Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Constructing Maternal Knowledge
- 1 Flesh and Stone: Dissecting Maternity in the Theatre of Anatomy
- 2 The Cabinet of Wonders: Monstrous Conceptions in the Theatre of Nature
- 3 Strange Labours: Maternity and Maleficium in the Theatre of Justice
- 4 Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death
- Postscript: Our Maternities: The Historical Legacy
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
1 - Flesh and Stone: Dissecting Maternity in the Theatre of Anatomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Constructing Maternal Knowledge
- 1 Flesh and Stone: Dissecting Maternity in the Theatre of Anatomy
- 2 The Cabinet of Wonders: Monstrous Conceptions in the Theatre of Nature
- 3 Strange Labours: Maternity and Maleficium in the Theatre of Justice
- 4 Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death
- Postscript: Our Maternities: The Historical Legacy
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Behold the Woman: The Renaissance Anatomist in the Satyr's Mask
[T]he death of the womb, is an entrance … [T]he womb hath discharged us, yet we are bound to it by cords of flesh …
John Donne, Death's DuelIt was after dark in Louvain when Andreas Vesalius of Brussels allowed himself to be locked out of the city gates once more. Days before, while ‘looking for bones where the executed criminals are usually placed along the country roads’, he had chanced upon the remains of a dried cadaver ‘which had been partially burned and roasted over a fire of straw and then bound to a stake’. Making successive clandestine visits to the gruesome site he was able to smuggle parts of the decayed body back into the city. His return, on an autumnal evening in 1536, was prompted by his desire to ‘obtain the thorax, which was held securely by a chain’, fastened to the gibbet from which the remaining parts of the corpse still hung. This episode from his student days is described in what is perhaps the founding text of modern anatomy, the De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543):
So great was my desire to possess those bones that in the middle of the night, alone and in the midst of all those corpses, I climbed the stake with considerable effort and did not hesitate to snatch away that which I so desired.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespearean MaternitiesCrises of Conception in Early Modern England, pp. 27 - 93Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008