For the early modern study of medicine, natural philosophical inquiry, and university administration, dissection was a technique with didactic significance. It could teach students where parts of the body resided and if combined with clinical rounds, where diseases tended to strike. While these lessons took place in private settings, dissection was also a part of public anatomy demonstrations, where it accompanied the reading, presentation, and sometimes disputation of anatomical knowledge. Equally didactic, these exercises covered material that resurfaced in students’ examinations. As performances, they also established the importance of anatomical inquiry at the university. But what was the significance, beyond the academy, of anatomical proceedings, the practice of dissection, and the anatomized corpse? How did these features resonate in the wider community and accrue (historically transient) meaning? What do these associations tell us about the history of the body and the transition to Enlightenment? In Murder after Death, Richard Sugg provides sophisticated answers to these questions.

Murder after Death argues that as the seventeenth century wore on, the sacred dimensions of anatomy eroded, and in their place, secular ones emerged. The story of that erosion is a story about the transformation of the soul into mind. This study thus excavates the origins of the materialist, mechanistic approaches that came to dominate Enlightenment science and culture. Rather than track the shift in a narrow selection of philosophical texts, however, Sugg turns to the more common cultural formations found in the period's prose, poetry, drama, and sermons. This archive allows Sugg to extend discussions of anatomy or the odd reference to dissection into a fuller analysis of sexuality and identity, articulated alongside this shifting conception of the early modern body.

The first chapter focuses on the skeleton, memento mori motifs, and revenge. Sugg argues that around 1600, anatomy recharged the icons of the dead, “infusing the materials of revenge drama with the buoyant anatomical culture of the early seventeenth century” (34–35). The second chapter juxtaposes dissection and cannibalism via mummy (the medical use of the corpse). Although the boundaries between anatomy and mummy were sometimes fluid, the study of anatomy was repeatedly distanced from mummy by its classical pedigree and its religious symbolism. But religious configurations would not long provide stability to the study of anatomy. The third chapter explores the discourses of piety, love, and identity, which use the anatomical body as proof and thus endorse a materialist understanding of the body. Here Sugg organizes his analysis around the female object of anatomical inquiry as well as midwifery, pornography, sacred violence, and secular fetishism. These brief discussions highlight the growing tendency for dissection to be represented and explored in the female body or an effeminized, male one; they also reveal considerable ambivalence toward the sacred and secular dimensions of anatomy, the mystical and material bodies, respectively. The fourth chapter underscores the parallel between the Cartesian split of the body from the soul and the historical one of anatomy from religion. It concludes with an extensive reading of John Donne's poetry and his melancholic recognition of the transition from a sacred to a secular body. The final chapter sees vivisection as a violent outcome of the split between the body and soul. It conflates an anatomist's practice of vivisection with a surgeon's routines in order to illuminate the emergence of a more reserved practitioner, whose identity is structured around the sexualized violence of vivisection.

Murder after Death uses anatomy as a representational and epistemological key to the uncertainties about seventeenth-century religious and philosophical foundations. In an impressive range of literary sources, it explores the preoccupations with death and the body (both alive and dead) that influenced sexuality and identity formation at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Although its interdisciplinary approach is richly suggestive, the historical substrate of the analysis is sometimes thin. In the last chapter, for example, Sugg uses Ambroise Pare's recommendation that the surgeon ignore the cries of his patient, but this was hardly the common approach taken by surgeons who needed to foster their practice by gaining the trust of as many patients as possible. Similarly, Sugg cites the well-known work of Jonathan Sawday (The Body Emblazoned [1995]) for evidence of public anatomies in London rather than primary sources, making it difficult to know what constituted these practices and their audiences. The engagement with secondary scholarship is also sometimes limited. Sugg adopts Sawday's account of Renaissance anatomy, which begins with Andreas Vesalius, the illustrations of the Fabrica (1543), and hands-on dissection. Berengario da Carpi (ca. 1500) is considered medieval, and Vesalius is seen as anti-Galenic despite the fact that medical historians have recently shown otherwise. And although this study explores the sacred aspects of dissection and the importance of the female body, its limited reference to Katharine Park's work on the former and the absence of any consideration of Mary Fissell's work on the latter are significant oversights in a book-length study. Fissell begins with Thomas Raynalde's Birth of Mankind (ca. 1560), a midwifery text that included Vesalius's illustrations, reminding us that the vernacular reception of Vesalius's work, one of the main engines behind the development of this anatomical culture, was not only a seventeenth-century phenomenon.

Murder after Death shows us that anatomy and dissection occupied the cultural imagination of our early modern predecessors. It fascinated, horrified, and compelled the interest of a broad range of readers, spectators, activists, and poets. It fostered and, at times, controlled aberrant sexualities; it may also have normalized a conception of the body that departed radically from the mystical, sacred, and humoral body of the medieval period. This study illuminates these features in the literary life of the period, and although limited in its understanding and use of medical history, its readings of literary texts by both major and minor authors achieve depth and novelty, making it a valuable resource for the introduction to and study of the wider significance of dissection in early modern England.