Abstract
Medicinal cannibalism, the medical circulation and consumption of the human body, is part of a long and complex history that continues with the global trafficking of organs and body parts today. This book is about an important moment in that history, during which the early modern English distributed and consumed as medicine the flesh and excretions of the human corpse—frequently described as “mummy” (mumia)—sourced from both imported mummified corpses and recently prepared local corpses. A central tenet of this corpse pharmacology is the perception that the human body contains a mysterious healing power that is transmitted in ingested matter such as mummy. The pervasive presence of mummy in early modern literature and drama reveals a cultural fascination, almost to the point of obsession, with the medical recycling of corpse matter. The main objective of this book is to attempt to shed light on this fascination through an exploration of the significance of the medical consumption of corpses for the early modern cultural imaginary and, inextricably, the religious implications of this in view of the contested belief in divine flesh in the Catholic Eucharist. But it would be misleading to attempt to isolate this recycling of corpses as a product of a single historical moment, or as a curious glitch in medical history.
Cannibalism is never just about eating but is primarily a medium for nongustatory messages—messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order.
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger1
What our druggists are supplied with is the flesh of executed criminals, or of any other bodies the [makers of mummy] can get, who … send them to be baked in an oven till the juices are exhaled.
Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary2
Global capitalism, advanced medical and biotechnologies, have incited new tastes and desires for the skin, bone, blood, organs, tissue and reproductive and genetic material of the other.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Bodies for Sale—Whole or in Parts”3
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Notes
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 3.
Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963) 258.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant, eds., Commodifying Bodies (London: Sage Publications, 2002) 5.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974) 4.1.23. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are from this text.
Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, vol. 1 (New York: Zone, 1989) 221.
Here I am working with Derrida’s idea of the trace as set out by Gayatri Spivak, which “is not only the disappearance of origin … it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.” In Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) xviii.
William Knipe, ed., Criminal Chronology of York Castle; with a register of the criminals capitally convicted and executed at the county assizes (York: 1867) 7.
Much work has been done on what has been identified as the “culture of dissection.” Jonathan Sawday offers a fascinating discussion in The Body Emblazoned: Dissections and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). More recent is Hillary M. Nunn’s Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005). Also, for a lively reading of the performance of medicine,
see Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Scheper-Hughes, Commodifying Bodies, 1. As well, for a clear exposé of this problematic and economy, see Scheper-Hughes, “The Global Traffic in Human Organs,” Current Anthropology 41.2 (2000): 191–225. This book owes much to the work of Scheper-Hughes, which has helped me identify and clarify the resemblances between the early and late modern medical markets in human bodies.
Anthony Purdy, “The Bog Body as Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier,” Style 36.1 (2002): 93.
John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy,” John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1986) 65. All references to Donne’s poems, other than the Anniversaries, are from this volume.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 4.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) 4–5.
Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation,” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1533.
Marshall Sahlins, “Raw Women, Cooked Men, and other ‘Great Things’ of the Fiji Islands,” The Ethnography of Cannibalism, ed. Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (Washington: Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983) 88.
See William Arens’s discussion of Sahlin’s point in “Rethinking Anthropophagy,” Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 46. For an overview of the debate about what constitutes cannibalism, see the Introduction to Barker et al., Cannibalism and the Colonial World. See also
William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979);
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986) and “Making No Bones: A Response to Myra Jehlen,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 179–187;
Myra Jehlen, “Response to Peter Hulme,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 187–191; and
Gananath Obeyesekere, “‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 630–654. Also, for a thoughtful philosophical discussion of the symbolism of all forms of eating, see
Michael Allen Fox, Deep Vegetarianism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999) 23–38.
Francis Barker identifies early modern English culture as a “culture of violence,” as his title makes clear. See Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Also, Jonathan Sawday describes the public punishment and mutilation of human bodies as “spectacles of suffering,” 81.
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (New York: Vintage Books, 2007) 268.
Rupert Brooke, “Mummia,” The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1932).
Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981) 24.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2003) 167–168.
Cynthia Ozick, Memory and Metaphor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) 282.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 75.
For a discussion of literary form as a cultural practice, see Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. IX (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1987).
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975).
Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 8.
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© 2011 Louise Noble
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Noble, L. (2011). Introduction. In: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118614_1
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