| Home |
| Programme Description |
| Palaeo/Meso/Neolithic |
| Bronze Age |
| Classics |
| Modern Body |
| New Bodies? |
| Museum Exhibition |
| Events / News |
| Publications |
| People |
| Links |
| The Modern Body and the Modern Individual in Death | ||
| Dr. Annia Cherryson, Dr. Zoë Crossland, Dr. Sarah Tarlow | ||
The fourth project asks what is the relationship between beliefs about the self and the individual developed in philosophical and scientific writings in the 16th - 19th centuries and practical understandings of the individual body at the time of death? This is a key period in which it is generally agreed that much of our "modern body" was formulated. However, there are a number of tensions in the realm of "beliefs about the body". Religious orthodoxy, for example, often represented the body as a foil for the soul: where the soul was immortal and valuable, the body was ephemeral and worthless. Yet other beliefs emphasised that the body represented the entire cosmos and its perfection revealed the mind of God; certainly early modern ideas about anatomy generally took that view. Later, however, science developed as a separate field of discourse, whose beliefs were different to those of theologians. Alongside all of this ran another set of beliefs, mostly irrational and mostly at odds with both the medical and the religious (written) orthodoxies, that were animated by a lingering belief in the sensitivity of the corpse. The anxieties produced by this resulted in many of the archaeologically observed practices of this period: preventatives against grave-robbing; care for the ‘comfort’ of the corpse, and talismanic uses of body parts, for example.  An anatomy in progress, from the title page of Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia (1631). This project works to further knowledge of these changing beliefs in two ways. The first is systematic documentation. Archaeological knowledge on post-medieval burial generally remains unpublished and unknown, and one goal here is to write the first synthetic account of all archaeological evidence for burial from post-medieval Britain. At this stage, the compilation of a gazetteer and database of all archaeologically excavated sites of post-medieval human burials in Britain and Ireland is well underway, and includes nearly 700 sites. Publication of an overview of the archaeology of post-medieval burial practices and an extensive gazetteer and bibliography is planned for late 2009 or early 2010 (Cherryson, Crossland and Tarlow).The second thrust of research is to contextualise this work in relation to written discourses on selves and bodies. How did funerary practicesrelate to, or resist, new scientific knowledge or theological dogma? What was the relative importance of new scientific knowledge as opposed to the changing structures of family life or religious belief? How did changes in mortuary practices coincide with new understandings of persons, such as the "Enlightenment individualism" often discussed by cultural historians, for instance; or emotions of grief and bereavement focused on the individuated body, supported by new cults of romantic love or the individuation of childhood? This part of the research will result in the publication of a book in 2009 (Tarlow). |
||
