Un-Dissectable Bodies: Literature, Anatomy, and Salvation in Early Modern England

What happens when we take the religious curiosities of early modern anatomical writing seriously? What happens when we believe anatomist Andreas Vesalius when he longs for his resurrection body, or when we regard Guillaume Du Bartas’s hexameral description of God creating Adam’s corneas as a valid scientific account? What happens when we approach John Milton’s depiction of the bodily alterations caused by the Fall as a genuine physiological theory? My dissertation attends to just such moments: moments that are easy to dismiss because they have little place in modern anatomy but that provide a window into the theological and literary investments of anatomical writing in early modern England. Attending to those moments allows us to see that the investment in Biblical history that saturates early modern anatomical writing is not extrinsic to anatomical inquiry, nor is it a token gesture towards spirituality in an otherwise secular medical pursuit. Instead, it is part of the very fabric of what early modern anatomy is and does. Early modern anatomy traces the contours of the body in the deep time of salvation history.My dissertation examines early modern anatomical writings ranging from anatomy treatises to hexameral poetry by delving into the substrate of salvation history that shapes their approach to the human form. I argue that early modern anatomists and anatomically minded authors cultivated anatomy as a historical and theological mode of inquiry into the body. Writers ranging from Vesalius to Milton examined the anatomized body as a historical entity whose every fiber was knit into a personal narrative of embodied sin and salvation and into an overarching human narrative of creation, Fall, and resurrection. As a result, early modern anatomy was deeply invested in the prelapsarian body, the ensouled body, and the resurrection body. Unfortunately, all of those bodies eluded the anatomist’s knife. It was there that literature performed crucial work in the production of anatomical knowledge. Literature could take up dissection-based knowledge and methodologies and apply them to the un-dissectable bodies of salvation history. The representational capacities and imaginative scope of anatomical writing, whether in the form of anatomy treatises, poetry, or sermons, allowed writing to function as an experimental terrain in which to reach for the impossible goal of early modern anatomy: to anatomize the human body as it unfolded over Christian history from creation to resurrection. Early modern anatomy looks different when we view it as a mode of examining the body in the long span of salvation history. Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on early modern anatomy and literature has been shaped by Jonathan Sawday’s model of an early modern “culture of dissection” characterized by violent, systematic fragmentation of the body. That model resonates through scholarship ranging from David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s edited collection The Body in Parts, which argues for the early modern privileging of dis-integrated parts over a reintegrated whole, to Enrique Fernandez’s recent exploration of literature and dissection in early modern Spain, which emphasizes “the negative and destructive aspect” of anatomization. My dissertation offers an alternate view. I demonstrate that the concept of the body as an entity enwrapped in salvation history created a more flexible relation between fragmentation and bodily integrity. The early modern cadaver was a body in process, situated at one point in a salvation narrative that extended beyond death and dissection to resurrection. The traces of God’s hand in the intricate anatomy of the dissected cadaver affirmed the privileged status of humankind in the fabric of creation, providing embodied evidence of the divine history that promised reintegration. Soteriology marked every fragment of the anatomized body with an indwelling bodily integrity. My dissertation investigates soteriological anatomy over the course of four chapters, each of which is centered on a particular text or author. I begin with an introduction that proposes biological anthropology as a hermeneutic framework that helps us to recover the theological investments of early modern anatomical writings. Biological anthropology, which includes the archaeological study of human remains and the evolutionary study of human history, reads the body to determine its meaning in relation to a larger narrative to which it bears witness. I argue that early modern anatomical writers saw the body in a similar light, regarding it not only as a record and instantiation of the deep time of human history – in this case, salvation history – but also as the site and guarantor of individual and group identity within that history. Chapter 1, “Andreas Vesalius and the Soteriological Body,” builds on that conceptual framework by demonstrating Vesalius’s investment in un-dissectable, theological iterations of the body in the landmark anatomy treatise De humani corporis fabrica. In Chapter 2, “Creating Anatomy in Du Bartas’s Devine Weekes and Workes,” I shift from anatomy treatises to anatomical poetry, examining the extended anatomical description of the Adamic body in Du Bartas’s influential hexameral epic. I argue that the merger of theological poetry and practical anatomy in Du Bartas’s Devine Weekes and Workes opens the possibility for a purer form of anatomy than that available on the dissection table because it allows the poet-anatomist to combine dissection-based knowledge with the scriptural narrative of the body’s relationship to God. Chapter 3, “Physiology and the Fall into Medicine in Paradise Lost,” takes up an alternate depiction of Adamic anatomy, including the alterations to the body at the Fall. I argue that the physiology of the Fall has very real stakes for Milton, who seeks to establish sufficient continuity between the pre- and postlapsarian human form for fallen bodies to retain the biological mechanisms necessary for embodied revelation. Chapter 4, “John Donne, Anatomical Fragmentation, and the Recollected Self,” brings my dissertation to a close by taking up a key through line from the previous chapters, namely, the relationship between fragmentation and bodily integrity. Donne’s writings show how fragmentation can function as a seam between dissection and resurrection. For Donne, the trajectory of salvation history holds fast the fragmented bodies of the seculum, transforming fragmentation from a mode of destruction – destruction not only of the body, but of the selfhood that inheres in the body-soul unit – into a mechanism of incorporative wholeness in which bodily fragmentation and porosity can bind people into relational forms of identity and into the corporate body of Christianity. My dissertation as a whole provides a model for rethinking our scholarly approach to early modern anatomical writing in a manner that attends as much to bodily integrity as to dismemberment, as much to scripture as to the scalpel.

Advisor: Marno, David