ABSTRACT
For well over 200 years European Christians ate or drank human flesh, bone, brains and blood. They rubbed the oil of human fat onto rheumatic or gouty joints, onto cancers, and into the facial scars left by smallpox. Some ate or drank human shit and urine. A shadowy network of suppliers, sea captains, grave robbers, executioners and anatomists oversaw the acquisition of bodies, blood, bones and fat. Whilst English soldiers and settlers seized Irish land, others discreetly foraged for moss-crowned skulls (prizes which, admittedly, may sometimes have been those of the invaders rather than the natives). Doctors and chemists and hangmen chopped, sawed, filed, dissected and pulverised human bones, skull, tissue, brains and nerves into the various forms required for practitioners and clients. How could the smallscale communal rituals of the Huron, the Tupinamba or the Wari’ ever begin to approach the systematic, quasi-scientific determination of these educated Christian man-eaters? By now we are surely in little doubt as to who, for some two and more centuries, were the real cannibals of the early modern world. They read and wrote in Latin, dressed in silks, debated theology, painted many of the greatest Western artworks, threw up some of Christendom’s most astonishing palaces and cathedrals and churches. When and why did this end? Neither of these are easy questions. In these final
chapters I aim to set out a good deal of evidence, but refrain from drawing rash or totalising conclusions. Treating these divisions themselves with some caution, I will split this survey of opposition and decline into pre-Restoration, post-Restoration, and eighteenth-century periods. The present chapter handles the first two of those phases, which are generally marked by ambivalence rather than outright opposition. But, as we will see, the eighteenth century itself has to be internally divided. This is in part because it is so difficult to say when corpse medicine was abandoned, even by the educated or literate.
