This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of
embodiment – as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and
anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark
the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of
Barber-Surgeons’ domination of the practice of dissection in
London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement
but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist: Or the
Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power,
the book contends, is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept
of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the
human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay
between the texts used in and the material practices of three
specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House,
and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of
Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the
socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in
Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found
in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body
demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are
intimately inter-connected in that process.
In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality
of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the
mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth
century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier,
‘traditional’ interpretation of embodiment is
intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized
‘modern’ body.
"Cregan is an acute observer and insightful interpreter of Vesalian and post-Vesalian anatomical illustrations. Her thesis places very great emphasis on these illustrations in anatomy textbooks, rather than on the texts, but the value of the contribution of her book in this respect is truly estimable..."
(Peter Mitchell, in: Journal of the Northern Renaissance; 21 May 2010)