Analysis Of The Body Emblazoned By Jonathan Sawday

Review of “The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture” by Jonathan Sawday.

The “The Body Emblazoned” is a deep dive into the motivations and implications of dissection in the Renaissance. Written by Jonathan Sawday, a cultural historian, this book anatomizes the Renaissance using various prevalent sources and perspectives. Sawday is a multidisciplinary historian with a focus on literature, science, and technology research. The Renaissance, often termed a period of “rebirth”, was a fervent source of political, artistic, and scientific progress. Sawday uses his multifaceted background to dissect the dark eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theaters and their intrusive effect on society. He argues that these theaters

In 8 chapters, with around 270 pages and 30 black-and-white images of dissection, Sawday provides many interesting facts and impressions that detail how the Western view of the internal body facilitated these anatomy theaters. He “anatomizes” these chapters into sections surrounding specific lines of reasoning and how they proliferated throughout European society. In addition, Sawday operates through an extended analogy of the Medusa myth to guide his audience through the unknown of anatomization. Through taxonomy—the classification and labeling of parts—the author shows how the discipline of anatomy evolved throughout time from, in his comparison, a voyage of discovery to a sort of colonization and oppression. We witness a radical shift in knowledge when the dominant archetype of the internal body—from a complex microcosm to an unfeeling mechanism—is presented. Along the way, we discover the intriguing social composition of anatomy theaters, and the exhaustive levels of immorality reached in the scavenging of cadavers for dissection. Sawday uses his experience in many literary sectors to detail how dissection overwhelmed the political, social, and

He later describes the dark and violent methods of the Renaissance from which these emotions, more than likely, originated. Sawday elaborates on the myth of Medusa and Perseus as an analogy for the culture of dissection in the Renaissance. Here, Medusa serves as the body interior and Perseus as the surgeons and physicians. Sawday writes that “...attributes of the Medusa – [her] blood, head, and skin – are emblematic of a fragmented and dispersed body-interior – a profoundly ambivalent region – whose power can be somehow harnessed for good or ill” (Sawday 18). In this way, by conquering the body-interior in the same way Perseus conquered Medusa, there is a potential for good or ill. The use of dissection for good is very obvious in that we now have a greater understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the human body. However, the potential for illness, as acknowledged by Sawday, is no less great and will be discussed later in the review. Sawday’s use of the harnessing of the power of Medusa, and its potential for good or ill, allows the audience to draw the line of their own morals about