ABSTRACT
How might one go about looking at the relation of particular forms of religious commitment to particular forms of anatomizing, especially where one lacks any incontrovertible evidence of religious persuasion on the part of the anatomists in question? In this chapter it will be seen that, on the basis of our present evidence and using our present analytical categories, we can sometimes make strong and conclusive associations between the new kinds of anatomizing brought in by particular anatomists and their local religious contexts and commitments - and thus legitimately conclude that the new kind of anatomizing was the result of the adoption of one or other new kind of religious confession. In some cases the correlation is weaker but suggestive and could perhaps be legitimately inferred; while in other cases it would still almost require the eye of faith itself to see it. On the principle that actions speak at least as loudly as words, one approach I shall use here, in what is avowedly a tentative essay, is to seek a homology of actions: seeing what parallels and similarities one can find in the actions of religious reformers on the one hand, and the actions of contemporaneous Modern anatomists on the other, and to see what inference (if any) one can reasonably make about religious commitment on that basis, and whether a commitment to a particular new or old religious confession underlies a particular kind of anatomizing. Even when our correlations turn out to be on the meagre side, in the following case studies it will be necessary to deal quite extensively with some of the major events of the Reformation in order to locate our anatomists with respect to them.
