ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the putrefaction and decay of the human body and how modern westerners have come to find the idea of bodily decay so upsetting. Allusions to, and depictions of, the decay of the body are ubiquitous in the late medieval and early modern periods, not only in memorial monuments but in many other forms of material culture (Llewellyn 1991). Yet by the nineteenth century the dead and decaying body is almost entirely absent from the ordinary practices of death and life. In this chapter I want to examine how this transformation takes place, particularly with reference to the changing understanding of the relationship between body, self and identity.
