Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700)

__Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture__ examines an important moment in the long history of the medical use and abuse of the human body. In early modern Protestant England, the fragmented corpse was processed, circulated, and ingested as a valuable drug in a medical economy underpinned by a brutal judicial system. In a meticulous engagement with an extensive range of medical, religious, and literary texts, Louise Noble shows how early modern writers became obsessed with medicinal cannibalism and its uncanny link to the contested Eucharist sacrament. In the process, Noble points out startling continuities between early modern and contemporary medical consumptions of the body. Introduction: the pharmacological corpse: the practice and rhetoric of bodily consumptions The mummy cure: fresh unspotted cadavers Medicine, cannibalism and revenge justice: Titus Andronicus Flesh economies in foreign worlds: The unfortunate traveller and the sea voyage Divine matter and the cannibal dilemma: the Faerie queene and devotions upon emergent occasions The fille vièrge as pharmakon: Othello and the anniversaries Epilogue. Trafficking the human body: late modern cannibalism. The human body, traded, fragmented and ingested is at the centre of Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture , which explores the connections between early modern literary representations of the eaten body and the medical consumption of corpses.