Cregan, Kate
The Theatre of the Body

Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London.

This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment - as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House, and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier, 'traditional' interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized 'modern' body. XVI,349 Seiten mit 35 Abb., gebunden (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Vol. 10/Brepols 2009)