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Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), Bodily extremities: preoccupations with the human body in early modern European culture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, pp. ix, 235, illus., £45.00 (hardback 0-7546-0726-7).
This collection explores the "strong preoccupation with the human body" identified as a "characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts": the former apparently evidenced by such themes as monstrous births and body snatching, the latter by cosmetic surgery and genetic manipulation. Whilst wisely avoiding the tendency to make comparisons between those two vantage points, the book is intended as a comprehensive and interdisciplinary historical investigation of the body "in extremis, the crossing of physical boundaries, the transition between outside and inside the human body, and bodily orifices". Acknowledging that many literary studies of the body suffer from "intcrnalism", and that embodied experience is often overlooked in favour of the textual or metaphorical, it aims to parallel its account of body-knowledge-as acquired through anatomy, torture and techniques of "othering"-with concern for early modern human bodies as "living, acting and...