Reviewed by: The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700-1900 by Thea Tomaini Jeffery Moser Thea Tomaini. The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700-1900. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017. 241p. Death is a business, but so is a lot of the busyness that precedes and lingers after someone dies. Certainly, death and dying were not spared from the business and busyness of the Renaissance and Reformation of Western Europe, when religious authorities expended great efforts toward reforming doctrines and practices. However, these activities penetrated socio-political ideas in ways that went beyond reforms of the Roman Catholic Church and Europe's ongoing encounters with other religions. [End Page 90] Not only was Protestantism born during the Renaissance on the Continent and in England, but also the beliefs and practices by both upper classes and ordinary individuals were set in the crosshairs of reward and relief. Psychological and material consequences were extracted for alleged and real sins that were committed throughout the masses; social reputations and political consequences were no longer reserved or meted out as just rewards or mercy only among royals and the aristocracy. In fact, the development and the preservation of "the self," in life and in death, were launched during the early modern period. Thus, death took on greater meaning in terms of memory and materiality. Hence, Stephen Greenblatt's well-coined term of "self-fashioning" meant that the process of constructing one's identity, especially as a public persona, became a significant matter while one was alive and even after dying, according to a set of socially acceptable standards. If the ideal societal behaviors set down by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier for how noblemen and women—and their lesser counterparts, the masses--were to count, it is hardly surprising that a sustained cultural fascination and curiosity emerged about how they deserved to be remembered, validated or idealized into perpetuity. During the early modern era, the legacy of virtually every individual increasingly began to be perceived as a necessary, even curious, persona whose construction of self indeed warranted the comparison and worthwhile (or not) remembrance by others, just like when they had been alive or as the appropriate memory was demanded among the living. Early modern scholars interested in the interconnections and cultural networks surrounding the materiality of death need to investigate the varying attitudes of the living towards corpses. The significant role that material objects play in the transition between a person's legacy, deathbed, and their burial place requires study into funerary and exhumation practices. Too, the significance of the physical body and its retention of religious and social importance after death should become a part of a wide survey of literary and historical references. Further, if the deceased had been a writer, let us say a poet or playwright, their significance and relevance to socio-political events and the merits of their surviving material literature, i.e. in manuscript or print, become additional objects of worthy scrutiny. Objects–often recycled or ephemeral–sustained a connection between the deceased [End Page 91] individual and the wider community. When we today place a lens upon this curiosity about an artist's material body and their material works in print, the meaning and memories attached to the artist are figuratively held up to inquiry. Thea Tomaini extends the study of the inquiry and discernment of lives, deaths and corpses beyond the early modern period. The Corpse as Text explores and contextualizes the discrepant interpretations of the radical business of disinterment between 1700 and 1900 by those who attempted to relate to the dead. Tomaini carefully examines how the cultural exhumation of bodies, when carried out for legal, ritualistic, or scientific purposes, produced various reactions, such as disgust, horror, fascination, and emotional gratification. These exercises are worthy academic examinations, citing and analyzing examples of British engagements in successful and rejected attempts with the disinterment of figures from English history and literature, including Henry VIII, Katherine Parr, William Shakespeare, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and others. At the heart of Tomaini's book is a careful analogy of the competing aspects of death that interconnect and divulge ideology, aesthetics, allure, revulsion, attraction...