ABSTRACT

This chapter socio-culturally and religiously contextualizes late-medieval English cadaver sculptures. Depicting an idealized representation of a specific individual’s naked body at death, carved cadavers in England are typically sculpted to show the memorialized person in a state of extreme emaciation. Yet whilst the carvings in this style are suggestive of death due to extreme malnutrition from a lack of food or a wasting disease, they require symbolic interpretation rather than being read literally. Memorializing only wealthy land-owners, prosperous merchants or members of the clerical elite, these individually were largely well fed and, even if they had died of dysentery, it was not considered a good way to end one’s days. Further, several of the 41 extant carved cadavers in England were commissioned and installed a good few years before the represented individual died and thus cannot be understood to portray them at death. Relating the sculptures to concerns about an afterlife in Purgatory, however, allows them to be perceived as extravagant expressions of piety that sought to provide material evidence of the spiritual-self through imaging a religiously perfect body. This, together with the sculptures relationship to pre-Versalian anatomy, demonstrates that English carved cadavers represent the human form in a highly specific milieu.