculiarly ambiguous drive for pleasure and knowledge which, as Sawday noted, is potentially anatomical in its attempt to pierce relentlessly into "the 'thing' itself." 107 To paraphrase Koch, anatomy does at this stage still "play peekaboo" in the evasive, indirect manner of soft-core erotica. Or, as Patricia Parker puts it in her discussion of the relationship between anatomy, secrecy, and female sexuality, the Renaissance shows here "a much more complicated impulse" than that normally unblinking "scrutiny of the gaze" so characteristic of dissection. Rather, there is "a desire both to see and not to see." 10B Interestingly, that ambivalence neatly matches the dualistic psy-

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chology of anatomical proof. The sudden plunge within, seeking a viscerally rooted confirmation of feeling or faith, is implicitly countered by a fear that, looking too hard, one may fail to locate what is sought. To put it another way: occasional single forays into the body are very different from the attitude of systematic, impartial, and experimental dissection that men such as May and Harvey wished to promote. Crooke's work, and certain other, more definitely pornographic writings give us a solely male perspective. We also know, however, that at least one Renaissance gentlewoman was sufficiently nervous about having her body handled by a male surgeon or embalmer after her death to address the issue specifically in her will. Mary, countess of Northumberland, desired her relatives "not in any wise to let me be opened after I am dead. I have not loved to be very bold before women, much more would I be loath to come into the hands of any living man, be he physician or surgeon. " 109 Whatever the exact motivations for this reluctance, the countess may well have been correct if she suspected that the medical realm was not always wholly detached from that of sexuality. 11 For the scandal surrounding Crooke's supposedly obscene chapters extended, albeit less sensationally, to a number of other medical or quasi-medical texts. Predictably, the association between such works and outright pornographv was more overt in the classic libertine era of the Restoration. 111 But it had begun even in the late Elizabethan period, with a text of very doubtful attribution, known as The Problems of Aristotle. Written as a series of questions about the nature of the human body, this popular work evidently failed to convince all its readers of its professed interest in the spiritual dignity of human anatomy. 112 Rather, despite its details of female sexuality being relatively slight and mildly phrased by comparison with the similar Aristotle\ lVIaster-piece, it quickly became synonymous with sexuality in particular, rather than with the body in general:

°

I would you should know it, as few teeth as I have in my head, I have read Aristotle's Problems, which saith; that woman receiveth perfection by the man. What then be the men [sic]? Go to, to bed, lie on your back. 113

From this in 1602 we find Robert Anton, in 1616, still less equivocal when he comments on the lustfulness of the present "hot rutting age"-a period in which the bawdy times tutor their goatish sense In ribald sciences, and rio commence Proficients in the art of midwife try. Pages can non-plus deep obscenity In Aristotle's Problems: and in fine, He's best, that best disputes in Aretine. 114

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Not only does the Problems here keep company with Pietro Aretino' s notoriously pornographic sonnets (and with "midwife try") but the issue of the vernacular that had so recently dogged Crooke is implied in the distaste for "pages" having access to such materiaL II.'> One can thus begin to see why both actual and metaphorical dissection might well have appealed to men at once fascinated, attracted, and unsettled by the complex significance offemale sexuality. It offered a supposedly legitimate and clarifying male technique especially powerful in its claims to fix, expose, and label what was hidden and mysterious. Anton himself, in the same work in which he attacked the "hot rutting age," seems to oppose dissection to the shadowy and implicitly degraded practice of midwifery when he hopes that "my keen pen" can "with art dissect, I The anatomy of woman." Furthermore, these lines are appended to a denunciation of female attendance at plays-an alleged vice marked by female freedom, both in the most obvious social sense and, perhaps more subtly, insofar as women's imaginations are th)ls further pitched beyond male comprehension.116 Similarly, at one point in Volpone, Corvino feels moved not only to lock his beautiful wife Celia in her room, but to forbid her to even "look toward the window" with the threat, Nay, stay, hear this-let me not prosper, whore, But I will make thee an anatomy, Dissect thee mine own self, and read a lecture Upon thee to the city, and in public (2.5, 69-72)

Corvino here is unnerved by female mobility-both of a physical kind, and of that wandering desire which might be gauged from wanton glances through the casement. As that instance neatly implies, however closely the woman is secured, she may still be perceived as dangerously unstable in her desires: something in her will continue, frustratingly, to elude male control and knowledge. This, however, does not prevent writers from persistently attempting to pin down and lay open the curious specimen, once and for all. Thus, in Shirley's play Changes: or Love in a Maze, the character Gerard, bewildered by the supposed cruelty of Aurelia, wishes that he might cut the knots of this labyrinth with the kind of final directness and precision promised by anatomy: I would entreat the surgeons to beg Some woman for anatomy, nothing else: I have heard their lectures very much commended, And I'd be present when they read upon

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Chapter 3 Her heart: for sure there is much diflerence Between a woman and a man, in that Same thing we call a heart, they do not love As we do ...

That investigation does for once seem more intended for the consolation of knowledge than of violence. Just how precisely it is tied to Gerard's disillusionment about "the soft and gentle constitutions" of women (now revealed as "hard and tyrannous") is difficult to say, in the absence of any stronger clues. 117 The examples of Lear and Harvey, though, urge us to keep the possibility in mind.

Anatomy and Sacred Violence A., with the case of Stephens, the writer who pursued the anatomizing of women the most thoroughly and intriguingly in this period was a very minor one. In 1603, having labored at the summit of what he describes as 'Wolves Hill my Parnassus," William Percy-brother of the "Wizard Earl," Percy of Northumberland-completed his The Faery Pastoral or Forest of ElvesY 8 Almost certainly intended for private amateur performance, this piece can be broadly described as a juvenile misogynistic fantasy, conveniently translated to a "fairy" world in which all-too-human failings are rewritten in exaggerated and at times bizarre form. The attitude of Percy and his male characters to the women in the play is a mixture of clumsy lust, antagonism and incomprehension. 11 ~) The "Faery Huntsmen," Learchus, Picus, and Hippolon, have designs on the "Faery Huntswomen," Florida, Camilla, and Fan cia. In an ensuing fairy "battle of the sexes" (one that might plausibly have been inspired by the strife of Oberon and Titania) the male huntsmen are first tricked, in course of their amorous advances, and subsequently trick and "punish" the huntswomen-with, one cannot help but notice, a convenient sense of merely "doing justice." After hearing of Hippolon's deception by Hypsiphyle (the "princess of Elvida"), Picus and Learchus indignantly berate womanhood in general. Already hinting at the recurrent issue of containment and control when he wonders "how shall I lay I Just terms to compass in the wall of your I Defects?," Learchus presently asserts that if this sex Were anatomised yon should find Within the hollows of their breasts to lurk Such falsity, lies, and perversity, Such rancour, malice, and enmity, Such tilth and such corruption, That Mom us who glan·d man would here

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Unto the woman once discovered Have pierced thorough ev'ry tripe and gut, Thorough the heart, the vena cava, Through ev'ry vein and ev'ry artery with Picus immediately coming in on cue to continue: Through all the nerves, the sinews and the muscles, The lungs, the panch, the midriff and the bladder, Into the apple and in the crystalline The breast plate and the rigid weasan-pipe, The fantasy and the chest of memory, Common sense, occiput and synciput. 120 Broadly echoing the frustrated energies of Lear, Romeo, and especially Pheudippe, this remarkable passage not only shows but ferociously acts out a misogyny whose unbearable pitch of rage spontaneously explodes into three dimensions. In accordance with an anger founded substantially on incomprehension, the anatomy conveniently mingles a partly legitimized "professional" violence with the more subtle-but perhaps also more satisfying-aggression of a supposedly final knowledge offering an oblique sense of control. Similarly, the force and detail of the speeches indirectly conjure an "essential embodiment" of womankind arguably more tangible and accessible than the actual three dimensions of the tormenting huntswomen's bodies. Beneath the more obvious particular motivation for this attack, however, a second, more powerful fantasy once again appears to be at work. In one sense, the sheer thoroughness of the visceral assault, with its obsessively exhaustive labeling, can be seen as a desire to definitively map and fix female mystery. This foreshadowing of a detached medical o~jectivity is arguably consistent with the satirical rigor _of Mom us, whose ridiculing and irreverent stance fuses a kind of "necessary inhumanity" with a moral version of pathological autopsy. It can also be argued, however, that the more conventional, uncontrolled violence so heatedly animating these lines was an ironic form of piety, obliquely reflecting the excitement of sacred anatomy. The potential glimpse of a later, more medically limited and systematic attitude (the body talking about itself rather than about its Creator) that Percy gives is, therefore, a very partial and isolated one. For it is precisely the unrelenting violence of the speech which presently leads the characters hack from the multiple components of the body to a typically single, underlying essence-Learchus picking up from Picus again with: He [Momus] would have beaten their bones to splinters, He would have pounded those splinters to bran,

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Chapter 3 He would have bolted this bran to meal, He would have mixt this meal with drops, He would have knead these drops to stiffning dough, He would have bakt splinter, bran, meal, drops, dough, In one consent, in jaw, of scorching ove Both To wrest with near regard and careful heed That humour forth and calcind quintessence Of their infirmity.

(2. 7, 75-84)

At a quite basic level, Learchus's speech, with its insistent hammering repetition and pounding rhythm, gives a still more dramatic mimesis of the physical (and probably sexual) force the characters would like to inflict on their female counterparts. Clearly, however, far more than just revenge or sexual dominance is at stake here. While the strong overtones of some kind of sexual climax are hard to ignore, the fantasy of invading the "hidden essence" of the female body also involves a compulsive and ferocious drive for absolute knowledge. 121 The most obvious clue to that larger quest is the word "quintessence," an index of identity loosely associated with "humour[s]" but here evidently surpassing them. That explicit link between alchemical and visceral distillations (both notably derived from tortuously material processes) is reinforced by a later "punishment" of a female character, when Florida is rather improbably trapped and "fired" by Learchus in a kiln. This torment draws from Florida the telling lament: Is there no hope of my releasemenL? say, But like unto alembic drop by drop Shall I consume to hyle, within this kiln? ( 4.2, 60-62)

Here the female quintessence is again arrived at by a form of sustained and relatively controlled violence. i\lthough broadly connoting alchemy ("like unto alembic drop by drop I Shall I consume"), the lines involve an apt reduction of woman to pure matter ("hylc") -and one that parallels the (presumably negative) "soul" drawn from a realm of "filth and corruption." Given the alchemical activities of William's brother, it is interesting to consider that anatomy and alchemy may have both offered quite locally immediate and concrete media for the revelation of some unshakeable inner certain tv. Even this hinted association of anatomy with alchemy, however, is superseded by the further rendering of absolute knowledge which Learchus's pounding of bones presents. For the positive, seemingly indestructible essence at the core of the dissection is, extraordinarily, a eucharistic one. 122

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This unlikely conflation of sacred and secular knowledge contains three distinct but related aspects. First, it presents a kind oflow, yet serious myth of immortality, via the startling resilience of a human entity that at once exceeds and crucially includes the body. The seemingly pathological, insatiable frenzy of annihilation effectively uses both the compelling detail of God's most artful creation, and the anatomical practice in which it is increasingly resituated, as a medium that might potentially "falsify" the promise of eternallife. 123 From this viewpoint, the violence acted out with such plosive force ("beaten," "pounded," "bolted") may be viewed simultaneously as a tremulous fervor sparked by proximity to the divine, and an agitated fear of its possible absence. Notwithstanding such ambivalence, that fear seems here to be subordinated to the celebratory product which literally rises from the ashes-or splinters-of destruction. Like the potentially murderous sectioning and partition of literary anatomies, the unflinchingly persistent atomization of matter leads not to a final extinction, but to a triumphant revelation. It may, moreover, be significant that this quasi anatomy has penetrated inside even the bones themselves. If, consequently, the "bran" presently "bolted ... to meal" is effectively the marrow of the bones, then Percy's fantastical host is constituted of an especially dense, integral, and deeply rooted corporeal matter, and one whose increasingly popular use to express a rich core of truth could, as Pheudippe indicates, have a heavily sensuous resonance. 124 Second, the detail and immediacy of the process conveyed by Percy do indeed seem to act as some kind of bizarre substitute for the older, arguably more direct and magical form of the Eucharist that Catholicism offered in its notion of transubstantiation. As Dennis Flynn has noted, "No family in sixteenth-century England suffered more for its Catholicism than the house of Percy," with William's brother, Henry, perilously assisting his father's pro-Catholic intrigues in some of the most dangerous years of anti-Catholic repression. Despite the little we know about William himself, it seems unlikely that he would have forgotten this, or his grandfather's execution after the Catholic rebellion of 1536. 125 It is not entirely surprising, then, that the lengthy and relatively exact dissection, reduction and essentializing of the female body constitute a kind of anatomically reworked Mass. Within this strange ritual, the communards gain the added, active thrill of an essence directly pummeled under the speaker's fingertips, as if in a heightened reexpression of eucharistic participation. Even the violence that so powerfully galvanizes these lines testifies to an intensely felt engagement with a cosmically meaningful body. The undertones of cannibalism permeating the strange creation of this "bread of femininity" are of course broadly consistent with the parallels suggested in chapter 2, between the "savage" eating of spirit in the New World and its "sanctified" counterpart in the Old. More precisely, in this case we might also wonder about the ambiguous nature of an "anatomy" upon a body that has not been explicitly killed, or described

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as dead. If there is indeed some whispered fantasy of transubstantiation here, is it then important to achieve that mystic contact with a live body, just as-for Catholicism-the alteration of bread and wine must be a "live" process, occurring effectively in real time? The eucharistic element of the passage is further complicated, however, by a third feature. For it is accomplished neither by a priest nor a Christian deity. The ostensible agent is a pagan god, and his effectual assistants are, as we have seen, all too human in their attitudes, notwithstanding their supposedly supernatural status. Despite Percy's Catholic connections, we seem here to find a poetically encoded comment on the distinctively Protestant attitude to natural philosophy. Momus, Picus, and Learchus, like those ambitious Puritan experimenters ofWebster's Greatlnstauration, wish to actively engage with-and effectively create-an essence of the supernatural which is no longer localized in the rituals of either con- or transubstantiation. Rather, just as the Catholic priest essentially redeems base earthly matter in his blessing of the host, so the key to the oddly positive result of dissective violence is an underlying sense that an initially corrupt quality can be transformed (by male, quasi-scientific intervention) into a quintessence. If, like the spiritual scientists of the lnstauration, you wished to free mankind from (among other things) the taint of sickness, what better place to start than with the essence of woman, whose first ancestor had brought disease upon a once immortal and unassailable human organism? For all its comic surface, Percy's remarkable invention echoes the eucharistic mediation of Paracelsian physicians, transforming human flesh into the purest spiritual medicine, in their newly democratic and utilitarian version of the Christian Mass. Indeed, as Camporesi reminds us, a medicine "distilled" either from the pulverized mass of an entire corpse (though not limited to Paracelsian physic) was in fact known as aqua divina. 12 (' As such comparisons indicate, this distinctively Protestant version of the Mass is a far more problematic one than (for example) the role of martyrdom as an oblique form of transubstantiation.127 NeYertheless, much of what galvanizes the whole furious creation of this "quintessence of infirmity" is a continuing adherence to, and desire for closer contact with, the sacred. Some thirty-seven years later, in a second myth of female anatomy, matters are noticeably different.

Anatomy and Secular Fetishism Thomas Killigrew' s popular play The Parson's Wedding ( 1664) was considered so bawdy, even by Restoration standards, that it was acted entirely by women. 128 In act 4 of Killigrew's pedestrian comedy (evidently first composed around 1639 or 40), the Captain, his "Livery Punk" (Mistress Wanton), and messers "Wild" and "Careless" are debating the justice of a trick played on the "old stallion-hunting widow," "Lady Love-all," now trapped in

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a tavern pending payment of the reckoning. 129 Wild feels that· "the jest is gone far enough; as I live, I pity her"; to which Wanton dismissivelyresponds: Pity her? hang her, and rid the country of her, she is a Thing wears out her limbs as fast as her clothes, one that never Goes to bed at all, nor sleeps in a whole skin, but is taken to pie-ces Like a motion, as if she were too long; she should be hang' d for Off'ring to be a whore.

The Captain supports this claim, adding: As I live, she is in the right; I peep'd once to see what She did before she went to bed; By this light, her maids were dissecting Her; and when they had done, they brought some of her to Bed, and the rest they either pinn'd or hung up, and so she lay dismembred till morning; in which time, her chamber was strew' d All over, like an anatomy school. 130

This strange depiction implies a woman whose elaborate clothing and cosmetically sculpted figure fuse deceptively, until her artificial creation is "anatomised" at nighttime. At the simplest level, then, we are presented with a kind of pathological autopsy which shows that Lady Love-all is not what she seems. This procedure is also indeed vivisective in a subtle but important sense, anatomizing its victim alive in order for her to fully suffer the knowledge of her own inadequacy. Throughout the play, Love-all is the most harshly objectified of all the characters, allowed no chance to engage the audience's sympathy and continually "used" purely for comic value. The vivisection can thus be seen as an amplification of her more general fate, taking one personal quality as a fundamental essence, while remaining narrowly oblivious of any sentimental human concerns. A little further scrutiny, however, suggests that in tact the passage is in many ways interesting because it shows us a male writer frustratedly circling around an essence that cannot finally be closed into his curious fist. First, Killigrew was suspiciously fond of the passage. He reproduced it again, with some alteration, in another play, Thomaso-a work apparently written in 1654, so that its composition postdates that of The Parson's Wedding. 131 In the first act, two courtesans, Saretta and Paulina, are commenting jealously on their popular and beautiful rival, Angelica Bianca, and accordingly deriding the follies of men: some fools court quality, a great Lady, though she stink above the allay of amber; one that never goes to bed, all, nor sleeps in a whole skin, one whose

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Chapter 3 teeth, eyes and hair rests all night in a box, and her chamber lies strew'd with her loose members, high shoes, false back, and breasts; while he hugs a dismembred carcass, such as is fitter for an antiquary's study then a lover's arms. 132

Here the "false back, and breasts" confirm the ostensible motivation for dissecting the woman's person. ""11at, though, is the underlying impulse for this strange conceit, so fascinating to Killigrew that he felt compelled to use it twice? I will argue that in both plays, various forms of dissection are used against qualities of the female character that, while certainly retaining an important charge of mystery, are all notably limited, and-one might saymodern, by comparison with the sacramental anatomy of William Percy. An overall framing device is found in both plays, with each of these dissections being mediated by women-first, the maids, and second, the jealous rivals. That further enclosing layer of the feminine might be seen to loosely parallel the culturally charged community of female midwives, or the particular groupings of professional women and "gossips" in individual birth chambers. In keeping with the largely Restoration qualities of Killigrew' s famously bawdy work, however, these female mediators or guardians seem to function more as a device for heightening sexual interest than as a densely mysterious boundary. In the case of the Captain's spying, most notably, they give to the scene of male voyeurism the extra thrill of invading a supposedly authentic, wholly female, and especially private realm: a scenario already familiar from Aretina's pornographic Dialogues, and increasingly popular through the Restoration, when the similar revelations of "girls together" were offered in L 'Ecole des }zlles. 133 The different functions of anatomy in Killigrew's plays can be broadly grouped into two areas: first, their relation to fetishized female bodies, and second, the way they help control female sexuality. The first, arguably most important effect of the dissections is to sever the respective women into a set of fetishized parts. In terms of the anatomy passages themselves, it is the second that most clearly exposes that element, precisely identifYing those "loose members" detached from the woman at bedtime: "teeth, eyes ... hair ... high shoes, false back, and breasts." All of these items correspond remarkably closely to Freud's identification of sexual fetishes. Perceiving little girls as "castrated" because they lacked a penis, the little boy-Freud argues-fears such castration himself, and therefore unconsciously wards it off by substituting a fetish object for the "lack" which the girl displays. As Freud further states: "What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen)." 134 The hair, eyes, andespecially-the teeth, certainlv fit the first of these categories, with the shoes

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and the false back and breasts all more or less suited to the second (the foot itself also being, as Freud stresses, "an age-old sexual symbol") .135 In the later play the "teeth, eyes and hair" are all contained in a box. Although this itself gives us the most obvious symbol of female sexuality, it perhaps also indicates that the room as a whole (constructed in the first play as an intimately female domain and containing the scattered "loose members") serves to echo the motif of secretive enclosure. In the earlier comedy, the dissected pieces of clothing-presumably including undergarments-clearly match those Freudian fetish objects related to "the person" and their sexuality. Additionally, a recurrent feature of .The Parson's Wedding offers another fetishized substitute. Various characters are continually vying with one another to get possession of a string of pearls owned by Love-all. 136 These are tellingly overvalued by comparison with their actual worth, and seem not destined for sale in any case. Their ownership symbolizes to the audience an open manipulation of Love-all, and one linked to a desire to control some graspable essence of female sexuality. The acquisition of the pearls is tinged with a particularly cool assertion of detached power when the Captain, revealing the stratagems of jolly, who first secured them, tells Love-all herself that a quarrel between Jolly and Wild ended in a bet of a buck-hunting-nag, that sometime to day he would bring a neck-lace and chain of pearl of yours (not stol'n, lmtfreely given) to witness his power. 137 In this case there seems especially to be a dualistic quality to the fetish object. The fact that it is comprised of precious stones aligns it to some extent with more heavily mysticized treatments of the female genitals, such as the "mine of precious stones" to which Donne so heatedly approaches in "Elegy 19." 138 At the same time, while Donne's poem clearly betrayed libertine overtones of women as transferable commodities, it did at least nominally focus on one woman as the possession of one man. Love-all by contrast is persistently and irreverently degraded throughout the play, as a kind of common property which is derided as much as it is desired or exploited. Similarly, the pearls are a persistent focus of attention and a subject of jest, lacking the mystic overtones of the "mine," which was further removed by its association with the still alien world of America. In Thomasa, Angelica is effectively her own fetish, being at once fantastically desirable and yet nominally available to all, having put herself up at high price for sale. Moreover, the way in which she is effectively split from herself through this commodification is neatly symbolized by the fact that the most familiar and accessible image of her to the townsfolk is the picture that, with her price, "hangs upon the door" of her house (1.1, 41) .139 In The

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Parsons Wedding, the precisely Freudian character of the fetish is confirmed by an otherwise peculiarly arbitrary passage. The "dull suitor," Mr Constant, and the courtier and "humorous gentleman," Mr Jolly, are discussing the former's female cousin. Referred to as "the Independent Lady," this woman is apparently renowned for her obsession with charitably assisting the sicknot simply financially, but with some degree of precise interest in medicine. After several innuendoes on this topic-echoing not only the convergence between medicine and pornography but also the ambiguously presented male sexuality we will encounter in chapter 5-we hear Jolly insist that infirmity of some kind is the best way to win the Independent Lady's heart. For this reason, he claims her gentleman-usher broke his leg last dog-days, merely to have the honour to have her set it, a foul rank rogue, and so full of salt humours, that he posed a whole college of old women with a gangrene; which spoil' d the jest, and his ambling hefore my Lady, by applying a hand-saw to his gartring place; and now the rogue wears booted bed-staves, and destroys all the young ashes to make him legs. (1.3, 84-90)

The "Independent Lady," then, has the power to make a man willingly cripple himself-a version of castration anxiety neatly confirmed not only by the ultimate loss of this member, but also insofar as the "she-chirurgeon" "hates a man with all his I Limbs" (1.3, 100, 82-83). Moreover, in this period even the phrase "gentleman usher" was occasionally used as slang for "penis"-a resonance that would surely be heard in this play if anywhere. 140 Here, then, we find an anticipation of Freudian fetish theory, with its emphasis on perceived castration. As noted, the passage in question is otherwise arbitrary and nonfunctional in terms of plot, with the Independent Lady failing to appear again in the play. More precisely, the female figure is at once broadly maternal in her charitable attentions, partially sexualized in her handling of the "members" of naked male "patients," and parodied as attempting a nominally male activity in which she conspicuously fails. 141 The second function of Angelica Bianca and Love-all is to act as icons of female sexuality-ones which on the whole combine those elements of fantasy acceptable to men, while conveniently excluding more unnerving and unknowable qualities. Angelica Bianca, most obviously, is an embodiment of available female sexuality who is professionally detached from the less easily manageable realm of generation and reproduction. A seemingly legendary beauty all the more desirable because she has only just become available following the recent death of her previous "patron," she now offers herself very publicly for sale:

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Know then, since the General's death she is exposed to sale; Her price and picture hangs upon the door, where she sits in public view drest like Aurora, and breaks like the day from her window; she is now the subject of all the love and envy of the town (Thomaso, 1.1, 40-44)

Again, while she is a still greater focus of attention than the ambiguous Loveall, and is said to epitomize all possible aesthetic and sensuous virtues, her relatively two-dimensional quality is confirmed not only by her overt commodification, but by the interesting detail of her being immune to love. 142 She is wholly worldly in her attitudes to sex, and never forms a serious attachment which could obstruct her easy sexual circulation. Love-all is a rather different, but also clearly convenient, construction of the female. Her two most apparent qualities are a comic affectation of feminine delicacy and sensibility, 14 :~ frequently undermined by her parodically eager yielding to male sexual attentions: I'll swear, I could have hang'd you for that rape, ifl would have follow'd the law; but I forgave you upon condition you would do so again.l 44

Even the rude aggression of this "rape" is, typically, no discouragement to Love-all's lustful readiness and acquiescence. She seems, then, to combine a fantasy of female sexual insatiability with a congenially puppetlike status. The men in the play are able to control and use these energies as they wish, with no danger of being psychologically overwhelmed or threatened by them. The sense that she operates chiefly as a male construction of female sexuality, with its more uncertain and dangerous aspects defused or neutralized, is confirmed by three other features of her role in the play. First, as suggested she is indeed "anatomised" or "vivisected" throughout in a coolly detached manner-entirely, transparently knowable just because she is so two-dimensional. The poised, almost indifferent quality of the recurrent vivisection and exposure to which the comedy subjects her corresponds, on the one hand, to the increasing objectification of the anatomized body, while contrasting, on the other, with the relatively uncontrolled violence that gave Percy's anatomy of woman its sacralizing overtones. Second, unlike Angelica, Love-all does not even retain the genuine, iflimited, power of sexual attraction. Being, in the Captain's dismissive words, "a right broken gamester, who, though she lacks wherewithal to play, yet loves to be looking on," she is denied that ambiguous quality that provoked alternate male excitement and bitterness in those (like Shakespeare in Sonnet 129) subject to its vicissitudes. Third, while Angelica is professionally detached from re-

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production, Love-all-though obviously less desirable-also embodies a sexuality lacking the mysterious power of generation. Conveniently, she is at once sufficiently vigorous to desire sexual advances, yet too old to bear children. 145

Conclusion: Demystifying the Body The various forms of anatomical interiority seen in this chapter can be broadly summarized in two related ways. First, we find that once again the culture of dissection has reinvented existing habits of thought. For the materializing tendencies of Renaissance psychology were certainly not new. Gail Kern Paster, in her book on the deterministic psychophysiology of Galenic humoralism, has recently emphasized the dominance of such attitudes in the period. As in the case of the autopsy of James I, behavior was widely read as the expression of essentially chemical inner states and processes, jostling and shifting to make up the individual "temperament" of the four humors. Perhaps the most valuable feature of Paster's book is its repeated insistence that "what is now emotional figuration for us was bodily reality for the early-moderns." 14 G This is undoubtedly true in many cases, from innumerable references to one's spirits, through the inner fires oflove, anger, and so forth. Yet Paster's argument takes strangely little account of the role of anatomy. She discusses both Lear's desire to "anatomise" the seemingly flinty heart of Regan (208), and the literality of Toby on Aguecheek's bloodless liver (26), and yet misses the overt dissective cues in either case. When allied with the kind of dissective selfhood seen above, Paster's claims for materialistic psychology look rather different. One key point is so substantial that it can only be stated here as a question. That is: while Paster repeatedly contrasts the very fluid and open state of humoral psychophysiology with later notions of the body as a static and solid container (23), such a claim is qualified by the rise of anatomical determinism. The fluid or vaporous qualities of humors and spirits clearly contrast with more foundational material preconditions such as the size of the liver, heart, and brain, or the frame of the skeleton. Indeed, everyone had the same kind of "triangular" heart, and we have seen just how precisely that could be thought to dictate one's actual or ideal behavior. But this qualification must be stated for now as an open question, just because early modern attitudes to such anatomical determinism remain intriguingly ambiguous. Finally, the Renaissance body was governed (again in surprisingly physical and precise ways) by the soul. Did this mean that efforts of pious will or of bravery could, in fact, change not just the unstable humors but also the seemingly absolute dimensions of, for example, the heart or brain, or certain important ventricles within either organ? 147 Anatomy reshapes Paster's argument in at least two other important ways.

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The rhetoric of dissection was very new; Galenic humoral theory many centuries old. I have indicated that anatomy appealed because its varying claims of final interior "proof" fused the thrill of novelty with senses of persuasive depth, precision, and thoroughness. Humoralism may have been more rigorous and exact than we would now think, but clearly four humors in differing permutations did not offer the same kind oflabyrinthine complexity as did the post-Vesalian body. As noted, the two examples from Shakespeare given by Paster are both overtly anatomical in context (while even As You Like It, discussed at length in her book, broadly signals such context through Oliver's sham dissection of Orlando). There is good reason for thinking, therefore, that humoral discourse was resituated and revivified by its association with the anatomized body. In one sense this alliance strengthens Paster's case for the corporeal weight and literalism of humoral psychology. But it also implies, second, a growing tension between the old fluids of the body and their newly re-presented anatomical vessel. We know that ultimately post-Vesalian dissection challenged and overthrew many Galenic orthodoxies. 148 Harvey's radical theory of circulation was perhaps the most famous example. Equally important, however, was the growing tendency to replace the older notions of a fluid, blurred, and slippery physiology with the harder, more schematic explanations of Cartesian mechanics. Indeed, our initial contrast between the fluid vibrancy of Vesalian images and the harder, more static qualities of Lancisan ones corresponds neatly to that shift from a humoral to a mechanistic body. 149 To state the issue broadly: here, as in so many other areas, anatomy offered an ambiguous bargain. Existing, often highly conservative attitudes were powerfully revitalized, injected with the thrilling strangeness of a newly assertive, dynamic corporeality. But this gain was only temporary. If the culture of dissection afforded a compelling window of opportunity in which older, essentially religious psychology could be intriguingly reconceived, it also contained elements that would ultimately destroy or radically transform earlier Renaissance cosmologies. This growing tension between Galenic humoralism and Vesalian anatomy brings us to the second broad conclusion of the present chapter. I suggested that, for all the wondering excitement of these emotional dissections and self-dissections, an important shade of secular psychology could be detected, especially in conceits of love. While anatomy still gripped the imagination as something uncanny and untamed, those attempts to root, anchor, or prove one's relatively abstract emotions probably felt very real, satisfyingly combining universal truths with the solidly particular matter of tissue, fiber, and bone. But the wonder would ultimately fade. As it became more fully and systematically charted, the body could no more satisfy all the fantasies aimed at it than the Americas could yield the gold, Amazons or Ewaipanoma insisted on by Sir Walter Ralegh in 1596. 150 As my general introduction has argued, the shift was one from a highly engaged and immersed state of won-

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der to a more detached and irreverent stance of control. This contrast appears quite precisely in the differing attitudes of Percy and Killigrew. The former shows how the female offered an especial challenge to anatomy. Could the scalpel finally pierce, divide, unfold and convincingly label all those entangled layers of mystery so densely compacted within the male imagination? In Percy's case, one might say no. The frenzied violence of his dissection only yields up the kind of entity (a bizarrely eucharistic quintessence) which existing mind-sets might expect to find. Percy, it seems, can imagine a quite radical investigation, but not the radical discoveries to which it should lead. What, then, ofKilligrew? By comparison, he seems to have drastically desacralized the female body, and by implication the anatomical body per se. It would be misleading to say that Killigrew has fully dispelled the unnerving mysteries of the female interior. Rather, what he has done, in his careful constructions of female types, is to invent a new version of the femaleone that can be more calmly and successfully approached by the male anatomist's scalpel. In this, he again resembles that cooler, schematizing attitude of Lancisan anatomy. More particularly, he also foreshadows another vital feature of eighteenth-century dissection. It was in this later period that an increasingly confident anatomical science usurped the longstanding dominance of female midwives. The highly influential anatomy lecturer Sir William Hunter is perhaps the most famous example of an accoucheur, the new term for the assertive, if controversial, male midwife. 151 But Hunter is still more famed for his groundbreaking new images of the female reproductive body. The engraved plates of his Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774) have an unflinching and poised directness which to us translates into something approaching brutal photo-realism. To return to Williams's valuable phrase, they do indeed seem to offer the plain "thing in itself"the kind of final revelation aimed at by the unrelenting gaze of hard-core pornography. 152 Hunter provides a compelling new standard of detached irreverence against which other dissectors, actual and rhetorical, must be measured. Setting Killigrew up to this standard, we find that he has not fully stripped the female body down to its plainest, most "objective" core. As stated, the female subjects in each play are fetishized. In Williams's study of hard-core pornography, it is just such fetishizing which effectively signals male bewilderment or defeat in the face of female otherness. 153 A persistent excess or surplus (such as the pearls associated with Love-all) recurs in such cases, standing as a quite literal "per-version" ("swerving away") from the body to a fetishized object that circles around its elusive center in coyly referential fashion. The fetishized female body, then, implicitly connotes a certain lingering reverence; the male observer more or less literally stands back or moves back from an imagined center of truth. Yet such a stance hardly makes Killigrew as conservative as Percy. Lud-

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millaJordanova has emphasized how this fetishizing of the female anatomical body persisted into the Enlightenment era. In the late eighteenth century, a set of wax anatomy models was created for La Specola museum in Florence, where they are still visible today. Like Hunter's images, these extraordinary figures are notable for their essentially modern scientific realism.154 Yet the female models jolt us right back to Killigrew's Lady Loveall: though otherwise naked, they are "adorned with flowing hair, pearl necklaces, removable parts and small foetuses. "1'' 5 If this kind of fetishizing could endure so stubbornly, then Killigrew himself must seem relatively objective by comparison. To put it another way: perhaps the most important difference between Killigrew and Percy is that Killigrew's dissections are not violent. Jordanova has described Hunter's uterus plates as images in which "violence has been focused particularly on women's genitals." 156 The only detailed support for this claim is that Hunter has "sectioned the clitoris, although this was not the object of his enquiry." Such an argument is doubly vague. First: this was a period when relatively little was known about the female reproductive system, so that the exact "object of enquiry" cannot be so easily limited as it might later be. Hunter's anatomical thoroughness cannot, accordingly, be seen as a purely pathological misogyny. (And he does indeed specifically identify "two small arteries" revealed by this section.) Second, such an argument requires a far more precise definition of "violence." To state the point emphatically: any violence committed by Hunter is very different from that imagined by Percy. For the tremulous assault of Percy's characters was essentially the product of fantasies of religious depth, an aggression directed against an intolerably tantalizing inner secrecy. Killigrew, by contrast, resembles Hunter insofar as he has abandoned these fantasies of depth, and consequently made his dissections in a calmly detached manner. Accordingly, Killigrew's anatomies of women reveal only surfaces: the clothes and other accoutrements that are largely visible to all in the first place. Even those elements which are exposed (the Jalse hair and teeth) arc merely social deceptions, rather than metaphysical conundrums. With Killigrew, then, we find that the gaze of the anatomist has steadied and isolated itself from the other senses. It is now a question of only looking. For Harvey and Percy, as for the cannibals of the New World, the body was good enough to eat: was, crucially, worth eating, offering a concrete sensuous engagement with metaphysical truths. For Killigrew, it is something to coolly stare at, with Love-all in particular not even deemed worthy of touching. The following chapter shows how certain Renaissance writers had already begun to sense the final spiritual emptiness of a once densely meaningful human body.

The Split Body

In 1655 the Platonist philosopher Henry More published An Antidote against Atheism. In it, More offers his own distinctive reaction to anatomy, and in particular to the way that anatomy had drastically shifted the relationship between matter and spirit. It has generally been forgotten that, for hundreds of years, Christians believed the human body to contain an organ specifically devoted to the immortal soul. When dissecting the heads of oxen, sheep, and apes, Galen had observed an impressive entanglement of veins and arteries situated near the base of the skull. (We have in fact already glimpsed this labyrinthine structure, in Alexander Chapman's evocation of human sophistry in chapter 3.) By the sixteenth century, it was commonly accepted that this rete mirabile or "wonderful net" effectively processed the vital spirits of the heart into the animal spirits of the brain. Here, then, was the organic connection with the rational, immortal soul. But Galen had evidently not dissected humans, and the newly empirical dissection of theRenaissance found the human rete to be either disappointingly minute or nonexistent. As early as 1522 the eminent Italian anatomist Berengaria da Carpi had doubted its existence. 1 For decades after Vesalius this vital issue was a matter of debate among anatomists. Despite the decisive new empiricism of the era, religious preconceptions often warped the supposedly definite structures of the brain. The French anatomist Caspar Bauhin ( 15601624) insisted that he had seen and dissected the rete many times, while even Vesalius adhered to the traditional rete in his earlier years, prior to his emphatic rebuttal in 1543. 2 Finally, a decisive shift of approach was proposed by Descartes in 1640, with a new body-soul link being identified in the 130

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form of the pineal gland or conarion. 3 Descartes seems to have chosen this on pragmatic physiological grounds. More's own conception of the matter was clearly very different: As for that little sprunt piece of the brain which they call the conarion ...

If you heard but the magnificent stories that are told of this little lurking mushroom ... and then afterward by dissection you discover this worker of miracles to be. nothing but a poor silly contemptible knob or protubcrancy, consisting of a thin membrane containing a little pulpous matter ... would you not sooner laugh at it than go about to confute it? 4

Notably, More still feels able to use dissection in support of his energetic harangue. It is clear, though, that his reaction to the dissected body goes beyond the casual and dismissive laughter he evokes. The lines indeed convey almost a personal antipathy to this inert kernel of matter which More constructs as a kind of social upstart ("little sprunt piece ... little lurking mushroom ... poor silly contemptible knob"), assailing the entire dignity of humankind and its Creator. 5 Like so many of those who attempted to absorb the raw wonder of the post-Vesalian interior, More shows himself to be effectively lost in the body-unable to abstract any clear and totalizing new scheme of things as he skids and slides amid the alien viscous threads and nodes that have lain waiting so long, ever present but forgotten. The very strategies of his attack, with its supposed derision of the "lurking mushroom" and the "thin membrane containing a little pulpous matter" ~etray the new sensuous exactitude of the climate in which he writes. The inability to match that close attention to material detail with the grand truths of theology is vividly exemplified when More, now attacking not only the conarion but the brain as a whole, asks, "In this lax consistence that lies like a net all on heaps in the water, I demand in what knot, loop or interval thereof does this faculty of free fancy or active reason reside?" (Antidote, 56). The recurrent dream of uniting those intangible but deeply felt certainties of human emotion with the pulsing fiber and tissue of the body has here turned unmistakably sour. The tantalizing essence so persistently conjured by writers and poets in the earlier seventeenth century required a remaining space of uncertainty and an associated cloud of mystery in which to survive. More, by contrast, bears angrily down upon the most precise fragments of cerebral matter, wholly unable to fuse the knots, loops, and intervals of this "lax consistence" with the ethereal and elevated functions of mind and spirit. His seeming hostility, bewilderment, and disappointment are directed against a body that increasingly refuses to conform to once simple and unproblematic religious needs. I aim to show how the schism to which More so violently responds was already opening up in the later lifetimes of Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson. But the signs of unease found there can be usefully set alongside a more fa-

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mous landmark in the relations of anatomy and religion. For what More is essentially debating here is a Cartesian conception of body and soul, one that had been gestating since the 1630s, and to which he himself directly reacted in the 1640s, when he exchanged letters with Descartes on the subject. As noted, Descartes had decided to break with those who persisted in trying to recover some version of the rete mirabile, or in effecting the relatively makeshift expedient of locating the soul in one of the cerebral vcntricles.6 He instead decided that the pineal gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed. The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double ... it must be the case that the impressions unite with each other in some part of the body before being considered by the soul ... moreover it is situated in the most suitable possible place for this purpose, in the middle of all the concavities; and it is supported by the little branches of the carotid arteries which bring the spirits into the brain. 7

Descartes' attitude, which had been substantially influenced by attending anatomies and making his own dissections and vivisections of animals, was effectively "we have to find somewhere to put it-and this will do." 8 It cannot simply be said that Descartes was one of the atheists who troubled More. But his personal attitude is certainly highly ambiguous. He suppressed the publication of his own astronomical treatise, The World, evidently fearing that its support for a heliocentric universe might attract the same kind of religious persecution visited upon Galileo. 9 In his letters we find him at one point claiming that "there is conviction when there remains some reason which might lead us to doubt, but scientific knowledge is conviction based on an argument so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger argument."10 When he adds, "Nobody can have the latter unless he also has knowledge of God," one has a sense that he is merely tacking on a necessary disclaimer. That impression is strengthened by a quite candid admission a couple of years later: "I must confess a weakness in myself which is, I think, common to the majority of men. However much we wish to believe, and however much we think we do firmly believe all that religion teaches, we are not commonly so moved by it as when we are convinced by very evident natural reasons."11 Descartes here not only admits to being more convinced by the compellingly immediate proofs of empiricism ("very evident natural reasons") but suggests that many others indeed feel the same, despite being perhaps less honest with themselves than he. In the light of such a statement one can begin to sec why Descartes, discussing Herbert ofCherbury's book De Veritate, remarks to a correspondent, "What he says about religion, I leave to be examined by the gentlemen ofthe Sorbonne." 12 Descartes' choice of the pineal gland is no less telling than that last iron-

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ically dismissive aside. Most obviously, he approaches the whole matter in terms of mechanical suitability (his conception of physiology being, famously, a mechanistic one), an attitude sharply alien to More's sensuous empiricism and aestheticism. 13 Descartes felt justified in doing this because he had effectively detached reason and faith. One's faith was accepted once and for all and sealed up in an unassailable, atomistic nucleus of religious certainty, after which worldly matters, acknowledged as distinct from and subordinate to that pious grain of truth, could be pursued in the most hardheaded and pragmatic ways. 14 Intriguingly, the material composition of the pineal gland itself mirrors that break between worldly and otherworldly knowledge. The rete mirabile-at least as once envisaged-had been an intricate structure, and one which looked capable of processing spirit into its finest state, thereby matching More's aesthetic and sensory criteria. Equally, the rete was continuous with the veins, arteries and brain matter around it. The pineal gland, while certainly chosen for its site and consequent ability to effect physiological processes, was a sealed unit. Exactly what happened within it was not stated, but effectively the older, quasi-alchemical transition between matter and spirit had now shifted from a process to a switch. In keeping with his well-attested mechanism, then, Descartes' approach has a certain businesslike impatience about it. The matter is decided, and we can move on, and pursue the business of anatomy without debates or unease about the spirit-matter interface. The pineal neatly assisted this desire by being an essentially atomistic unit, offering nothing more when probed than "a little pulpous matter." This unproblematic acceptance of a spiritual zone at once vitally important, yet beyond the realm of human debate, compares interestingly with another of Descartes' reflections on De Veritate. Herbert, Descartes remarks, "examines what truth is; I have never thought of doing so, because it seems a notion so transcendentally clear that nobody can be ignorant of it." 15 This in itself can be read as a canny strategy on the part of one who is simply paying lip service to the demands of religious opinion. Yet it is not necessary to prove Descartes' atheism or agnosticism in order to demonstrate the seminal stage in early scientific thought which his ideas mark. What is most important in the present context is the way in which Descartes so unrepentantly and systematically demystified the body. It is now a region of pipes and gears, where even nominally spiritual processes occur in a "purely mechanical manner." 16 The "impressions preserved in the memory," Descartes suggests in a letter, "are not unlike the folds which remain in this paper, after it has once been folded. "17 Similarly, 'The number and the orderly arrangement of the nerves, veins, bones and other parts of an animal do not show that nature is insufficient to form them, provided you suppose that in everything nature acts in exact accord with the laws of mechanics, and that these laws have been imposed on it by God. "18 In that formulation especially, the realms of natural matter and of God are notably distanced. God's inter-

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vention and presence in the world, we might say, are diminished in a similar way to the new role of spirit within matter. In each case the divine is allowed a conceptual function, but distanced in terms of sensuous immediacy. Even Descartes' drawings of body parts-contained in his Treatise on Manare tinged with this cold, schematic quality, notably resembling the images ofLancisi rather than those ofVesalius. 19 Descartes, then, applies the scalpel to the body like Occam's razor, coolly skeptical of that which lies beyond the realm of empirical verification. I want now to consider how this kind of attitude had already begun to manifest itself in the early years of the seventeenth century.

Limited Significance: The Changing View of Autopsy and Pathology As we have seen, autopsies in this period could be constructed in a way that for us appears to peculiarly confound the poetic or spiritual with the organic or pathological. Nevertheless, alongside those seemingly quaint anatomies of character, we already find a number of accounts that offer purely pathological judgments on the soundness or failure of organic systems. When Donne, toward the close of his own ncar-fatal sickness of 1623, notes that "no anatomist can say, in dissecting a body, here lay the ... occasion of all bodily diseases," we might feel him to be simply expecting (albeit rhetorically) too much of medical enquiry. 20 Real gains could of course be made by asking less, or by altering one's questions. And the beginnings of such a tendency do appear in his own lifetime. In 1612, there occurred a postmortem autopsy rivaling those of Henri IV and .James I in public interest. Mter the premature, entirely unpredicted death of James's eldest son, Henry, in early November 1612, the prince was examined by a number of senior physicians. Here, where one might again expect a tendency to identify analogues between character and interior anatomy (Henry, after all, was a popular icon during his lifetime), surviving reports are businesslike and straightforward. The liver is "more pale than it should be," the spleen "unnaturally black" in parts, the stomach "without fault," and the brains "fuller of blood than they should be." 21 The royal physician Theodore de Mayerne linked "the abundance of blood" in the pia mater with "divers humours gathered together," and the "very clear water" in the ventricles of the brain with "convulsion, ravings, and drowsiness. "22 Similarly, of Henry's mother, Queen Anne, we learn only that "she was found much wasted within, specially her liver as it were quite consumed." 23 Other, more obscure subjects are also described in terms of the order or disorder of a purely material organism. On 1 October 1635,James Howell reported to a friend that "Master Attorney-General Noy, is lately dead, nor could Tun bridge-waters do him any good: though he had good matter in his

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brain, he had, it seems, ill materials in his body, for his heart was shrivelled like a leather penny-purse when he was dissected, nor were his lungs sound." 24 Again, Donne's brief account of the autopsy of "one Swinburne, a clerk," found dead after heavy gambling losses, simply records that "the physician pronounced him poisoned, but they think it to be received before his loss." 25 We also learn, though, that Donne obtained this report from "some that were present at his opening." Such events, then, could be public spectacles to a limited degree, whether for legal or didactic reasons, ones of mere curiosity, or a combination of the three. Although the exact reasons for autopsies would vary according to circumstances, what all of these events tell us is that, from the late sixteenth century (when a horse was "ripped, to see the cause of its death") through the early seventeenth, the interior body increasingly became a natural source of evidence, with that evidence itself being more tightly defined and restricted.26 Taboos against violating the body were countered by the desire for verification. Autopsies were now conducted even in relatively constricted circumstances. Francis Nelson, master of the ship Resolution, was opened and examined during a voyage, after his death on 2 December 1612. 27 Many decades prior to this, a surprisingly early case occurred on a voyage to Newfoundland and Canada in December 15~5. Hakluyt's Prinr:ipal Navigations tells of how one Philip Rougemont died in the region of Stadacona, aged twenty-two. The crew as a whole was suffering from the disease that had killed Rougemont, and so, "because the sickness was to us unknown, our Captain caused him to be ripped to see if by any means possible we might know what it was and so seek means to save and preserve the rest of the company." The subsequent description is not only relatively thorough ("his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of red water about it: his liver ... indifferent fair, but his lungs black and mortified") but goes so far as to note precisely that the subject's "milt" (spleen) was "rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone. "28 What we see here is a certain appropriate alliance between experience and experiment. In keeping with the early date of the autopsy, it was made not as a routine examination but with a particularly utilitarian impetus behind it. The fact that Hakluyt uses the term "ripped" rather than "anatomized" or "dissected" corresponds with the atypical character of the autopsy, at a time when Britain lacked even the epitomized editions ofVesalius available from 1540 onward. 29 Certain nonprofessional medical references also evoke this new sense of the anatomized body as a final, authoritative point of reference and proof. Around 1615, in Webster's sketch of'The Roaring Boy,"we are first told that this worthy "sleeps with a tobacco-pipe in's mouth," and then that "1 have heard of some (that have scap't hanging) begg'd for anatomies, only to deter men from taking tobacco." 30 Here Webster imagines the unorthodox case of a non-felon, set at a high premium by surgeons (whose assistants had sufficient trouble acquiring dead convicts) because of his specific patho-

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logical condition. In the new culture of anatomical verification, the exotic modishness of tobacco is satirized not only in terms of external effects (bad breath, discoloring of fingers, teeth, and beard) but prompts suspicion of those direct and particular internal signs that are now photographed precisely to deter the takers of tobacco. 31 Similarly, a couple of years later, the pseudonymous Blasius Multibibus ("Drinkmuch") warns a young smoker: "I will have thee begg'cl for an anatomy, that thy entrails (like Tamerlaines black bannaret) may hang for trophies in honour of Captain "Whiff."32 A more honorable, real-life case of interior pathology occurred in 1622. The Puritan Nicholas Byfield, besides being greatly concerned with the detection of signs that might indicate God's assessment of an individual's spiritual state, also leaned toward a religious rhetoric marked by sensuous immediacy. It was appropriate, then, that Byfield's fellow Puritan, William Gouge, displayed such precise attention to the details of his friend's postmortem. In Gouge's preface to one of Byfield's posthumously published books, we are first told of how, in his lifetime, Byfield had "carried a torturing stone in his bladder for fifteen years together, and upward." 33 At one point he was "by a skilful chirurgion searched" (presumably, that is, ''cut open"), and the stone mistakenly judged to have dissolved. However, after his death in 1622 "he was opened, and the stone taken out; and being weighed, found to be 33 ounces and more in weight." Gouge's account is notable for its combination of sensuous empiricism and exact measurement. We further learn that the stone measured fifteen and a half inches in circumference, and thirteen in both length and breadth, and that it looked "like a flint" (A7r). Both this case of scrupulous lay observation, and Harvey's belief in the significance of soft or hard hearts, prevent us from too straightforwardly opposing "creative" lay judgments to the carefully limited assessments of physicians or surgeons. Nevertheless, it is certainly plausible that on the whole these latter figures tended to read the interior signs of dead bodies in a more narrow way than did observers such as Howell and D'Ewes. We have seen that Howell viewed the serpent in Pennant's heart as a microcosmic omen of imminent disaster in Britain as a whole. Edward May's own account is very different. With the exception of a few points which we would now view as "magical" or at least nonscientific, May's description and assessment of the autopsy is notably modern and cautiously empiricaJ.3 4 In keeping with the new, emphatically visual character of post-Vesalian anatomy, the printed account contains two carefully rendered drawings of the serpent-one depicting it still coiled in Pennant's heart, the other spread out, with a hand inserting a probe into the central body of the creature, as May himself had clone during his investigation. 35 This stress on direct visual representation is matched by May's closing passages, which emphatically deplore common, superstitious hostility to dissections (it is from these pages that the phrase "murder after death" derives), regretting the poor supply of specimens and

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insisting that "there are by dissections every day something to be learned" (38). Indeed, not only is the interior organic realm the final key to medicine, but even exterior signs become clearer in the light of anatomical knowledge: "Let but physicians well note their patients' complexions, and colours ... and let them take afterward if they come to dissect them notice of their livers, and if they be diligent, in few dissections they shall be able, looking into any man's face whatsoever, to know the affections very manifestly of his liver. "36 Admittedly, May's protoscientific bent is countered slightly by the fact that he has Jacob Heydon, the surgeon, dissecting for him on this occasion. Nevertheless, following his initial bewilderment at first sight of the serpent, it is May who insists on dissecting and probing the creature himself. Equally, even May's theorizing is usually guided by empirical considerations. Although he considers the belief of ancient or Arabic authorities (Hippocrates and Avicenna) that the heart is peculiarly immune to disease, he then argues his own opinions from the empirically known composition of this organ (12-14). Considering how the serpent could have got into the ventricle, his approach is again precise in physical detail, and prefers authorities who are themselves empirically rigorous (17). Among these are included not only Vesalius but Lucretius-a thinker whose atomistic theory of matter was highly problematic for many Christians, and whose presence here might have helped confirm the physicians' proverbial status as atheists in the minds of certain readers. 37 Presently concluding that the serpent was produced by the particular type of blood found in the deceased, May supports his opinion by reference to the pathology of other organs, and even by his knowledge (cited but discreetly withheld) of the diets of Pennant's mother and grandmother (22-23). The new medical postmortems are therefore seen to increasingly prefer a narrow empiricism, comparing interior signs not to outward character or the wider world, but only to the observed and well-documented case histories of other bodies. The longer-term direction of this habit appears most vividly and memorably in an examination performed by Harvey in 1634. In this year a tale concocted by a schoolboy to excuse his having played truant led to accusations of witchcraft against seven Lancashire women, alleged to have caused a storm which threatened the life of Charles I while at sea. Three of these suspects died while in prison. Of the remainder, Margaret Johnson confessed, not to causing the storm, but to contact with a demonic familiar that sucked her blood under the guises of a dog, white cat, or hare. In July the women were examined for witch marks at Surgeons' Hall in Monkwell Street. Although the initial searches were made by midwives, Harvey appears to have personally intervened once suspected marks on Johnson's skin were observed. The certificate of examination recorded "two things" that "may be called teats," one "between her secrets and the funda-

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ment," the other "in the middle of her left buttock." The first, however, was "in our judgements nothing but the skin of the fundament drawn out as it will be after the piles or application of leeches," while the second, though "like the nipple of a woman's breast" (and therefore conceivably a place from which the supposed familiars could have fed), was "without any hollowness or issue for any blood or juice to come from thence." 38 Although this case was not a postmortem autopsy, it held the extra irony of a live subject whose preliminary confession might have easily prejudiced another observer against her in the face ofless "evidence" than that seen by Harvey. Here, then, we have a strikingly clear illustration of the shifting relationship between theory and practice, science and religion. In a case where the life of the king himself was thought to have been at stake, and in a period notorious not only for its innumerable executions of alleged witches, but for its nervous slippage between magic and religion, as the approaching sense of national disaster sparked a proliferation of ill omens, Harvey had the levelheadedness, the conviction, and-perhaps most crucially-the authority to collapse the potential hysteria of general opinion into the purely accidental substance of minor skin blemishes. The various careful observations of his Lectures had, it seems, served him well.

Medicine vs. Religion The relatively narrow professional realm of autopsy and pathology, with its concrete and serious legal overtones, was an area where one might well expect to find a more modern attitude to the internal "signs" of the body. Yet we now see degrees of that mentality in a range of writers and contexts. As far back as 1586, for example, devout Christians were resisting the medical classification of spiritual conditions. In documenting the spiritual crisis of the fervently pious and troubled Protestant woman Dionys Fitzherbert, Mary Morrissey has emphasized the narrator's central aim: to insist that her condition was not melancholy, but conscience. 39 The general distinction itself, as Morrissey further notes, had been recognized by the physician Timothy Bright, author of a 1586 Trmtise of Melancholy which not only preceded Robert Burton by many years, but also limited itself to a more narrowly medical perspective. Bright was quite clear that the affliction of conscience, though scoffed at by those guilty of "atheism," was "sorrow and fear upon cause, and the greatest cause that worketh misery unto man: the other [i.e., melancholy] a mere fancy and hath no ground of true and just object. "40 In Bright's opposition we find a professional physician giving a seemingly inverse view of the relation between a psychic state and its "objective correlative." For him a convincing "cause" is religious, not physiological. But not all physicians were so pious. In 1600, for example, the preacher William Perkins admits: "Many are of opinion that this sorrow for sin is nothing else

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but a melancholic passion." The truth, he insists, is "far otherwise," before going on to effectively abstract conscience from the ordinary medical realm of physical causation and cure: "melancholic passions are removed by physic, diet, music and suchlike," while "sorrow for sin is not cured by any physic, but only by the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." 41 By 1642, we find John Jackson attacking "thou that with thy loud music and carnal mirth canst deaf and outvoy conscience," and being moved to silence this worldly sinner with just the kind of undeniable interior proof such materialists understand: "lfDemocritus had but the anatomizing of thee, he would find melancholy in thee too, that is conscience." 42 Jackson's phrasing now appears to allow no choice or distinction between the two states, as if the ongoing tension between medicine and Christianity has by this stage increased sufficiently to warrant a strong polemical attack on narrow, materializing tendencies. Although that polemicism might at first seem to apply only to the especially obdurate sinner whom Jackson denounces here, a marginal note suggests that the issue was one which troubled him more generally: "We shall feel sometime a terror coming upon us, the physicians say it is melancholy, but I say it is the power of God" (ibid.). A more direct opposition between two authorities-wrestling, as it were, over the right to define spiritual and corporeal experience-could hardly be imagined. Moreover, that schism had already been recognized in the late Elizabethan period, as Jackson in fact credits the statement to Richard Greenham, who is thought to have died in 1594. In 1631, the Puritan minister Robert Bolton reaffirmed Perkins's division between melancholy as a physically, medically identified complaint, and conscience as something with which "the soul may be seized" even when "the body [is] sound and in good temper." 43 In this case, it seems that Bolton may well be genuinely convinced of his claims. In chapter 3 we saw Philip Melanchthon positing a physiological index of godliness. Especially "pious men," he believed, could spiritually and chemically intensify the spirits unifying body and soul. Almost a hundred years on we find Bolton, similarly, insisting: I am persuaded, the very same measure of melancholic matter, which raises many times in the heads, and hearts of worldlings ... continual clouds of many strange horrors, and ghastly fears, nay and sometimes makes them stark mad; I say, the very same in a sanctified man may be so mollified and moderated by spiritual delight, and sovereignty of grace, that he is not only preserved from the sting, and venom of them, but by God's blessing from any such desperate extremities, violent distempers and distractions, which keep the other in a kind of hell upon earth (198). Despite the nominally clear ascendancy of spirit over matter, there is again an apt edge of the new empirical, concrete tendency even in Bolton's

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starting point: it is perhaps not entirely whimsical to see his "very same measure of melancholic matter" as adumbrating the language and methods of a chemistry experiment. Here we have a skewed but recognizable version of interior bodily proof-one not only material, but precisely measured, as if the author has thought this idea through at some length. Once more, the supposedly abstract and long-established truths of Christianity implicitly subject themselves to the emerging criteria of a newly rigorous natural philosophy-criteria which could, on occasion, produce conclusions far less congenial to Christian belief.

Material vs. Symbolic Bodies This struggle over the categorization of melancholy and conscience shows us how uncertain and sensitive were the boundaries between human and divine, science and spirituality. It shows us, too, one of the important arenas of debate in to which anatomy could easily stray, and whose concerns it could sharply intensify. The shifting nature of those boundaries is illustrated with especial vividness in a peculiarly hybrid devotional work of 1637. Henry Church's Miscellanea Philo-theologica is a short book containing a number of the kind of parallels used by Worship, King, and Playfere. 44 Nominally, it appears at first to belong with those instances-a supposition seemingly confirmed by its full title, which presents "a treatise compendiously describing the nature of God in his attributes ... wherein many secrets in Scripture, and in nature, are unbowelled, with solid jJroofs" (emphasis added) .45 Again, another plausible comparison that offers itself is Melanchthon's De Anima, as Church's book begins with a section "Of the soul" before moving on to the created masterpiece of the human body. Yet, while Melancthon's extensively topical use ofVesalius was already a notable shift from looser discussions of God's "Book of Nature," he had at least devoted roughly equal amounts of space to the topics of body and of soul. Church, by contrast, employs a similar anatomical exactitude in a work that has eighteen pages on the soul and other spiritual issues, followed by over sixty on the human body. Despite his insistence on the earthy and base nature of humankind, Church is clearly fascinated by the newly prominent details of anatomy. While some of his somatic metaphors or similes are little more than familiar commonplaces, other parallels show an imaginative ingenuity which matches the ingenious design of the body itself. 46 From a bone in the ear "like an anvil" it can be concluded that some men's "consciences be sermonproof" (presumably, "as hard as iron"), and from another, "like a stirrup," that others will "hear, and learn" only "to get advancement, and ease. "17 Referring to the authority of "the anatomists" who say that "in the head, and neck [there] be 125 muscles," Church sees an indication of "the near, and strong, and inseparable union between the head, and the body" (26). 48 The

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reader is further reminded that "if the bones be thirty in the arm, and hand: as anatomists affirm; then Judas stretcht forth as many bones, as he received pieces of silver" (59). Elsewhere Church explains that "the bones of the arm are joined with moisture; so they grate not one another: To teach those joined in nearest bonds a meek yielding, and unity; so they may perform duties comfortably together" (60). Again, as "some bones be hollow, so be some actions ... their hollowness is filled not with marrow, but hypocrisy, deceit, and sin," and will thus "bring a mystical gout, and lameness" (63). Clearly Church is departing in these cases from general, commonplace comparisons between (say) the elevation of the head and of human reason and the soul. Indeed, what we must suspect is that, for him, these parallels are not merely "analogies" in any loose sense, but (in accordance with his title) "solid proofs" of both God's intentions and humanity's (often fallen) nature. Moreover, by splicing these curious analogies through a long description of the entire body, he has also gone beyond the more occasional inventions of Worship, Playfere and others. Church is at once faintly mesmerized by the interior of a body which he anatomizes in considerable detail, and yet also feels a need to fully integrate the novel materiality of this entity more tightly with Christian belief. In attempting this, he immediately signals that the body is no longer a straightforward, universally accessible source of devotional rhetoric-he clearly depends on anatomical lectures or textbooks, and at one point effectively acknowledges his own layman's viewpoint by contrasting "the anatomist's relation of the belly" with "a more plain observation" of the same (71). It is certainly difficult not to see some significant irony in his admission, toward the end of the book, that "I want the art of the anatomist" (65). For if Church necessarily lacks something of the skill and fuller knowledge of a professional dissector, he appears to share a partly similar temperament. Something of the potential desire for a sensually intimate relation to God, achieved through the body, is conveyed when he remarks that "I have brought my thoughts now to my fingers-ends" (65). Again, a tendency toward vivid local detail, rather than abstract generality, is glimpsed through "the door of men's mouths," which can be opened in very different ways: "Open a brothel-house-door, you see courtesans, bawds, light persons: so some men's mouths once open, we perceive nothing, but filthy talk .... Open the bear-garden-door, there is confusion, noise, fighting, barking: so some men's mouths are opened with contention, railing, threatning" (44). Most of all, Church's absorption in the minute concrete realities of the body is attested by his patient enumeration of them, across sixty-odd pages that often read much like an anatomy textbook. Moreover, the bulk of this lengthy description of cartilages, bones, membranes, and so forth is not directly linked to any corresponding spiritual or ethical conclusions. The different sections on individual body parts each have their own separate "conclusions" and "resolves," where Church quotes a good deal of scripture;

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but, unsurprisingly, he is unable to unite these essentially distinct sides of his book. In many ways, then, his Miscellanea recalls the case of Phineas Fletcher's anatomical poem, The Purple Island, as analyzed by Sawday. Noting how Fletcher's similarly overingenious and often heavy-handed attempts at poetic allegory are tellingly countered by the detailed anatomical marginalia which continuously frame the central verses, Sawday concludes that here "two discourses-the poetic and the scientific-seem to oppose one another over the page, as though a moment of transition in the history of discourse were on display." 49 Although Church's book does not offer such an immediately obvious visual comparison, its split between the protoscientific and the religious is no less striking. Church's desire for "solid proofs" results in a lengthy evocation of a body effectively "too, too solid" to melt into the exalted air of spirituality. A host of minute anatomical particulars sit conspicuously apart from the theological and deYotional passages, defiantly material, nmd and unabsorbed. If Descartes had needed any further persuasion that his effectual splitting of body and soul, religion and science, were the right one, Church's efforts might well have supplied it.

Languages of the Heart The curiously whimsical, tellingly dualistic character of Miscellanea Philo-theologica is to some extent a result of its thoroughness. Where other writers delve in and seize what they want from the human interior, briskly flourishing it before shifting to new rhetorical territory, Church becomes lost within the body as a whole. Yet even language using a single organ can, bv the early seventeenth century, no longer be as easily abstracted from the anatomical body as one might imagine. Early in 1642 the minister Cornelius Burges preached a fast-sermon to the House of Commons. Here, in a piece that described itself as "opening the necessity and benefit of washing the heart," Burges asked rhetorically, "What part must they wash? the heart: not the outside alone, but the inside also: not the heart taken physically for that fleshy part in the body of man which is the fountain of natural life, and principal seat of the reasonable soul; but figuratively." 50 It seems that, after initially offering so many commanding metaphors of interiority, the body has now grown too defiantly, purely material to be easily manipulated by religious rhetoric. And yet, ironically, Burges still clings to the notion of a secret inner truth, clearly equating "the inside" with the heart's most sacred qualities, despite opposing it to the physical interior of the body. In this instance, the physical and the symbolic are not merely separate. Rather, they must now be actively and self~consciously separated. And the need to do this had indeed been felt some years earlier. On 1 September 1615, with Crooke's Microcosmographia now fonning a dazzlingly

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novel showpiece among the booksellers' wares, Daniel Price-again concerned with the washing of the heart-noted cautiously that "God's word biddeth me to say, that the heart is taken in the language of Canaan, for the corrupted, and depraved qualities of the heart; and not for the lump of flesh, and material heart in man, which is the good creature of God." 51 Other preachers' less careful use of anatomical language may have been what obliged Price to make this clarifYing distinction. Nevertheless, he himself could not resist blurring spiritual and physiological realms, going on to add that "the heart is the first liver, and the last dier; let the heart be cleansed, and sanctified, and thou wilt begin well, and end well; live well, and die well" (102). Again, on 2 February 1623/24, John Donne's friend and fellow royal chaplain,Joseph Hall, spoke on Jeremiah 17:9, 'The heart is deceitful above all things." Here Hall admits that "when ye hear of the heart, ye think straight of that fleshy part in the centre of the body, which lives first, and dies last." That, however, "is not it, which is so cunning.""~ As he shifts his auditors' attention away from the rawly empirical to the figurative, the preacher sounds almost like a patient schoolteacher, attempting to establish the very concept of the figurative in the defiantly concrete and particular minds of young children, absorbed in an energetic world of immediate sensations. 53 With these examples in mind we might indeed review the statements of John Denison ("the heart of a man is little in quantity but large in desire ... the whole circular world cannot fill the triangular heart of man"). Are they indeed as much a defiant assertion of the abstract over the physical as a pious lament? Perhaps even the sinful insatiability of abstract desires is implicitly preferable, for Denison, to an organ robbed of all symbolic value. lt is certainly a striking testament to the impact of post-Vesalian anatomy that, after hundreds of years of metaphorical discourse on the heart, Hall, Price and Burges all feel the need to make dear just what it is they are actually talking about. In doing so, they effectively attempt to rescue spiritual abstraction from the compelling texture, structure, and color of the material organ that now threatens to swallow it up, and which is simultaneously being promoted by preachers such as Hull, Henry King, and Playfere, keen to exploit its potential just because it will so swiftly command an audience's attention. Hall, Price, and Burges seem able to momentarily glimpse the new scheme of the body proposed by Descartes, with its careful split between an immediate physical entity and its abstract divine origins. 5 4 Yet such writers also remain caught up in the force field of the body's raw and commanding presence. We encounter a similar ambivalence in the writings of Hall's friend, Donne-a figure whose heavy use of anatomical images is augmented by the wide range ofliterary genres and subjects to which he applies the scalpel. Across poetry and prose spanning perhaps forty years, Donne

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offers us a compressed history of the shifting relations between anatomy and religion. Before considering this history, however, it is necessary to supply it with one more broad frame.

Anatomical Materialism and the Leap of Faith The year 1611 saw the publication of Cyril Tourneur's play, The Atheist's Tragedy. This work is remarkable for a number of reasons. Perhaps most obviously, the very word "atheist" was at this time still relatively novel and uncommon. Though it became increasingly familiar as the Jacobean period wore on, it is especially striking to find it so centrally and explicitly defining an entire work. 55 Tourneur's choice therefore shows us that a certain version of atheism was recognized widely enough to form the subject of a popular play. In entering into this relatively new territory, the dramatist had set himself a challenge. He was not, after all, presenting any ordinary or familiar kind of villain. The preconceived alienage of stock Italians, Jews, or Catholics would not fulfill the implicit promise of his title. Nor, indeed, would the merely worldly crimes of one prepared to kill and rape for his own material or lustful gains. Characters such as Barabas or Iago may have a certain Machiavellian dedication to the pursuit of evil, but-as the seventeenth-century French religious writer Jean-Fran~;ois Senault implicitly acknowledged-their very selfishness at least limited their impious acts to the mundane sphere. By contrast, the passion for knowledge "is much more violent, then that of voluptuousness, for the latter is easily contented ... but the other never." Whereas "the voluptuous have this advantage, as that they see all their desires confined with the limits of delights ... there is nothing which may not be come at by the fury of so irregular a passion" as that for knowledge. 5 6 This might be broadly read as an attack on Faustian hubris. Faustus is, after all, defined by his efforts to break through the earthly constraints to which humans should be subject. But those attempts, seminal as they are, can still be understood as part of another familiar, if demonized, area: namely, that of magic. By its very nature, magic effectively supports a religious worldview (as Faustus itself ultimately does at its conclusion), insofar as it requires the existence of a supernatural realm-misused by the Devil and those foolish enough to be tempted by him, but ultimately falling under the sway of the omnipotent Christian God. What is important about the atheist is that he does not seek divine or demonic aid for his ambitions. Instead-rather like Pheudippe-he feels his own strenuous will and ingenuity to be all that he can rely on. To be a little more precise: he is made, as a kind of scapegoat, to effectively claim this arrogant role, thereby distilling and limiting a sense of "atheism" that in fact naturally exceeds any one individual (and is of course intrinsically cooper-

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ative and increasingly anonymous, insofar as it involves protoscientific endeavor). Tourneur's atheist, D'Amville, is therefore identified by an open and systematic impiety founded on excessive faith in natural philosophy and purely natural reason. In a certain sense, that attitude justifies the singling out of one "atheist," because it is just his attitude to the scope of human knowledge that is at fault, rather than any of the fields of natural enquiry themselves. That attitude is most defiantly and clearly demonstrated by one particular notion. In the final act of the play, D'Amville's virtuous nephew, Charlemont, admitting to the judges that he is "guilty of killing ... but not ofmurder[ing]" D'Amville's servant, Borachio, willingly embraces death, leaping voluntarily onto the scaffold, to be immediately followed by his beloved Castabella. 57 Bewildered at their courage, D'Amville demands that the judges grant him Charlemont's "body when t'is dead I For an anatomy." With the second judge expressing perplexity, D'Amville responds with a typically overweening glance at his allegedly superior natural wisdom ("Your understanding still come short o'mine"). He explains that I would find out by his anatomy What thing there is in nature more exact, Then in the constitution of my self. Me thinks, my parts, and my dimensions, are As many, as large, as well compos'd as his; And yet in me the resolution wants, To die with that assurance as he does. The cause of that, in his anatomy I would find out (5.2, 142-5:1)

This plea epitomizes the deluded materialism of natural philosophy. Anatomists seek, in this view, to narrowly and finally isolate an essential quality whose origins are ultimately greater and more mysterious. Perhaps even D'Amville's echoing refrain ("in his anatomy I I would find out") subtly underlines his need to cling to this reassuringly positivistic and limited form of explanation. Even before he has spoken, of course, the play has sought to dramatically, performatively refute his belief by Charlemont's courageous faith in a future life. 5 8 D'Amville's parodic failure to distinguish between the "spirit of courage" and its material basis is reflected elsewhere in the play. For he has earlier asked a doctor to "take this gold; extract the spirit of it, and inspire I New life" into the bodies of his dead sons (5.1, 88-90). The notion of a medical panacea derived from gold was in fact widely accepted in this periocl. 5 ~ 1 In the context of D'Amville's narrowly materialistic attitudes, however, such a parallel only serves to authenticate Tourneur' s satire,

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with its highly topical attack on those who grotesquely confuse material essences and essential spiritual values. 60 It seems, therefore, that to memorably represent something as novel as an explicitly labeled stage atheist, a no less novel and arrogant zone of natural enquiry must be called upon. By 1611, Tourneur can assume that anatomy is mistrusted not only for its irreverent destruction of God's most artful creation, but because it implicitly denies the very basis of irreverence itself. It can explain all within the purely limited, material entity of the human body. As Sawday has emphasized, this delusive ambition is justly punished. Having been granted not only his desired anatomical specimen, but the right to personally conduct Charlemont's execution, D'Amville economically combines his own coup de grace with his nephew's salvation, somehow managing to knock out his own brains with the executioner's ax while leaving his intended victim unscathed. Accordingly, Sawday draws attention to the close link between the peculiar "infamy" surrounding both execution and anatomy, and the respective agents of the two, before going on to assert that D'Amville's "atheistic will ... acknowledges no other power but reason." 61 What has not previously been recognized is how Tourneur's seemingly parodic swipe at dissective notions of truth epitomized and responded to concerns about those "narrow inquisitions" of the scalpel identified a mere two years later by Stephens (and obliquely signaled by Price, Hall, and the more general debate on melancholy and conscience). The most ominous quality of the atheistic D'Amville is not his worldly vice, but his association with that most "irregular ... passion" for knowledge. His distinguishing feature is his implicit collapsing of heaven and earth, down into the graspable and knowable limits of mere matter. Not only, indeed, is D'Amville materialistic in the widely understood sense of the atheist's conception of the cosmos, but he brutally and consistently depersonalizes human relationships into purely practical concerns. He is, for example, anxious about his sons' deaths chiefly because he will now have no one on whom to bestow his wealth-an aptly materialistic conception, we might say, of personal immortality. 62 Most crucially of all, he is ready not just to kill his own nephew, but to transform him into a site of experimental enquiry, in order to materially explain the mystery of human courage. As we saw at the start of this chapter, Descartes proposed a canny solution to the fears which lay behind the persona ofD'Amville-fears that, as in the case of Galileo, offered to impose heavy constraints on human knowledge. But Descartes himself was avant-garde, and his ideas were not formed or publicized before the 1630s. As shown, in the lifetime of Donne, it was still possible for a number of writers to conjure with D'Amville's anatomical essentialism in more positive ways. Although these writers did not force the issue so dramatically as D'Amville himself, their inventions were yet more than insubstantial and casual whimsy. The relationship between the residual-ultimately sacralizing-mystery of the body, and the desire to close

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one's fist on the hot, still hissing nugget of truth was at this time very finely balanced. The scalpel had pierced close enough to rouse an unusual (and indeed necessarily unrepeatable) pitch of excitement, yet had not quite killed off the spiritual wonder which still clung, like the slowly cooling vapors of life itself, to the opened corpse.

Donne's Bodies In general terms, cultural change is typically a blurred and piecemeal process. Accordingly, I am not attempting here to plot some exactly chronological line, showing how the anatomized body reached the greatest peak of its sacred density before gradually, inexorably sloping off toward an ever more demystified future. Nevertheless, by focusing on the writing of a single author, a limited, provisional sense of that process over time can be more clearly perceived than in the naturally conflicting uses of numerous writers. We start, then, early on. Although many critics and editors have rightly stressed the difficulty of absolutely dating Donne's poems, "The Damp" looks very much like a product of the 1590s. In addition to the cases made by Helen Gardner and Arthur Marotti, an oblique source of evidence can be found in the undercurrent of energetic, worldly, and youthful confidence which runs through the piece: When I am dead, and doctors know not why, And my friends' curiosity Will have me cut up to survey each part, When they shall find your picture in my heart, You think a sudden damp of love Will through all their senses move, And work on them as me, and so prefer Your murder, to the name of massacre. Poor victories; but if you dare be brave, And pleasure in your conquest have, First kill th'enormous giant, your Disdain, And let th'enchantress Honour, next be slain, And like a Goth and Vandal rise, Deface records, and histories Of your own arts and triumphs over men, And without such advantage kill me then. For I could muster up as well as you 1\Iy giants, and my witches too, Which are vast Constancy, and Secretness,

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Chapter 4 But these I neither look for, nor profess; Kill me as woman, let me die As a mere man; do you but try Your passive valour, and you shall find then, Naked you have odds enough of any man. 63

Viewing the poem as a whole, what we realize is that the opening shock tactic of the autopsy is in fact just one version-albeit the most prominentof an insistently demystif)'ing attitude. Where "The Legacy" was ambivalent in its attitude toward the anatomical proof of otherwise elusive human qualities, 'The Damp" uses dissection to emphatically disprove the supposedly mystical power of love. There is, of course, a strong implication that the speaker has died from the pangs of unrequited love. Implied in the opening stanza, this cause of death is indirectly echoed in the final one, where "let me die I As a mere man" signals a wish for a different kind of death from that to which the standard Petrarchan lover succumbs. But this fairly overt conceit of death-by-love is inflected in certain important ways. Most notably, the lines "You think a sudden damp of love I Will through all their senses move" shift the issue of the power of love toward subjective delusion, rather than medically proven fact. In the next stanza Donne at first seems to admit that the woman has indeed achieved all these "victories," massacring the viewers of his corpse as well as himself. The significance of the precise phrase "Poor victories" becomes clearer, however, when the lover instructs the mistress to change her amorous strategy. She will have "pleasure in [her] conquest" only if it is really she who achieves it, rather than a set of outworn literary traditions, standing in for and obstructing a more "real," immediately personal form of love. Indeed, therequest that she should Deface records, and histories Of your own arts and triumphs over men, And without such advantage kill me then

gives us a strikingly apt echo of how anatomy itself patiently stripped layers of misleading text from the human body. A vital underlying message of the poem, then, is that amorous experience filtered through the dusty conceptual screen of Petrarchanisrn is a poor substitute for independent human life. The lovers might indeed be seen as powerfully naked in the final lines, given that their bodies radiate a sensuous charge previously obscured hy abstracting conceptions oflovc and sexuality. It is probably too strong to claim that the defiantly novel, empowered, and autonomous couple imagined here are quite so transgressive as D' Am ville's overweening belief in unaided human knowledge. But the comparison is undoubtedlv suggestive: Donne

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clearly allies himself with anatomy as a highly topical and authoritative form of demystifying endeavor. It certainly would be a mistake to view "The Damp" as a poem that achieves or attempts some kind of Cartesian split between emotional and sexual love, between ideas and actions. Rather, what it aims for is a closer, unmediated contact with an emotion which, in Donne's poems, is often tinged by or saturated with the divine. Deriding those abstracted, deluded would-be lovers trapped in a world of ethereal Petrarchan sensibilities, its point is precisely that their kind of love lacks substance, toughness, durability. As we have seen in "The Funeral," Donne pervasively, tangibly integrates material and spiritual love into a force that pulses through the complex web of the nerves. Similarly, in "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window" he invests the spare but comprehensive human skeleton with a vital amorous power. 64 Perhaps most famously of all, in "The Ecstasy," with its unrepentantly idealizing view of love, the mystic union of the lovers is achieved through a number of quite precise materializing conceits, culminating not only in a broad joining of souls but in a physiological fusion of bodily spirits. 65 What Donne is often attracted to, then, in both religious and amorous contexts, is an ingeniously contrived transitional zone, blurring the boundaries between matter and spirit. Like the humanistically trained anatomists of the earlier sixteenth century, Donne is not giving up the body in "The Damp," but seeking a purified, more authentic version of it. The brutal jolt of the autopsy conceit is therefore especially attractive to one who wishes to assert the raw power of bodies themselves over the damps or mists of sentiment currently obscuring tl1em. This stance is an important one to remember, both insofar as many of Donne's sermons continue to directly and precisely "embody" religious feelings and beliefs in a very meaningful way, and because when Donne does appear to relinquish that material locus, he is doing so only with considerable reluctance, pressured by the tough intellectual integrity that marks all his writing, and which at times subtly challenges his religious faith. One of the clearest and most sustained examples of intellectual curiosity disrupting the accepted religious order of the cosmos is found in Donne's An Anatomy of the World. This long piece was commissioned as a poetic memorial for the prematurely deceased daughter of Sir Robert Drury, a man who would presently become Donne's patron. 66 For our purposes, the initial impulse behind the poem is relevant because, in the piece as a whole, Donne often seems to be working out quite deep-rooted and unresolved religious anxieties, undercover of elegizing the dead Elizabeth Drury. He is not precisely off his guard, but it seems unlikely that the concerns of the poem would have been expressed so openly, and at such length, without the pretext that the memorial commission afforded. Donne's extended pathological autopsy of the terminally corrupted world (at times claimed to be "dead,"

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at others sick, at one point "soul-less," void of "she which did inanimate and fill" it) has often been seen to epitomize its diagnosis most sharply in the following lines: And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for iL And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies, 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, father, son, arc things forgot ... (lines 205-15, Poems, 276)

A once supposedly harmonious interdependent order-visible in the firmament or amid the properly distinguished social ranks on the streets of London-has been severely dislocated. 67 At first, it might seem that anatomy is one of the few cultural innovations that Donne does not attack. And indeed, any such attack might appear somewhat ironic, given the implicit tribute to dissective method found in his title. Yet dissection does in fact underlie this famous lament in certain oblique ways. First: Donne's title is by no means an unequivocal tribute, given the sly pun it involves. As so often, the word "anatomy" is here unstable in its signification, slipping between verb and noun. The elegy's title indicates not simply a "dissection" or "anatomizing" of the world, but also a descrij1tion of a dead and putrefied entity ("an anatomy")-something persistently degraded throughout the piece. Moreover, as David A. Hedric Hirsch has observed in a valuable article on Donne's attitude to anatomv and atomism, "If one cuts away at the very word 'anatomy,' as did speakers of colloquial English in Donne's time, the dissection of parts might lead to an 'atomy' or atom, the smallest piece of matter. "68 Accordingly, what we witness here is not so much a precise attack on anatomy as an unconscious sense that traditional structures cannot themselves he dissected, or "atomised,'' with impunity. The general mentality of analysis Donne perceives, then, crystallizes into the word "atomics," which itself implicitly slides between a material particle and the process responsible for such reduction. How does this kind of anxiety play itself out in Donne's explicitly religious writing? There are four instances in Donne's sermons where we find a split between anatomy as human knowledge, and a supernatural truth broadly opposed to it. 69 On 2June 1628, Donne emphasized to his St. Paul's con-

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gregation the limits of human knowledge. His illustration was telling: ''What anatomist knows the body of man thoroughly, or what casuist the soul?. "70 Clearly it is not for a casuist to comprehensively know the greatest mystery of God's work in his human creature. It must, then, be significant that Donne juxtaposes that assertion of what is effectively beyond human understanding with a body supposedly still not fully mapped out by men such as Crooke, Harvey, and May. One need only take that inference a step further to sec Donne as making an unconscious link between theological notions of the soul and its empirical dimension-this latter now coming increasingly under threat just because anatomists are steadily paring away the numinous aura of the human interior. One other way of viewing Donne's rhetorical query is to see it not as an assertion of the spiritual over the corporeal, hut rather as an attempt to recover a congenial version of the corporeal, with its lingering unfathomed mystery, from the cold hands of the dissectors. Just a few months before, in a sermon of Christmas Day 1627, Donne had warned: "For matter of belief, he that believes not all, solvit]esum, as S.John speaks, he takes Jesus in pieces, and after the Jews have crucified him, he dissects him, and makes him an anatomy. We must therefore teach all.'m The preacher seems here to be at least as concerned with the perils of anatomy as with the perils of erroneous theology. At one level, his exact and creative gloss of the general Latin term solver,e ("to loosen, break up, undo") as "anatomy" already suggests that medical dissection is an unconscious preoccupation in his own mind. n More precisely, the "anatomy" made of Christ connotes not only a distorting abridgement of scripture, but a special kind of violence committed against the "living spirit of truth." Donne is, then, setting a certain new, human attitude to the body against an emphatically more valid, supernatural body at once comprehending and sw-passing the purely material. In doing so he partly echoes Hall, Price, and Burges. He also finds himself in perhaps still more surprising company. For his opposition is remarkably close to the Paracelsian views of a contemporary medical and theological writer, James Forrester. Forrester's scriptural epitome, The Marrow and juice of 260 Scriptures, implicitly offers a pithily distilled "body of truth," broadly resembling the claims of many literary anatomies. But Forrester, keen to precisely define the kind of body his work forms, insists that it is "not the dead skeleton, but the living anatomy of the body and soul of our saviour Jesus Christ. "7 '1 As the Paracelsian attitude to mummy has shown, such conceptions of the body were at once fiercely spiritual and forcefully material in their effects and powers. Donne's objection to the anatomizing of Christ does of course have a straightforward, unproblematic side, in that he is attacking a supposed misrepresentation of spiritual truths which he elsewhere states in more neutral language: "We shall consider, first, conrisionem corporis, the shredding of the body of Christ into fragments, by unnecessary wrangling in doctrinal

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points. "74 But the dissective form of that objection in 1627 is important. For it betrays an unconscious association between two versions (practical and intellectual) of the anatomical or analytic attitude. Both these versions are implicitly cast as at once limited and dangerously misleading kinds of knowledge. Moreover, Donne evidently has some sense of anatomy as a topical, concrete reality in mind on that occasion, given the parallel between Christ's execution and those contemporary hangings that preceded the dissections of condemned criminals. Indeed, his remarks could have been more or less seasonal in their topicality. At some point in or shortly after 1624, when Robert Fludd and others volunteered as dissectors for the new, "Goulstonian" lecture endowed by Dr. Theodore Coulston, the College of Physicians began to dissect in December as well as in Lent. 75 Evidence suggests that the new demonstration had begun by 1628, but the absenceof records between 1624 and 1628 does not rule out a much earlier start, given the similar failure to refer to events such as Harvey's three-day dissection of 1623. 76 Donne may well have been speaking, then, just around a fortnight after the new anatomy of mid-December. His remarks may therefore have had a certain local motivation, and an accordingly extempore character which matches the sense of unconscious anxiety. One could certainly argue that the quite shocking evocation of a dissected Christ (made more immediately real by the play on execution), and even the effectual heightening of the original "infamy" of Christ's nominally criminal death, suggest Donne to have been at least slightly off his guard in this case. 77 What we therefore seem to witness is a quite serious and longstanding uncertainty obliquely surfacing in real time, when Donne is not composing at leisure in his studv, but speaking to a large and attentive audience on one of the most important days in the Christian calendar. 78 One would not want to overemphasize the presence of such habits in Donne's sermons. These are indeed often remarkable for their poise and control, and for their ability to sustain a relatively abstract discussion with reference only to orthodox textual authorities. Yet it is precisely this habitual restraint and balance that makes the following instance so unusual and so telling. On 8 April 1621, Donne preached to a White-hall audience which, though evidently not including the king on this occasion, was an elite and highly educated one. His text was Proverbs 25:16: "Hast thou found honey? Eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it." Edmund Gosse long ago noted that Donne may not have had more than a few notes with him when he first delivered a sermon, evidently writing up the now extant Ycrsions after he had spoken. 79 The editors of Donne's complete Sermons also note-citingJohn Sparrow-that a sermon would usually have been "carefullv thought out and memorized" before the preacher delivered it from notes. 80 Although the present case seems to have been far from "carefully thought out," this overview of general preaching habits does

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imply that preachers were able to speak fluently without a full script. There are several reasons for thinking that Donne's sermon of8 April had indeed been more rushed in preparation than he would have liked. One of these is the fact that the piece is (perhaps especially to the modern ear) often compelling in its seemingly spontaneous inventions and vivid details-these being far from typical qualities in Donne's sermons as a whole. A second sign that haste has produced a slightly overpressured inspiration is the scattering of more or less open hints at just the kind of worldly and cosmic disorder lamented, ten years earlier, in Donne's Anatomy. 81 Perhaps the most surprising single moment is that found on the second page. Having opened with a long paragraph on sin, Donne suddenly makes an unusual admission: "But this consideration of our insatiableness in sin, in my purpose I supposed for the end of this hour: But who knows whether your patience, that you will hear, or who knows whether yours, or my life, that you can hear, shall last to the end of this hour?" The faintly whimsical notion that preacher or hearer could die before the close of the sermon was perhaps a useful way to compel the attention of sinners bound for an uncertain afterlife. But on the whole the admission of spontaneous construction is highly atypical. Evidently lacking his normally rigorous structure, Donne appears to conveniently start with something definitely available to memory (and fairly commanding in its impact) while at the same time mentally ordering a workable scheme for what follows as he speaks. That initial sense is quickly compounded by an associated impression: namely, that Donne is at certain moments filling time and space in a sermon that barely appears adequate to occupy the hour it should span. Apropos of the chosen text, we learn of how "in experience, when some men curious of natural knowledge, have made their hives of glass, that by that transparency, they might see the bees' manner of working, the bees have made it their first work to line that glass-hive, with a crust of wax, that they might not be discerned" (232). Still more vividly, the importance of moderation is conveyed through the question, "Have ye seen a glass blown to a handsome competency, and with one breath more, broke?" (234). 82 A moment later, Donne shifts wryly from St. Paul, "whom for his eloquence the Lystrians called Mercury" to both the medicinal use of the metal as supposed cure for syphilis, and its swallowing as a method of suicide: "How many of them that take it outwardly at first, come at last to take it inwardly?" (234-C~S) .83 Again, he illustrates his claim that "there is no ... fixed measure for worldly things, for everyone to have" by reflecting that "the same piece of money given to a water-man, is his fare ... given to a farmer of custom, it is impost ... to a merchant it is the price of his ware ... to a labourer, it is wages, to a beggar it is alms" (235). Presently this unusually vivid and persistent eye for detail shifts to medicine. Imagining a rich man who has vomited up his soul (and thus strikingly echoing a youthful elegy, 'Jealousy"), he insists that this figure is now "but a

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rotten and abhorred carcass; at best he was but a bag of money, and now he is but the bag itself, which scarce any man will stoop to take up." And, he continues, "as in a vomit in a basin, the physician is able to show the world, what cold meat, and what raw meat, and what hard and indigestible meat he had eaten; so when such a person comes by justice, or malice to this vomit, every man becomes a physician ... and can show all his falsehoods, and all his extortions in particular. "84 With similarly characteristic medical precision Donne also notes "a greater danger in vomiting"-namely, that "often times it breaks a vein within, and that is most commonly incurable"-before shifting with typical case from basins of vomit and broken veins to the "blood of Christ jesus," imagined as hemorrhaging within the unhappy sinner (238). One would probably find that five of Donne's sermons chosen at random did not contain as many striking details as this. Gusting like drafts of spring breeze into a stuffy chapel, these sudden fragmentary evocations of the outside world already give us cause to think that the "anatomy" which we will shortly encounter was equally present to Donne's imagination as he spoke. Not only that, but unlike the image of the bees or the glassblower, it appears to have been far more than mere convenient illustration or time filling. Rather, it was one strand in a web of anxieties that underlies the piece from start to finish: "As though this world were too little to satisfv man," Donne laments, "men are come to discover or imagine new worlds, several worlds in every planet; and as though our fathers heretofore ... had been but dull and ignorant sinners, we think it belongs to us to perfect old inventions, and to sin in another height and excellency, then former times did" (225). As in the case of the dissected Christ, we find the ostensibly accidental rhetoric of natural philosophy to be more significant than the sin it is supposed to amplify, with both forms of enquiry implicitly constructed as sinful in themselves. Perhaps most notably, Donne neatly signals his inability to fully adjust to this cosmic shift by the equivocal "discover or imagine." Here, as elsewhere, we encounter a mind in process of absorption. Indeed, Donne's preoccupation with the subject was so great that he had made an almost identical remark less than two months earlier, on 16 February 1620/21. 85 A little later, Donne begins with relativelv slight pretext to attack a percei\'ed confusion of social order: "Note the slipperiness of our times, where titles flow into one another, and lose their distinctions; when as the elements are condensed into one another, air condensed into water, and that into earth, so an obsequious flatterer, shall condense a yeoman into a Worshipful person, and the Worshipful into Honourable, and so that which duly was intended for distinction, shall occasion confusion" (227). We have seen in chapter 2 that, for Edward Sutton, flattery was sufficiently serious to be figured in terms of cannibalism. Moreover, while the kind of social instability discussed in the con text of The Wedding was itself an important source of unease for this period, Donne here tacitly presents it as part of a wider cosmic imbalance, via his parallel with the shifting of elements. The social grada-

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tions whose blurring he laments should ideally be as substantially real and integral to human life as the most basic physical constituents of matter itself-or, indeed, more so. Finally, toward the end of the sermon there is a brief, ambiguous reference to those many heathen nations that God has "left in ... darkness, who shall never hear of Christ, til they hear himself"that is, remain fatally unconverted and unenlightened until the Second Coming. Although this does not specifY any particular country or continent, it seems very likely that Donne has America in mind. As I have argued elsewhere, the issue of New World evangelism was one which clearly engaged his attention in the early twenties. 86 The native peoples of North and South America were in some ways no less cosmically jarring than the new planets or rogue stars spied by Kepler, Galileo, and Tycho Brahe. This, then, is the context in which Donne makes one of his most striking references to anatomy. Not only do we have a sense of an impressively resourceful extempore performance, but in a relatively short sermon Donne alludes to four of the more important epistemological concerns first brought together in his long poem of 1611. In particular, his allusions to astronomy and to confusion of social rank involve one fundamental objection: that mankind is increasingly re-creating structures supposedly fixed by the Almighty. Such a concern is no less central in the following lines, where Donne gives a new and topical twist to his chosen text ("Hast thou found honey ... ?"): He doth not say yet, lest thou be satisfied; there is no great fear, nay there is no hope of that, that he will be satisfied. We know the receipt, the capacity of the ventricle, the stomach of man, how much it can hold; and we know thereceipt of all the receptacles of blood, how much blood the body can have; so we do of all the other conduits and cisterns of the body; but this infinite hive of honey, this insatiable whirlpool of the covetous mind, no anatomy, no dissection hath discovered to us. When I look into the larders, and cellars, and vaults, into the vessels of our body for drink, for blood, for urine, they are potties, and gallons; when I look into the furnaces of our spirits, the ventricles of the heart and of the brain, they are not thimbles; for spiritual things, the things of the next world, we have no room; for temporal things, the things of this world, we have no bounds (235-36).

This parable of worldliness has certain important topical overtones. Falling less than a week after the Easter of 1 April, it may indeed be a seasonal occurrence. Second, the passage is undoubtedly the clearest sign Donne gives in any of his writings that he had at some point attended a dissection ("when I look"). 87 Indeed, for Geoffrey Keynes, this statement "is startling because Harvey's lectures, their substance not yet published to the world, would seem to be the only source from which Donne could have got

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knowledge of these quantitative measurements of the capacity of the viscera. "88 Although his phrasing is perhaps not as precisely quantitative as Keynes implies, it seems hard to deny that either at a public anatomy, or poring over a textbook, Donne had taken special trouble to examine the cavities (of heart and brain) supposedly reserved for vital and animal spirit. The result, he states, was disappointing. And this disappointment was not only literal but topical. Behind these lines there lies the faint and wavering shadow of the rete mirabile. As recently as 1615, Crooke's Microcosrnographia had echoed the preference for certain cerebral "ventricles" as substitutes for the increasingly discredited "wonderful net" (516). Where there had once been a beautiful, intricately wrought plexus of veins and arteries, there were now only minute webs lodged in the thimbles of the brain cavities. A structure had dissolved into gaps. Forced into these interstices by the invading scalpel, the physiological index of mankind's immortality clung to a last few millimeters of sacred space. We seem, accordingly, to be witnessing an oblique version of the consternation so volubly expressed by Henry More a few decades later. Donne's complaint reads as an aptly literal summary of the distinctive problems that Vesalian anatomy posed for Christian pneumatology: the newly examined body does indeed "have no room." Back in the days of "The Funeral" Donne had evoked anatomical space in a labyrinthine free fall down the spiritually vibrant web of the nerves. Here his inner world has become more crudely, greedily material. That impression is certainly reinforced by the precise language which he opposes to the crudely material cavities of the viscera: "this infinite hive of honey, this insatiable whirlpool of the covetous mind." That latter phrase in particular, bravely conjured forth without reference to the text of the sermon, attempts to performatively respiritualize the inert, echoing larders and cellars of the anatomized body. The richly allusive image of the insatiable whirlpool combines a vibrant surface activity with an unknowable spiral into mysterious depths. For Donne the potent dynamism of the human mind (and, perhaps, of his own brilliant mind in particular) could surely not be something bounded at one level in the lax consistency of brain tissue, or at another in a minute sinus of that larger organ. Human thought, will, desire, imagination-whatever uncertain assembly of traits it was that clustered under the label of the soul-must be more than this. They must, accordingly, be pitched out into a safe space beyond the cold incisions of the dissecting knife. Discussing the relation between anatomy and the shifting nature of the physically localized soul, Scott Manning Stevens has noted that, while "Descartes is probably best known for the so-called mind-body split ... in regard to the debate between brain and heart, one might be justified in invoking a 'mind-brain split' -we are much more likely to invoke the word 'mind' as conceptually separate from the word 'brain,' whereas 'heart' may be used interchangeably as metaphor or physical object."89 This now famil-

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iar split between mind and brain is essentially a remnant of Christian theology: the mind can indeed be abstracted from raw cerebral matter, because it ultimately connotes the immortal soul. And Donne, similarly, has here made a first shadowy admission that the human brain, as perceived in the realm of anatomy, is no longer adequate to his own sense of the human mind or soul. Nor could he easily let the matter drop. Just over a year later, speaking at St. Paul's on Midsummer Day 1622, Donne elaborates on john 1:8: "He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light." In this case there is of course no question of seasonal influence. Nor indeed does the sermon-with one or two exceptions-have much of the memorably exact, perhaps inspired, detail of the 8 April performance. Interestingly, though, it does again have a certain urgency. That urgency is focused once more on the vital questions of sin and salvation; and given that the season in which Donne speaks does not automatically license a penitential theme, these topics can be taken more readily as a sign of his state of mind. While the most emphatic visceral image of the sermon appears toward its end, the motif from which it develops is already stated around the middle. From the emphatic, "Poor bankrupt! thou hast sinned out thy soul so profusely, so lavishly, that thou darest not cast up thine accounts, thou darest not ask thy self whether thou have any soul left" (4:149), Donne rises effortlessly to sitby the shoulder of the Almighty, from where he offers one of his most impressive evocations of divine power: God cannot be blinded. He seeth all the way, and at thy last gasp, he will make thee see too, through the multiplying glass, the spectacle of desperation. Canst thou hope that that God, that seeth this dark earth through all the vaults and arches of the several spheres of heaven, that seeth thy body through all thy stone walls, and seeth thy soul through that whir example, Richard Brucher, "Piracy and Parody," Ben.fonson.foumal6 ( 1999): 209-22. esp. 209. 38. See Harold Jenkins, Tlw Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London, 1934), 86-R7, cited by Brucher 1999, 214. 39. Searches of Early English Books Online (made 25 1\'ovember 2005) for "skeleton" and "skeleton" (singular and plural). 1500-1642, yielded onlyf(Jrty-three incidences in thirty-one records. Twenty of these bll after 1630, with seven of the earlier occurrences deriving from Banister's 1578 textbook. Aside from Banister, there are only five incidences before 1603 (the latest likely date for the first performance of Hoffman). Two of those five are from obscure anatomy books of 1540 and 1545. Both the quantity and ambiguity of references to "anatomy" make a comparable search very difficult. However, of one hundred references already limited to more concrete physical senses of the noun "anatomy" (as an entity, not a procedure) twenty more or less definitely imply "skeleton," with a further thirteen being ambiguous but open to a similar reading. This represents 20% or (taking both definite and more ambiguous counts together) 30% of the sample. Seven of these. excluding those in Hoffman, fall before 1603. Setting these results in broad statistical and linguistic context, we find that in the same period EEBO searches for "anatomie" and "anatomv" (singular and plural) yield 572 occurrences in 245 records, and 503 in 207 records, rt>spectivelv. It should be emphasized that even where such references appear to us more hgurative than actual (as in "the anatomy of sin") they may well connote the "skeleton" of a subject-its essential foundation, outlines, or blueprint. 40. iBlures or Rradings upon ... Proverbs, 58, emphasis added. 41. Chambers, 3:261. See also Carson 1988, 114. 42. Mark Eccles believes C:hettle to have died "sometime between 1603 and 1607," noting that the last records of Chettle are in May 1603: see Studies in Philology 79, no. 4 ( 1982): 22. 43. See Brucher 1999. 44. As Shelford has indicated above, "bare bones" cannot necessarily be taken as a simply skeletal reference, but in this case it is echoed by other instances. 45. In Dessen and Thompson's Dictionary of Stage Directions this instance is simply included under the entry for "body," in the subsection "bodies can be discovered": Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary ofStage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (Cambridge, 1999), 33-34. 46. Act I, 414, emphasis added. 47. Act 1, 167. emphasis added; act 5, 39-42. 48. On \'esalius's thef't, see Roberts and Tomlinson, 127. 49. Moreover, at the play's opening Hoffman quite definitely "strikes ope" such a curtain, rather than leaving it half closed. 50. '/'he Battle nfA.lcazar should have been fairly fresh in people's memories when Hoffman hrst opened. C:hettle's play seems to have been staged initially in late wimer or earlv spring of 1602/03. Peele's work, though originally appearing around l:)R9. was later revived-possibly,

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Notes to Pages 24-28

225

according to Foakes and Rickert 1961, as late as 1601. While the two works probably did not, then, overlap in performance, there seems to be a strong chance that Chettle saw Peele's drama not long before he began composing Hoffman (see Hens/owe's Diary, 329-30). 51. Given that a primate skeleton would have been far more satisfactory than that of an ox or cow, it is worth noting that "from at least 1603" there were a number of live baboons on display as popular spectacles around Britain: see Volpone, 2.1, 88 (Jonson, Works, vol. 5); Chambers, 3:369. Cf. also Edward Sutton, Anthropophagus (1623), 41. 52. See Henslowe's Diary, 319, lines 60, 65, 66, and 67. Again, I am indebted to Inga-Stina Ewbank for drawing this to my attention. 53. The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons confirm the ownership of one skeleton by 1567, and it seems likely, therefore, that professional pride would have prompted the physicians to have obtained their own specimen shortly after the foundation of the Lumleian lectures: see Jessie Dobson and R. Milnes Walker, Barbers and Barber-Surgeons of London (Oxford, 1979), 40-41. If Webster's reference to flaying is to be taken literally, there were at least two skeletons in Surgeons' Hall by around 1612. 54. See, for example, Annals of the Barber-Surgeons, 2:335, 366 (23 March 1635, 13 December 1627). The 1581 painting of Banister shows a skeleton carefully framed by a length of striped cloth (Roberts and Tomlinson, 127). 55. Annals, 2:320. See also the title of a pamphlet (since destroyed): Anon., The Strange and Wonderful Discovery ... of the Skin of a Human Body ( 1684) . 56. Although it might be expected that such an expense should appear in Henslowe's accounts, this objection is less serious, given that the extant records end in March 1602/03, a date that may well precede performance of Hoffman. 57. Although grave robbing reached its most notorious expansion as a trade in the early nineteenth century-see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 2001)it was evidently occurring to some extent in Paris around this time: see Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London 1500-1670 (Cambridge, 2002), 115-16. 58. Ligaments decay more rapidly than bone, so that an exhumed skeleton would very probably separate into a number of constituent parts once disturbed. However, even at this point, the object could have been wired into a satisfactory state if required. See, for example, French 1999, 203, on Realdus Colombus's reassembly of a skeleton. I am very grateful to Richard Newell of Cardiff University's School of Biosciences for his kind help with this and other quenes. 59. See, for example, Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor, 1995). For one of the earliest known Puritan objections to theater per se in the Elizabethan period, see John Stockwood, A Sermon preached at Pauls Cross ( 1578), 24, 134. 60. Act 1, 379-87. It is not obvious why Mercury, rather than Apollo, is here associated with the flaying of Marsyas. 61. On some of the artistic and literary representations of this myth in the Renaissance, see Sawday, 185-86. 62. On late Elizabethan attempts to unify surgery, anatomy, and elite medicine, see D'Arcy Power, "Notes on Early Portraits ofJohn Banister, of William Harvey, and the Barber-Surgeons' Visceral Lecture in 1581," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 6 (1912): 18-35. 63. IfWhitteridge ( 1971, 86) is correct in placing the first Lumleian dissection in 1588, then the physicians should have demonstrated the skeleton twice by the turn of the century (1592 and 1598), with a third occurrence falling in 1604. 64. See Richard Sugg, "Donne and the Uses of Anatomy," in Literature Compass 1 (2004). The practice of embalming suggests that the rich and educated, as well as the poor and supposedly "superstitious," preferred not to allow the body to disintegrate after death. For further comment, see Vanessa Harding, "Whose Body? A Study of Attitudes toward the Dead Body in Early-Modern England," in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge, 2000), 170-88, esp. 17273. 65. "The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe," journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50, no. 1 (1995): 111-32. 66. Heaven's Speedy Hue and Cry after Lust andMurther (1635), C3r (reissue, STC 12010). Renaissance texts made relatively promiscuous use of italics, but more usually reserved them for

226

Notes to Pages 28-33

proper names rather than for ordinary nouns. The pamphlet was very much "breaking news," Shearwood and Evans having been executed on 14 and 17 April 1635. It seems to have been fairly popular; originally entered on 22 April 1635, it was reissued with additions later in the year. See also Anon., Afurder upon Murder (1635). 67. Sawday, 60-61. 68. BarbercSurgrons' Annals, 2:320. On the role of bodily mutilation in linking the figures of the criminal, the saint, and the martyr in Renaissance Italy, see Katharine Park, 'The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy," Rmaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1-33, esp. 22-23. 69. See A4v and (to some extent) C2v. 70. Caspar Hofmann quoted and trans. by William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt's "Anatomy of Dr. Tulp" (London, 1982), 26. For further details on audiences, see Giovanni Ferrari, "Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna," Past and Present 117 (1987): 50-106, esp. 104; Sawday, 149. 71. Dobson and Walker 1979, 78-79. 72. Shearwood's corpse was removed because spectators ruined the "growing fields" (C4v), so that he could not have been shifted to Ring-Cross much later than September. 73. See, f(n example, Alexander Montgomerie, The Chern and thr Slar (Edinburgh, 1597), B2r; Guillaume Dubartas, DuBartas Divine Weeks, trans. Joshua Sylverster ( 1605), lines 99-100 and 1273-74; Philip Massinger, The Picture (1630), 3.1, 1-17. 74. A crucial factor here must have been how fast Shearwood's corpse decayed. As David Whittaker of Cardiff Medical School kindly informs me, however, "the rate of decomposition of a corpse is extremely variable," depending on a number of factors within and around the body. 75. See, again, Bentley, 5:1114. 76. For the erotic dimension, see Sawday, 48-53. 77. See Carlino 1999, 92-94; Sawday, 54-84. Sawday notes that although such a policy was not legally codified until the 1752 Anatomy Act, this act itself rested "on earlier practices" (55). For the continuing association between an·atomy and legal punishment after 1752, see Richardson 2001. 78. Cf. Webster as above; and Thomas Dekker, .fohn Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton (1658), 1.2, 29-31. 79. Brucher 1999, 211-12, emphasis added. For an earlier example of this lack of interest in the play's anatomical aspects, see also the (otherwise valuable) edition of]. D.Jowett: Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of llnjfrnan (Nottingham, 1983), esp. iii. 80. Brucher 1999, 214. It is not clear from the context of this statement whether Brucher distinguishes between the (nominally) identical deaths ofOtho and Hollman. 81. Jenkins 1934,86-87, cited by Brucher 1999,214. 82. Act 1, 219-27. By contrast, Hoffman's own death speech at the play's conclusion is chiefly lacking in anatomical overtones, save perhaps his "I, so, boil on thou foolish idle brain" (act 5, 64-65). 83. A phrase such as "shrinking of sinews" could be used proverbially and abstractly; see, for example, Sampson Price, The Beauty of Holiness ( 1618), 30. Nevertheless, it seems also to have been typically concrete in many usages around this time; see, for example,John Taylor, The Old, Old, Very Old Man (1635), C1r, B4v. 84. Jowett 1983, iii, citing lines 379-82. 85. See esp. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1983), 328. As Aries's additional adjective "beautiful" perhaps implies, the skeleton may also have been more difficult to draw or paint. 86. See, for example, Samuel Nicholson, Acolastus (1600), I2r; Robert Yarington, Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), Flr;.John Davies of Hereford, Mirrorosmos (1603), 118. 87. Under the specifications of the physicians' Lumleian lecture, the skeleton should have been demonstrated everv fifth year. The progress of the Lumleian cycle was not a smooth onea new lecturer would begin the cycle afresh if a previous incumbent died; lecturers may at times have simply failed to dissect as required-but roughly seven skeletal demonstrations should have occurred in London by 1642. On the reluctance of certain physicians to dissect, sec Annals of the College of Physicians of London, trans.J. Emberry, S. Heathcote, M. Hellings, 5 vols., in Wellcome library, RCP, London, 3.1, 188.

Notes to Pages 33-39

227

88. Donne, Sermons, 3:105, Lincolns Inn [?Easter Term 1620]. 89. Again, as with Goodcole's use of the word, this seems confirmed by the presence ofitalics. 90. On Donne's visual imagination, sec John Carey,john Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London, 1981), 131-66. According to his will, Donne possessed at least twelve pictures (Donne, Letters, 2:359-63). 91. Donne, Letters, 2:360. 92. As the picture is not mentioned in the will of Donne's actual father (Donne, Letters, 2:357-59), the likelihood of tracing it seems slight. If anyone does have any information on it I would be inclined to remember them kindly in my own modest testament (for Winniff's will, see Gloucester Record Office, 1639 I 183 Winniff). 93. Legal students often studied medicine on their own initiative: see, for example, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Autobiography, ed.J. 0. Halliwell (London, 1845}, 1:230. Additionally, cases of postmortems with grounds for suspicion as to cause of death naturally involved lawyers: see, for example, Physicians' Annals, 3.2, 341, 30 May 1632; letter from Dr Moffet to Mr Hicks of Lincoln's Inn, 20.July 1585 (MS Lansdowne 107, No. 13 fols. 22r-23r, esp. 22r). 94. Donne, Sermons, 5:353. Allowing for some margin of error in respect of the minute "seed-bones" of the hand, this total is close to that of Helkiah Crooke's count of 258 (Microcosmographia [1631], 93!\-36, 995). 95. Although the picture may have come from Donne's stepfather, Syminges, he himself sadly died intestate (Bald. 49), leaving no record of his property. For the medical background of Syminges and its probable influence on Donne during childhood and early youth, see Carey 1981, 16; Bald, 37; Baird D. Whitlock, 'john Syminges, A Poet's Step-Father," Notes and Qyeries 199 (1954): 421-24 and 465-67. 96. These themselves, it must be admitted, though more anatomically accurate than their predecessors, did vary in their exactitude (see Roberts and Tomlinson, 144-45, first skeletal figure from De Falnica).

2.

"I'LL EAT THE REST OF TH' ANATOMY"

1. Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, eel. and trans. C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L. Poynter, and K. F. Russell (Berkeley, 1961), 27-28. The cannibalistic overtones of this passage are noted briefly by Sawclay (132). 2. For debates and evidence on the actual occurrence of ritual cannibalism, see William Arens, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Diswoery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge, 1997), 6; Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, 2001}, 6-7. 3. See Hermann Helmuth, "Cannibalism in Paleoanthropology and Ethnology," in Man and Aggression, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York, 1973), 229-54, esp. 235; Conklin 2001, xv. See also Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of . .. Guiana (1596), 39. 4. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, 1986}, 125-50. On the heart, see Sanday, 125; Helmuth 1973, 238. 5. Rene Girard, ~'iulence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), 276. Cf. also Francis Huxley, Affable Savages (New York, 1966), 254, cited in Girard, 275. 6. Lestringan t 1997, 9. 7. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London, 1986), 85, cited by Margaret E. Owens, Stages ofDismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Mediroal and f'arly Modern Drama (Delaware, 2005), 155. 8. Louise Noble, "Corfrus Salubre: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Culture," PhD diss., Queen's University, Ontario, 2002, 84. On Berengarius cf. Donne, Sermons, 3:211. 9. A Sermon, Preached at Paul's Cross [1571], 126. 10. George Goodwin, Babel's Balm (1624}, 65; Thomas Tuke, Concerning the Holy Eucharist (1625), 6. Cf. also Thomas Bilson, The True Difference ... (1585}, 782. 11. Camporesi 1996, 54, citing P. Messia, Della Selva Rinovata (Venice, 1638), 31. For two broadly similar accounts of tribal exocannibalism, see also William Gamage, Linsi-woolsie (1621}, D4r, and Sir Richard Barckley, The Felicity ofMan (1631}, 11-12. For the significance of the ritual Barckley describes, see San day 1986, 125.

228

Notes to Pages 40-4 3

12. Quoted in Robert Viking O'Brien, "Cannibalism in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ireland, and the Americas," in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest (l\'ew York, 2001), 35-57, esp. 37. \Vl1ile O'Brim (37) doubts that Spenser was present on this occasion, citing Willy Maley in support of his skepticism, Maley himself is actuallv more open to the possibility: Salvaging SjJmsn: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London, 1997), 11, 30, 42. 13. Sec Ruth Richardson, Drath, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 20(Jl). 3-29. On the underlving similarity between "primitive" magic and "civilized" religion, and for an early twentieth-century case of sympathetic magic in England, sec Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (London, 1919), 141, 137-38. 14. Conklin 2001,9, quoting Mabel Peacock, "Executed Criminals and Folk Medicine," Fo!Rlore 7 (1896): 268-83, esp. 270-71. Cf. Noble, who records "the Roman notion that blood drunk hot from a gladiator's wounds could cure epilepsy": '"And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads': Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus," English Literary History 70, no. 3 (2003): 677-708, 682. 15. For Ficino and Carpi, see Camporesi 1996, 44, 47. Banister: A Needful ... Treatise of Chyrurgerv (1575), 56, R9, 90; An Antidotary Chyrurgical ( 1585), 5; Donne: Devotions upon Emerc gent Occasions, eel. Anthom· Raspa (Montreal, 1975), 117; Letter:>, 1:178; Sermons, 7:260; Poems, 65; Bacon, Sylva Svlvarwn (1627), 261; Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer unto M. Fosler ( 1631), 103; Sir Ken elm Digbv, Choice !lndExjJerimented Receipts (1675), 26, 27, 32. On Boyle, sec Karl H. Dannenfeldt, "Egyptian !'vfumia: The Sixteenth-century Experience and Debate," Sixtemth Century journal I fi, no. 2 ( 1985): 178. 16. A list of 1678 prices mummy at 5s 4d a pound: Gideon Han-ey, Tlw Family Physician (1678), 127. On counterfeits, see Dannenfeldt 1985, 170-71, 179:john Swan, Speculum Mundi (1635)' 302-3. 17. Thorndike, 4:446,8:414. 18. A dissection of the human head is known to have been performed at Wittenberg as early as 1526 (see French 1999, 217). 19. "Of Cannibals," The Essays of Michad I"ord of Montaigne, trans. J Florio (1603) (London, 1894), 96. 20. The Apologie and Treatise of Ambroise Pare (1585), eeL Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1952), 145. 21. Camporesi 1996, 49. 22. For a range of uses involving "unnatural" and extreme beha\ior (often in one's own society), see Richard Younge, The Drunkard~' Character (1638), 94: George Downame, An Apostolical Injunction ( 1639). 34;John Taylor, The Noble Cavalier Characln'ised [I (i43], 4. 23. This account is a summary of that given by Dannenfeldt 198:'>. 163-fi4. 24. Camporesi 1996, 49. 25. 1'\oble 200'), fiRl-82. 26. For a positive recognition of this context, see Du Bartas his Divine Hl,cks and Works, trans. J Sylvester [1611 I. 617. 27. Sec, for example, \illpone, 4.4, 14; Thomas Dekker, TheSrwn Dead!> Sins ofi.ondon (1606), 39; William Davenant, The Wits (1636), 4.1, 245-16. 28. Cf. Luther, again, on "chewing" Christ's body, and also Donne, Sermons, 1:308,3:218, on blasphemy. 29. On this uncertainty, see Pare 1585, 144. For ambiguous definitions, see john Florio, A World of Words (1598); Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611). 30. The Labyrinth of Man's Life (1614), Blr. Cf. also Henoch Clapham, Error on the Left Hand (1608), 50, and Edward Benlowes, Theophila (1652), C3v. 31. For a fuller discussion, see Richard Sugg, '"Good Physic but Bad Food': Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and Its Suppliers," Social Histor~ ofl\1edicine 19. no. 2 (2006). For Schroeder's importance, sec Dannenfeldt 1985, 174. For l'aracelsus's opinion, see also Noble 2003, 681. 32. CL also Leviticus 17:14 on blood and vitality. 33. Donne, lftters, 2:260, to Mrs Cokain, n.d. 34. Camporesi 1996,19, citingjohann Schroeder, PharrnowjJraiaA1edim-C/zpnica (Frankfurt, 1677), 327. Cf also Noble 200~), 677.

Notes to Pages 43-47

229

35. See Lestringant 1997, 18. 36. On Paracelsian balm, see Paracelsus: Essential Readings, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (n.p., 1990), 179; Donne, Sermons, 6:116, 2:81. 37. "Paracelsianism and the Orthodox Lutheran Rejection of Vital Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Denmark," Early Science and Medicine 8, no. 3 (2003): 210-52, esp. 245. 38. For Hester, see A Hundred and Fourteen Experiments . .. [of] Paracelsus (1596), 37, 42. 39. Charles Webster, The Great lnstauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (London, 1975),224-25;278. 40. Webster 1975, 275. For Bacon's empirical attitude to mummy, see Bacon 1626, 261. 41. On College politics, see Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners, 1550-1640 (Oxford, 2003); Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), 209; Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 31. On the central role of de Mayerne in producing the Pharmacopeia, see also Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Traditions in Early-Modern France (Cambridge, 1991), 15. On Mayerne's sometimes ambiguous status as a foreign practitioner, see Pelling 2003, 169, 181-82. On the con text of the Pharmacopeia and Paracelsian influence, see De bus, The English Paracelsians (London, 1965), 149-55; Harold Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, 1986), 97, 121-22; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 353-433, esp. 354. On the problematic role of Moffet, see Frances Dawbarn, "New Light on Dr Thomas Moffet: The Triple Roles of an Early-Modern Patronage Broker," Medical History 47 (2003): 3-22, esp. 15-22. For a modified view of Debus's claim, see Webster 1975, 273-74. Mummy is an ingredient in various plasters in the Pharmacopeiaofl7 December 1618 (see 166, 172, 176). Less authoritative advocacy of mummy is found prior to this in Paracelsian translations (Hester 1596,37, 42; Timme 1605 [OED]). 42. Webster 1975, 246-323. 43. Culpeper, A Physical Directory (1649), 151. 44. See joan Baptista van Helmont, A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (1649), 12, 13, 15; Noah Biggs, Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos (1651), 161; Richard Elkes, Approved Medicines of Little Cost (1651), 32; Leonard Fioravanti, Three Exact Pieces of Leonard Fioravant (1651), 87; Samuel Boulton, Medicina Magica Tamen Physica (1656), 135-44; Oswald Croll, Bazilica Chymica, trans.]. Hartman (1657), 43;Johann Schroeder, Zoologia (1659), 39-61;John Tanner, The Hidden Treasures of the Art of Physic (1659), 406; W. W., Occult Physic (1660), 52. 45. Van Helmont 1649, 12. 46. For the degree to which Paracelsus anticipated the Protestant stance, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany, 1997), 2-3. 47. Lestringant 1997, 69, citing UC:ry, Histoire, trans. Whatley, 29. 48. Lestringant 1997, 44, citing Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1551), 119v (emphasis added). 49. Florio 1598. 50. Francis Meres, Wit's Commonwealth (1634), 734. 51. Lestringant 1997, 74-75. For a more equivocal attitude to famine cannibalism, see Thomas Adams, England's Sickness (1615), 49-50. 52. Lestringant 1997, 77-78. 53. "Epistle to the Reader," Christ's Tears overjerusalem, 2nd ed. (1594), Nashe, Works, 2:184. 54. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1599), 201, emphasis added. 55. A Pisgah Sight of Palestine (1650), 79. 56. Fuller 1650, 79. 57. The Holy State (1642), 426. 58. For a broadly similar example, see also Fuller 1642, 156. 59. Good Thoughts in Worse Times (1647), 100-101. 60. Cf. Thomas Churchyard, Churchyard's Challenge (1593), 195; Robert Bolton, Two Sermons (1635), 10. 61. Conklin 2001, vii. 62. Ibid., 12-13. 63. Although she does not use the word "commodification," Louise Noble appears to indicate something similar when stating that "medicinal cannibalism ... [was] mediated through

230

Notes to Pages 47-54

a whole host of practices-execution, corpse violation, dissection, distillation, embalming, packaging, distribution-which distance the ultimate ingestion from the original violence" (Noble 2003, 680). 64. Hvdriotaphia (1658), 78-79. 65. See Poetaster, Jonson, Works, 4:2.1, 29-30,49-55. 66. 2.1, :)6-59. "Oade" here means "woad," the blue dye made from leaves. 67. The Merchant's l'v!ap, I 08. See also Fynes Morison, An Itinerary . .. Containing His Ten Years Travel ( 1617), 96; George Abbot, A Brief Description of the Whole World (1664), Ll v. 68. Jonson, Works, 4.4, 14. Cf. Volpone's reference to "some human fat, for the conglutination, which we buy of the/ anatomists" (2.2, 153-54). 69. 4.4, 30-35. This play was composed just before December 1623 and published in 1624: The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1976), 1:301-2. 70. For such opposition, see Thomas Adams's contrast between "a man-eating oppressor" and "a gaming soldier": The Soldier's Honour (1617), 23. 71. Mystical Bedlam (1615), 51. On infOmt's fat and witchcraft, see also Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1, 23; Robert Baron, An Apology for Paris (1649), Glr;John Banks, Cyrus the C..reat (1696), 5. 72. SeealsoJamesShirley, TheBirdinaCage(1633), 1.1,317-19. 73. 5.1, 223-25. The play was published in 1647. Chambers thinks that Robert Daborne may also have been involved. On this and date of earliest performance, see Chambers, 3:227. Cf. also S. S., The Honest Lawyer (1616) act 3, 25-30. 74. The White Devil (1612), Webster, Works, I, 1.1, 20-23. 75. Thomas Dekker, A. Strange Horse Rae£ (1613), E4r. Cf. Lodowick Lloyd, 'llw First Part of the Dial of Days (1590), 225. 76. Cf. I .estringant 1997, 83, on an overtly cannibalistic tale in which a wife is made by her husband to unwittingly consume the heart of her lover. 77. John Speed, A Prospect of the MostF,amous Parts of the World (1646), 39. 78. Henry More, Divine Dialogues ( 1668), 386. The Loeb translation of Herodotus does not specifY drinking cups but does mention gilding: Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley (London, 192024), 2.4, 26, 225. 79. Ogden MS 42, fols. 170-72, University College London, cited in Robert C. Evans, 'Jonsonian Allusions," in &-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, Histmy, Performance, ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke, 1999), 233-48, esp. 233. 80. On this latter, see Camporesi 1996,45. 81. Conklin 2001, xviii. 82. 'J'he Second Tome ofthe Palace of Pleasure (1567), 407v. 83. Cf. Michel Foucault, Disripline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1991), 4R-49. R4. Camporcsi 1988, 19-21. 85. Ibid., 21. 86. For similar practices in Protestant-Catholic hostility, see Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and f.orulon, 1500-1670 (Cambridge, 2002), 278. 87. Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 (London, 1996), 78. This treatment was in fact not the work of Henry VIII, but of Queen Elizabeth's master glazier: see J.D. Mackie, A Histary of Scotland (Harmondsworth, 1964), 131-32. 88. Lestringant 1997, 80, citing Lery, Histoire, 132. 89. Lestringant suspects also a doctrinally exact irony in the actual consumption of a Christian who denied that status to the sacrament of the Mass (80). Cf. the anonymous woodcut entitled Anatomia Lutheri, which shows Luther being not only dissected by his followers but eaten by one of them: Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London, 1993), 1-4; Noble 2002, 67. Although the woodcut is undated, a response to it shows that it must have been produced in or before 1568. 90. The 1h rmning uf Thomas Nashe Gentleman ( 1597), G4r. Although anonymous, the work is now generally attributed to Harvey. 91. Camporesi 1996, 19. 92. Girard 1977, 276, emphasis added. 93. On dating, see Six Caroline Plays, ed. A. S. Knowland (London, 1962), xiii; Bentley, 5:1163-64. All further references are to Knowland's edition.

Notes to Pages 56-63

231

94. See Bacon 1626, 7. The theory had allegedly been verified by animal experiment: sec Edward Daunce, A BriefDiscourse of the Spanish State (1590), 28-29. Renaissance medical theory held that poisons could be rendered safe and efficacious, hence Bacon's apparently contradictory stance: sec Wear 2000, 86-87; Thomas Fuller, The History of the Holy War ( 1639), 90. 95. Robert Dixon, Canidia (1683), 76. 96. C. W., The Crying Murther (1624), title page, cited in Hilary Nunn's Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Ashgate, 2005), 69. 97. Cf., similarly, 1.3, 97-99. 98. There is probably also an allusion to tbe 'Jew' s-ear" mushroom, popular in medicine at this time. 99. For scripture, see Leviticus 25:36, 37; Ezekicl18:10, 12, 13; Exodus 22:25; Psalm 15:1; Luke 6:35. For anti usury tracts or sermons, see Thomas Wilson, Discourse upon Usury (1572); Henry Smith, [The Examination ofUsur') in Two Sermons] [159l];John Blaxton, The English Usurer (1634). 100. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth, 1979), 73. Although partially distinct from tbe pure form of "good lordship" as Stone describes it, tbe social codes of The Wedding function in a very similar way, particularly at the level of structural opposition. 101. Stone 1979, 109-11. 102. The social and economic instability to which the erosion of"good lordship" was related is seen by Lawrence Stone to be at its height between 1580 and 1620: The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), 15. For a contemporary, allegorical critique of such instability that focused on usury, see Gerard de Malynes, Saint GeorgeforEngland (1601), 43-46,71-79. For further discussion of Malynes, usury, and the body politic, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Merrantilisrn, andDismse in Shakespeanntire sentence (17)-from.John Ford's A Line of Life (1620), 7071. For another broad paralkl, see Thomas Adams, The Sacrifiu ofThankfulrwss (1616), 21, 40. 130. See, for example, 17, 42. 131. Crying Murthfr, A~r. Nunn's perception (2005, 69) of the incident as anatomical is not only unsupported bv any linguistic evidence from the text, but indeed contradicted by the pamphlet's alternative parallels with cannibalism and (more often) butchery (B3v, B4r, C3r}-both practices often being contrasted with the skill and value of disst>ction. See, for example, Luphues: The Anatomy of Wit, The Complete Works !ifjohn Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1942), 2:180. 132. See, again, the 1581 painting of Banister (Roberts and Tomlinson, 142), and Annals of the Barberc.'iurgeons, 2:335, 23 March 1635. Helkiah Crooke's 1631 edition of Microcosmographia has Ambroise Pare's "An Explanation of the Fashion and Use of Three and Fifty Instruments of Chirurgery" appended to it, and includes individual woodcuts of surgical instruments inset throughout its text. 133. This opposition corresponds closelv to that between anatomist and specimen as identified by Michael Sappol, during the much later rise of dissection in nineteenth-century 1'\orth America: A Traffic ofDead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 2002), 2. 134. Sawday, 54-55, 59-60. 135. Harvey, Lectures, 73, 79, 82, 104, 219,44, 39. 136. Ernst Cassirer. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford, 1%3), I i2. 137. Lectures, HiS. 138. See, for example, .Jeremy Taylor, A Co/lrrtion of Offices ( 165 7), K3v; Henry Barrow, A Plain Refutation (1591), 99. 139. Although his fairly pronounced loyalty to Charles I is worth bearing in mind, Harvey did also act as royal physician to the far less "popish".James l. A further relevant factor may have been his residence in Italy, while studving medicine in Padua.

Notes to Pages 70-90

233

140. Robert Southwell, Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears ( 1591), 46v-4 7r; Henoch Clapham, Three Parts of Salomon his Song of Songs (1603), 115. 141. John Foxe, ThePopeConji:1160. As king of England, Philip II had a traditional claim to Calais. 64. The image was not as precisely dissective as certain later conceits. Mary was probably aware of the imminence of death, and therefore knew that, as a monarch, she would automatically be "opened" by surgeons as part of standard royal embalming procedure. It is possible that "calice" is a pun on "callous."

236

Notes to Pages 100-107

65. Stephen Marshall, Meraz Cursed (1641), 37. Marshall himself, described by the DNB as a "Presbyterian divine," was evidently far from being Catholic in temperament. 66. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford, 1962), 150. 67. Sidney was clearly impressed with the rhetorical potential of anatomy. For other direct and indirect anatomical illusions, see An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965), 97, 101 ("a more ordinary opening"), 104, 120, 133 ("poetical sinews"). Shepherd dates composition of the Apology between EiR I and 1.'>83 (ibid., 4). See also Astrophil and Stella, Po· ems, eel. Ringler, 194, no. 38, lines 9-10. Ringler (xliv) dates the sequence as composed in 1582. 68. Donne, Poems, 63. For a Jess accomplished version of the conceit, see William Haughton, Grim the Collier of Croydon (1662). 1.4, 432-38. Although published only in 1662, the play probably dates from ca. 1600 (see Chambers 4: 16). Sec also The Insatiate Countess, eel. Melchiori, 2.1, 93-96. 69. For a (seemingly literal) case of autopsy revealing the effects of h)\'e, see also Burton, Anatomy, 3:159. 70. See Arthur F. Marotti,johnDonne, Coterie Poet (Madison, 1986), 25. Donne was at Thavies Inn in 1591 and at Lincoln's Inn from May 1592 to winter 1594 (Bald, 53-58). For a similar tone, see Donne, Porrns, 67-68. Again, Helen Gardner argues that both "The Legacv" and 'The Damp" were among a group of poems composed before 1600: John Donne: The Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), li-lviii. 71. See, f(x exampk, William Shu!lenberger, "Love as a Spectator Sport in John Donne's Poetry," in Renaissance Disrourses of Desire, eel. Claude]. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, 1993), 46-62. 72. "The Ecstasy," Donne, Poems, 51. 73. Figure 13: Nerve figure from Vesalius, DeFa!Jrica. 74. We know, of course, that Donne was tellingly fond of the hair conceit, as it is the basis for a companion piece, "The Relic." 75. On the significance of Donne's early Catholic upbringing, see John Carey, john Donne Life, Mind and Art (London, 1981), 15-59, and Dennis FJynn,.JohnDonne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington, 1995). 76. The Underwood . .Jonson, \j,orks, H:3H, lines 109-12. 77. Sec Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionary oft he French and English Tongues (1611 ), entry for esprit: "the spirit, soul; heart; breath, heat; mind, thought; opinion; wit; conceit; also, life, courage, metal." 78. For Servetus, see Michael Servetus: A Translation of His Geographical, Aiedical, and Astrological W1itings, trans. Charles Donald O'Malley (Philadelphia, 1953), 202, 208. For a partly similar attitude in Donne, see also Carey l~lH1, 172: "Everything would slide into [nothingnessl, Donne belieYed, if God ceased to exercise his sustaining power." 79. The Underwood, Jonson, Works, 8:286-87. 80. Jonson seems to have owned a copy of the contemporary work on atomism by Nicolaus Hill (Philosophia Epirwm, Demonitiana . .. [Pari>, 1601]), a book that later passed to Donne: see Geofti'ey Keynes, A Bibliography ofDr: john Donne, 4th eel. (Oxford, 1973), 270-71. 81. 3.6, 76-78. The quarto variant, "this harctness" instead of"these hard hearts," does not significantlv atrect my argument: King I.mr, ed. Horace Howard Furness, The Vmiorum Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1908), 213. Rivenide Shakespeare gives 1604/5 as a probable date of composition (1297-98). 82. Gail Kern Paster links Lear's assessment of Regan to "the drying and hardening effects of choler, the bodily fluid produced by cruelty and reciprocally productive of it," but gives no medical authority in support of this claim: Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stagr' (Chicago, 2004), 208. 83. See, for example, William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (Lexington, Ky., 1988). 84. Frank Kermode thinks that Learwas in production by early 1605 or even 1604. He also notes the known performance of26 December lfi06, which indicates that the play may well haYc been running at the time of the following inciclen t: King Lear: A Casebook (London, 1969), 1 l. 85. See esp. James VI and I, Demonology (Edinburgh, 1597). 86. Anon .. The Most Cruel and Bloodr Murder (1606), C2v-C3r. 87. William Peaps. I"ove in its Ecsta;1. (1649), 1.1, 8h-88. Bentley (4:951-52) dates this to 1634. 88. 3.3, 105- i. The play is dated around 1595 (Ril1erside Shakespeare, 1101).

Notes to Pages 109-113

237

89. Nashe, ~JJrks, 2:311. Nashe may have in fact coined the unusual word "quintessenccd." The Oill has only one instance, dating from 1898. 90. For a fictional nineteenth-century embodiment of the Faustian anatomist, see Michael Sap pol, A Traffic ofDead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social identity in Nineteenth-Century A.merica (Princeton, 2002), 229-32. 91. Camporesi 1996, 4,7. 92. "Vesalius' Fabrica and Shakespeare's Othello: Anatomy, Gender, and the Narrative Production ofMeaning," Criticism 35 ( 1993): 537. Valuable as Marchitello's article is in certain ways, its argument as to Othello's "anatomizing" Desdemona seems fundamentally undermined by lack of convincing evidence that the Moor's violence is precisely "anatomical." Marchitello simply cites Othello's threats to "tear her to pieces" (3.3, 438) or "chop her into messes" ( 4.1, 1 96). Not only are these very general expressions of dismemberment, but they lack the coolly systematic violence so often typical of dissection. 93. \1arie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Oxford, 1990), 82. It was relatively hard to obtain female bodies, as women were executed far less often than men. 94. Sawday, 66. Figure 12: Title page from Vesalius, DeFabrica (Basle, 1543). 95. Luke Wilson, in his valuable discussion of this scene, notes that the artist may have strengthened the impression of a potentially overwhelming crowd by "deliberately diminish [ing] Vcsalius' actual stature": "William Harvey's Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theatre of Anatomy," Representations 17 (1987): 62-95, esp. 71. 96. See esp. Jane Sharp, The Midwivrs Book: nr the Whole Art ofMidwifery Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford, 1999), xi-xxxii, esp. xiii; Doreen Evenden, "Mothers and Their Midwives in Seventeenth-century London," in The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe, ed. Hilary Marland (London, 1993), 9-27, esp. 16. For a surprisingly late example of prejudice against "unscientific" female midwives, see Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1979), 158. 97. A Short Compendium ofChirurgery, 103, 107. On touch and gender in particular, see also Adrian Wilson, "The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation," in ~hmen as 111.others in Pre-Industria/England: Essays in JV!ernm-y ofDomthy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London, 1990), 68-107, 73; Eve Keller, ''The Subject ofTouch: Medical Authority in Early-Modern Midwifery," in Harvev 2003, 62-80. 98. Evenden 1993, 19-20. 99. On gossips, see Wilson 1990, 7I et passim; and Hobby 1999, xiv. For the particular expression of such rituals in the case of the seventeenth-century religious experience of Sarah Wight, see Carola Scott-Luckcns, "Propaganda or Marks of Grace? The Tmpact of the Reported Ordeals of Sarah Wight in Revolutionary London, 1647-52," Women's Writing9, no. 2 (2002): 215-32, esp. 222-23. 100. Covent Garden (1638), 23. The play's title page states that it was first acted in 1632. Cf., also, Nabhes's bizarre comic medical masque, l'vlicrowsmus (1637), C3r. 101. See, for example, .John Denham, The Sophy (1642), 37;John Ford, The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638), act 1, 180-81; Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk (1628), 1.5, 58-60. See also Thompson 1979, 34-35, 86. 102. Crooke 1615, bks. 4 and 5. 103. C. D. O'Malley, "Helkiah Crooke, M.D., F.R.C.P., 1576-1648," Bulletin of the History of Medicine-12 (1968): 1-18, esp. 8. Crooke's discussions of the sexual organs and sexual act are, like other instances in this area, arguably ambiguous in their wording and interest at times. Given the subjectivity of reactions to this kind of material, one could well see how they would prompt inappropriate interest or indignation ti·om some. For examples on the womb and clitoris, respectively, see Crooke 1615, 223, 225. For a perhaps unnecessary digression on the penis, see 212. 104. Physicians' Annals, 3.1, Ill, 21 April1618, emphasis added. Banister's vernacular textbook, The History of Man (1578), had specifically admitted that it preferred not to discuss the female sexual organs (88,-). 105. The OED gives "revcil" as a Renaissance form of "reveal" or "disclose." 106. Sawday, 11-12, quoting I,inda Williams, Hard Core: Power; Pleasure, and the "Frenzy nfthe hsible" ( 1989; repr. Berkeley, 19Y9), 4il-49.

238

Notes to Pages 113-7 22

107. Gertrud Koch, quoted in Williams 1999, 49. 108. "Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the 'Secret Place' of Woman," Representations 44 (1993): 60-95, esp. 66. 109. Cited in Jennifer Woodward, The lheatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funeral5 in Renaissance England, 1570-1625 (Woodbridge, 1997), 143. 110. Richardson 2001, 95-96, claims that sexual indecency and even corpse profanation persisted in nineteenth-century dissection. 111. Sec Thompson 1979, 161-62,166-68. 112. See, for example, The Problems of Aristotle (Edinburgh, 1595), A2r. The book was published again in London in 1597, 1634, 1638, 1647, 1666, 1670, 1676, 1682, 1683, and 1684. For further discussion, see Ann Blair, "Authorship in the Popular 'Problemata Aristotelis,'" Early Science and JV(edicine 4 ( 1999): 189-227; Mary E. Fissel!, "Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture," in Right Uving: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Baltimore, 2003), 59-87. 113 . .John Marston, Antonio's Hroenge pt2 ( 1602), E3Y. (Perhaps the most "pornographic" instance in the Problnns is the question, "Hizy doth the matrix or womb of a woman draw grredily the seed ojman?" [E3r) ), Aristotle's Master"piece, evidently first published in 1684, was immensely popular, with numerous editions appearing in Britain and America in following decades. For a number of more or less clearly titillating moments. sec Aristotlr's Master1Jiece (1694), 99, 102, l 03. I am grateful to Shawn lVIanin, of EEBO, Michigan, for pointing out to me that the keyboarded version of this work is at present one of the most popular on the database. 114. Robert Anton, The Philosopher's Satires (1616), 52. (This latter work was reprinted, in 1617, as Vire:5 Anatomy.) 115. On Aretino, see Lynn I Iunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenit> and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1993), 25. Cf. Thompson 1979, 162, on the 1658 translation of the pornographic Rare Verities. During the Restoration the Problems was associated not only with Aretine but with the notorious L'Escolr des Filles (see, for example, John Leanerd, The Rambling.fustice [1678), ':'J! ). 116. The Philosopher's Satires (1616), 46-47. 117. Changrs: or, Love in a Maze (1632), 62-63. 118. "Finis at Wolves Hill mv Parnassus 1603" (The Cuck-queans and Cuckolds Errants . .. and TheFaerv Pastoral, orfiJrtst oj}"'lve\ [London. 1824], 190). ll9. For particularly notable instances of misogyny, see 3.3, 78-113; 4.9, 19, and the stage direction opening 4.1. 120. 2. 7, 4 7-49, 58-74. "Crystalline" refers to the lens of the eye; "weasan" to the gullet or esophagus. 121. For this fantasy, see also 4.10, 45-51. 122. I am very grateful to Anke Bernau for drawing my attention to this aspect of the passage. 123. Cf. David A. Hedric Hirsch, who sees Donne as cutting down to an irreducible, and therefore reassuring, atomic substrate: "Donne's Atomies and Anatomies: Ueconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory," Studies in English Literature 31 (1991): 68-94, esp. 69-70. See also Richard Sugg, "Donne and the Uses of Anatomy,'' in Literature Compass 1 (2004): 6-9. 124. For scripture, see ProYerbs, 11:2'1, Isaiah 25:6, Psalms 63:5. For Renaissance literature, see again Stephens, Cynthia's Revenge, 3.4, 22-40;James Forester, The 1Harrow and Juice of Two Hundred and Sixty Scriptures (1611); Nicholas Byfield, The Marrow o(thr Oracles of God (1620); Robert Aylett, The Rridts Ornammls (1625), 88;John Core, The God ofHem•en (1638), 20. 125. Flvnn 1995, 83, 95-96. 126. Camporesi 1996, 44-46. 127. See Janel M. Mueller, "Pain, Persecution, and the Construction ofSelfhood in Foxe's Acts and Monuments," in Religion and Culturr in Renaissance England, ed. Deborah Shugcr and Claire McEachern (Cambridge.l997), 161-R7,esp.l71-72. 128. See Thompson 1979,185. 129. On dating, see Bentley, 4:701-2. 130. Comedies and Tragedies (I G64), 4.1, 13-25. 131. Bentley dates the composition of the play, from internal evidence, as spring 1654 (4:710). 132. Tragedies and Comedies (1664), 1.2, 31-37.

Notes to Pages 122-130

239

133. Cf. Lynda E. Boose, 'The 1599 Bishops' Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, eel. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, 1994), 185-200, 1%. For a subtle variation of this private female sphere, see juliet Fleming's discussion of Peter Erondell's 1605 text, The French Garden: "The French Garden: An Introduction to Women's French," English Literary History 56, no. 1 (1989): 19-51. 134. Standrml Edition, 7:153. 135. Freud, 155. Cf. Parker 1993, 69, on the "substitute fetish-object of the handkerchief," which stands in for the fascinating yet repellent "truth" of Desdemona's infidelity. For Freud's alleged ambiguity on the role of the fetish, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Fetishisms and Renaissances," in Histmicism, P5yclwanalysis, andEarly-111.odern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (London, 2000), 20-35, esp. 23. 136. See 2.1, 44-45, 2.2, l-2. 137. 2.2, 119-22, emphasis added. 138. Mark Taylor relates the parallel between female genitals and precious stones to the rhetorical device of aposiopesis: "Voyeurism and Aposiopesis in Renaissance Poetry," Exernplaria 4, no. 2 (1992): 267-95, esp. 291-92. 139. In a scene in which the picture receives some attention and discussion it is indeed described as the work of Anthony Van Dyck (2.3, 45). 140. See again Most Cruel ami Bloody l'viurder; 13. 141. See 1.3, 94-98, where the contrast between bawdry and natural philosophy compares interestingly with works such as the Problems. 142. On her attractions, see, for example, Don Pedro at 1.1, 105-7; for immunity, 2.3, 210. 143. See 2.1, 40-41,46-47. 144. 2.2, 70-72. Cf. also 2.1, 92-93, and the Captain's comments at 2.2, 7-10. 145. See 2.2, 5-6 ..Jonesand Stallybrass (2000, 27) argue that Renaissance fetishism involved the tongue, owing to a need to silence women. This argument indeed fits both of Killigrew's instances, insofar as the more troubling aspects of sexuality are silenced or displaced. 146. Paster 2004, 26. 147. Cf., again, Melanchthon, De Anima (Lugduni, 1555), 111, quoted by Walker 1985, 290, and Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences ( 1631), 207-8. 148. Cf. Douglas Trevor, The Poetics ofl'\Ielancholy inEarly-J'viodern J;,ngland (Cambridge, 2004), 192. 149. Arguably, however, the mechanic/ organic contrast is nuanced by Descartes' preference for hydraulic (and therefore relatively fluid) types of machinery: see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes' System of Nat·ural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2002), 198-99. 150. Ralegh 1596, 11-12,23-24,68,70-71. 1.')1. On wavs of diffusing such controversy, see Lianne McTavish, "On Display: Portraits of Seventeenth-century French Men-midwives," Social History rif Medicine 14, no. 3 (2001): 389415; LudmillaJordanova, "Medical Men 1780-1820," in Portraiture:FacingtheSutrject, ed.Joanna Woodall (Manchester, 1997), 101-15, esp. 111-12. On Hunter in general, and as a man-midwife, see respectively, Roy Porter, "William Hunter: A Surgeon and a Gentleman," and Adrian Wilson, "William Hunter and the Varieties of Man Midwifery," both in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Centur.y Medical World, ed. Roy Porter and W. F. Bynum (Cambridge, 1985), 7-34, 343-70. 1.52. Williams 1999,49. 153. Ibid., 39-41. 154. See Marta Poggesi, "The Wax Figure Collection in 'La Specola' in Florence," in Encyclopaedia Anatomica (London, 1999), 6-10. 155. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, 1989), 4.5 (emphasis added). 156. Jordanma 1989, 61.

4.

THE SPLIT BODY

1. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, trans. J. B. de C. M. Saunders and Charles D. O'Malley (New York, 1973), 198. 2. TheatnrmAnatomicum (Frankfurt. 1605), 609, trans. Helkiah Crooke, cited by Andrew

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NotestoPageslJI-135

Wear, "Galen in the Renaissance," in Galen: Problems and Prospects, ed. Vivian Nutton, 229-62 (London, 1981), 258: Charles Singer, Vesalins on the Human Brain (Oxford, 1952), 57. 3. On the generally satirical response to Descartes' choice, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London, 2003), 24. · 4. An Antidote against Atheism ( 1655), 59. 5. Cf. Edward May on the blood and spirits associated with the soul as the "best, purest and most illustrious liquor in the body": Most Certain and True Relation ( 1639), 15, emphasis added. 6. Andreas Laurentius, L'!Iistoire Anatomique (Paris, 1621), 1300 (my u·anslation). 7. Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenn v (Oxford, 1981), 69-70, to Meysonnier, 29 .January 1640 (hereafter, Letters). On the question of the conarion's appropriate singularity, see also 'The Passions of the Soul," in The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1984-91) 1:34041. 8. Cf. letter to Mersenne, 30 July 1640, Letters, 75. For Descartes' emphasis on dissection and empiricism, see letters to ~fersenne, 15 April1630, 20 February 1639, Letters, 9, 63-64: and John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford, 1992), chap. 5, esp. 108. 9. See Anthony Kenny, Descartes: a Study of his Philosophy (Bristol, 1993), 7. For further evidence, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2002), 3. 10. Letter to Regius, 24 May 1640, Leltt:n, 74. 11. Letter to Huvgens, 10 October 1642, !.etters, 13[,. 12. Letter to Mersenne, 16 October 1639, Letters, 67. Cf. Gaukroger 2002,4, on the unusual relationship between Descartes' natural philosophy and his metaphysics. 13. For details on the mechanical functioning of the pineal, see Gaukroger 2002, 22-23. 14. Sec the third and fourth Meditations: Philosophiml Writings 1984-91, 2:24, 37. 15. Letter to Mersenne, 16 October 1639, Letters, 65. 16. This refers to the separation of "the coarser parts of the blood from the more rarefied parts which alone travel ... to ... the interior of the brain, where the conarion is located" (letter to Mersenne, 24 December 1640, Letters, il5-86.) 17. Letter to Meysonnier, 29January 1640, Letters, 69-70. 18. Letter to Mersenne, 20 February 1639, !.etters, 63-64. 19. For Descartes' diagrams, see Treatise on Man, trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, :Vi ass., 1972), 91-92. In terms of language, st'e also the accompanying references to "tubules" (ibid.). 20. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal, 1975), 119. Donne is of course not actually expecting medicine to do this, as he understands the ultimate "occasion of all bodily diseases" to be mankind's first sin. But this itself suggests a certain implicit struggle over the meaning of sickness and the body. 21. 'The Testimony of Six Physicians who viewed ye body of Prince Henry, when it was opened: 7 November 1612," from Gilbert Frevifle 's Commonplace Rook 1591-1622 (British Library Egerton MSS 2877). 22. W[illiam] Hlaydone], The True Picture and Relation of Prince Henry (Lciden, 1634), 4346. David Harley notes that this report was circulated in MS shortly after its composition, to dispel rumors of Henrv's having been poisoned: "Political Post-mortems and Morbid Anatomy in Seventeenth-century England," Snrial Histor> of Medirine 7, no. 1 ( 1994): l-2S, esp. 8. 23. Letter of 6 :Vlarch 161il/19 from .John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, cited in James I lry His Contemporaries, cd. Robert Ashton (London, 1969), 95. 24. 'To the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Savage," Epistolce !Io-eliana: (1650), 2045. Cf. the description of the heart with that of the physician Edward May, in the case ofJohn Pennant (Edward May, A Most Certain and True Relation [1639), 4). 25. Donne, Letters, 1:310 (July 1612]. On supposed internal signs of poisoning, see, for example, Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo (1622), 377. The importance of such diagnoses in legal cases no doubt caused physicians to study these matters with some care (see "Letter of Dr Mot~ fd to Mr Hicks of Lincoln's Inn, 20July 15S5, concerning Moffet's autopsy on Mr Beaumount," MS Lansdowne 107, No. 13, 22r-23r, esp. 22r; Physicians' Annals, 3.2, 341,30 May 1632. 26. We know that in that case surgeons took the trouble to open the heart (John Stow, Annals, 17 :VIarch 158G/H7, 719). 27. ':Journals of Voyages to the East Indies," MS Egerton 2121, lkitish Library. 28. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 3 vols. (1599), 1:226.

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29. Thomas Fuller describes something similar on the deat.h of Thomas Colet in 1519, but, despite his term "anatomists," he is probably referring to nonsystematic observations made during routine embalming by surgeons (see AbelRPdevivus [1652], 107. TheDNBnotes that Fuller's life ofColct was derived from a letter of Erasmus to Justus jonas ofWittenberg, written in 1520. 30. "Characters: The Roaring Boy," in Webster, Works, 4:32; the "Characters" first appeared in 1615, and were probably written 1614-15 (see ibid., 5). 31. Fm the reput:.>tion of tobacco, see, for example, R. West, Wit's ABC [1608], E2v-E'lr. 32. A Solemn Jovial Disputation ( 1617), 183-84. 33. A Commentary: or, Sermons upon ... Saint Peter (1623), A6v. 34. See, for example, remarks on "imagination" and astrology (23, 19-20). May also states at one point that he would not believe what he had seen in this case, had he not already rrad many other such accounts in the works of learned physicians (B 1v). 35. For drawings, see A4r-v; for probing, see 6. May also lays emphasis on the presence of witnesses (A4v, 8-9). On this invoking of an "anatomical jury," see French 1999, 200. 36. Mav, 38. For an intriguing rhetorical variant of this featuring Christ and Satan, see Thomas Fuller, A Comment on . .. St Matthew\ Gospel (1652), 35. 37. See 17, 18-19. 38. Quoted in Memorials of Harvey, ed.J. H. Aveling (London, 1875), 12-15, esp. 14-15. 39. "Narrative Authority in Spiritual Life-Writing: The Example of Dionys Fitzherbert (fl. 1608-14) ," Seventeenth Century l:l, no. 1 (2000): 1-17. On the general tendency to "sanctify afflictions ... since they would only be inflicted for the benefit of the afflicted individual," see David Harley, "Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560-1640," in Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London, 1993), 101-117, 103. 40. Bright1586, 188-90, cited by Morrissey, "Narrative Authority," 10-11. 41. A Golden Chain (1600), 589-90. 42. The Book of Conscience (1642), 85. The sermon has a notable amonnt of striking corporeal imagery (see 11, 53, 69, 123). Cf. also Henry Peacham, The Art of Living in rondon (1642), A2v; Robert Parsons, 11 Christian Directory ( [Rouen], 1585), 585. 43. Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Ajjlicled Consciences ( 1631), 207-8. For other examples of Bolton's attitude to the relationship between medicine and providence, see Harley 1993. 106. 44. The 1638 pnblication was a reissue of an original published in 1637. I have so far been able to find out little about Church. The preface by the printer, Thomas Weekes, makes it clear that Church died either in or before 1637 (A3v). 45. Tht> title page of 1638 also further advertises "a table of those texts of Scripture that are opened and expressed in this book." 16. For the former, see 25-26. 47. 40. The book has two sets of page references, the second set beginning again at "1" at~ ter "280." All references are to this second set. 48. Cf. also 28, 71. 49. Sawday, 178. 50. TwoSermons(1645),5. 51. The Laver of the Heart (1616), 102. 52. The Great Impostor (1623), 5-6. 53. Ironically, Hall himself often materializes analogy in the \Try way he seems to discourage; see, for example, Heaven Upon Earth (1606), 72-73, 33. 54. Scott Manning Stevens argues that Harvey in particular affected religious conceptions of the heart, now "discussed ... as a muscle in material terms" and "as the seat of the soul in what would he seen increasingly as metaphoric terms": "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain," in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early-Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London, 1997), 263-82, esp. 273. In the case of Hall, however, we would have to assume either attendance at Harvey's lectures or secondhand knowledge of them, as De A1otu Cordis was not publishelluntil162R. Price spoke before Harvey's first lecture of April Hil6, but could conceivably have attended it before his text was published. For a rather different, Catholic response, see Stevens (275) on the growing "anatomical precision" of the sacred heart. 55. A search of Early English Rooks Online for 20 i'\ovcmber 2005 gives 279 occurrences in 138 texts t()r "atheist," fi·om 1473 to 1610. Bv contrast, in the same pcriod the word "heathen" appears 4,105 times in 579 texts.

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Notes to Pagrs 144-1 53

56. Man Become Guilty, trans. Henry, Earl of Monmouth (1650), 35-36. 57. The Atheist's Tragedy, ed. Brian Morris and Roma Gill (London, 1976), 5.2, 103, 130. For the exact circumstances of Borachio's death, see 4.2, 8-J 2; 4.3, 2!i-27. 58. Cf. also 4.3, 28~>-H7. 59. Sc