The Body Emblazoned

An outstanding work of interdisciplinary scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a study of the Renaissance culture of dissection which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. Though the dazzling displays, in Renaissance art and literature, of the exterior of the body have long been a subject of enquiry, Jonathan Sawday considers in detail the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. Sawday links the frequently illicit activities of the great anatomists of the period, to whose labours we are indebted for so much of our understanding of the structure and operation of the human body, to a wider cultural discourse which embraces not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but the very foundation of a modern idea of knowledge. A richly interdisciplinary work, The Body Emblazoned reassesses modern understanding not only of the literature and culture of the Renaissance, but of the modern organization of knowledge which is now so familiar that it is only rarely questioned.