Of all the manners in which a culture attempts to relate to the dead, disinterment is the most radical. Its very directness is shocking, as it is characterised by the ultimate taboo of death: immediate contact with the corpse. But rather than producing disgust and horror exclusively, ritual disinterment also produces fascination and even emotional gratification. This is true when disinterment is performed ritually, as a religious practice, but it is also true when it is performed as an academic or scientific exercise. During the eighteenth, and also through the nineteenth century, antiquaries and ‘proto’ archaeologists in Britain engaged in the disinterment of figures from English history and literature. Their mission was to validate their own cultural and political values by looking, literally, into the faces of the dead.

During the period 1700–1900, the subject of remembrance and its connection to the historical, literary, or noble body in death attracted the attention of antiquaries who viewed disinterment for academic purposes as an essential element of study. A corpse could be seen as a document in and of itself, in which truths could not only be perceived, but read; for twenty-first-century scholars this idea is rooted essentially in the Derridean idea that memory can be inscribed upon an object, a person, or, in this case, a corpse. This concept is reflected in contemporary studies that use interdisciplinary methods to engage with objects and read them as texts. These studies include Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare by Jonathan Gil Harris (in which the objects in Shakespeare's plays are connected to the fabric of the dramatic narrative) and The Key of Green, by Bruce R. Smith, in which the colour green is connected to the construction of a comprehensive cultural narrative in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Susan Zimmerman discusses the particular subject of the human corpse as a facet of ‘thing studies’ in The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre. In cooperation with these studies, this book will present an interdisciplinary analysis of the culture of disinterment, by which a corpse is the ‘thing’ around which a theory of reading becomes possible. The corpse itself is a text that becomes part of a comprehensive tradition of intertextual analysis that involves a myriad of literary, ecclesiastical, academic, and artistic sources.