Francesco Paolo de Ceglia's The Body of Evidence: Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine brings together contributions by a dozen scholars of medico-legal history. The focus of the volume is on the dead body and the evidence it provided to criminal courts in the late medieval and early modern world. Unlike much recent work on the body in early modernity, the body here is not the locus of experience, but an object that could be interrogated to provide evidence in a court of law. And unlike a living body, a corpse required interpretation—presentation of the knowledge that it embodied—to the court. Most of the contributions examine the ways in which evidential value could be extracted from the cadaver, which de Ceglia describes as an “epistemic object” (15), or on the contests around who had the power and authority to interpret and speak for the dead person. Even in the case of cruentation (the phenomenon of the murdered body bleeding afresh in the presence of its killer), the exact interpretation and explanation of this sign, the existence of which was almost universally accepted, was subject to extensive and prolonged disagreement, as de Ceglia discusses in his own chapter. Cruentation was unusual in being a direct physical manifestation by the dead body itself. The bleeding corpse had a power of action that was normally associated only with the living body. The source of this physical power was the subject of a discussion that lay at the intersection of scientific, legal, and theological fields of discourse.

If the line between a living and a dead body was sometimes blurred, so was the very boundary of the body itself. Carmel Ferragud shows how clothing was a significant part of the body when it came to identifying the corpses of anonymous strangers, an important task in a society such as that of medieval Valencia, in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims were all well represented, so that the appropriate burial practice could be followed.

All of the chapters here are serious, scholarly contributions to the history of forensic science. For the nonspecialist, the chapters by Allen Shotwell, Alan W. H. Bates, Kevin Siena, and Lucia De Frenza and Caterina Tisci are woven around engaging stories, which leaven the occasionally ponderous legal history aspects. The geographical scope is broadly European, with several contributors taking a comparative approach. For the readers of this journal, only one chapter is primarily focused on British medical history, but the interesting differences between northern and southern European ideas about the body are evident in many chapters. Equally, the contrast between a British-style accusatory system of justice and the inquisitorial one more widespread in Catholic areas of the mainland led to a difference in the evidential weight that the body was required to carry. In their discussion of the forensic investigation of drowning in France, De Frenza and Tisci show how the desire to find a certain and unambiguous indicator of drowning discouraged surgeons from admitting to or discussing ambiguity and complexity in some cases. The difficulty of obtaining clear and unambiguous medical evidence from the bodies of perinatal infants also frustrated attempts to prosecute women for infanticide, as discussed in Margaret Brannan Lewis's study of early modern Germany. The status of evidence from autopsy, and of the individuals entrusted with its preparation, were also contested throughout the period. Massimo Galtarossa's examination of early modern Padua and Diego Carnevale's study of France and Naples a couple of centuries later trace some of the shifting relations between court officials and various kinds of medical men.

Finally, the evidence that a dead body provides is potentially a visually interesting area. It is a shame that just three chapters include any illustrations (and only one of these chapters has more than one, and none includes a map). It is perhaps inevitable that these are very document-dominated accounts, but the incorporation of art historical, archaeological, and literary evidence would have enhanced some of the studies presented here. Siena's work on the fear of plague contagion, for example, would be complemented by archaeologically identified changes in burial practice. In these, it is possible to see a move from more to less careful preparation of the body as contagious theories of disease take hold in Europe: those charged with preparing plague bodies for burial are less inclined to wash, wrap, and lay them out carefully or to put them into the ground in an orderly way and more likely to tip the bodies into pits wearing the clothes they died in.

The Body of Evidence is a welcome contribution to the history of science that moves the history of the body, and scientific interest in it, away from anatomical textbooks and treatises to look at how that knowledge was deployed in legal contexts. It is priced at a level that will, unfortunately, put it beyond reach of most individual researchers, which is a pity because these intelligent and deeply researched reflections on the late medieval and early modern corpse deserve to be well known in the field.