Richard Sugg, Murder after death: literature and anatomy in early modern England, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2007, pp. xiv, 259, illus., £23.45, $45.00 (hardback 978-0-8014-4509-5).

Abstract

Murder after death is a study of anatomical knowledge, practice, and reference in early modern England, as explored in the plays, poems, sermons, and stories of the period. It contributes to a growing field of scholarship interested in understanding the history of the body not only through the study of scientific discovery and medical progress, but also through the close reading of the contemporary and often popular literature that seized upon such advances for its source material. The book begins with a consideration of the impact continental anatomical works like Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica had on the English literary imagination. In particular, Sugg emphasizes how the methodology and investigative impulses of anatomy presented new rhetorical opportunities for writers. In an appendix to the book, he provides a bibliography of 120 English “anatomies” published between 1576 and 1650, and this empirical evidence provides strong support for his ensuing argument about the relationship, both etymological and epistemological, between anatomy and analysis. In the practice of both, he argues, investigators split and sort their subjects into sections for scrutiny, incrementally asserting mastery over the entire corpse / corpus. Both are involved in a quest for knowledge, its limits, and its control, and Sugg frequently returns to this point as he takes his readers on an eclectic and enjoyable journey through topics as various as early modern stage properties, the drug trade, pornography, and vivisection. The first two chapters investigate anatomy's links to aggression as expressed through revenge and cannibalism. Through vivid examples, Sugg explores how writers used extreme violence not only as a means of representing spectacular physical torture, but also as a device through which a victim's soul could be controlled and conquered. The following two chapters pursue questions of body–soul sympathy more explicitly, suggesting that while anatomy initially reinforced religious ideas about the soul, over time it came to endorse a view of the body as separate, secular, and mechanistic. In the final chapter, Sugg returns to the subject of violence, considering how the practice of vivisection or “live anatomy” in this period was both entangled in ontological questions about personal identity and otherness, and also influential in the development of modern medical science. Though engagingly written throughout, one of the limitations of the book is its failure to set out and stick to what parts of anatomical discourse it wishes to explore. Sugg covers an admirable list of topics as they relate to anatomy, but at times his discursiveness weakens his argument, resulting in a sense that everything, from knowledge to power to violence to sexuality, can be read as an expression of anatomy. Furthermore, given the vast amount of scholarship in the past fifteen years that has concerned itself with unravelling the relationships among anatomy, literature, and the body, it is unfortunate that Sugg does not introduce his book with a review of the field and his place in it. Such an undertaking might have helped stave off the inevitable suggestion that the work follows too closely in the wake of Jonathan Sawday's The body emblazoned (1995), which over a decade ago made similar claims about the affiliation between literary and dissective enquiry in early modern English culture. Still, Sugg's work offers its own insights, mining lesser-known dramas like Henry Chettle's The tragedy of Hoffman and John Stephens’s Cynthia's revenge for new explorations of anatomy and its metaphorical and literal uses. His chapter on cannibalism keenly probes the incongruity between early modern tales of New World savagery and the Old World belief that the consumption of mummified human flesh was a useful medical treatment. Finally, his detailed appendices illustrate the scope for anatomical rhetoric in early modern writings and will be of great use to other scholars in the field.