ABSTRACT
In his 1627 work An apologie of the power and prouidence of God in the gouernment of the world, George Hake will issued two vigorous and seemingly contradictory comments regarding the civic display of human bodies. As part of his lengthy condemnation of Roman civilization, the Oxford divine and chaplain to the king lambastes the barbarity of gladiatorial contests, lamenting that "Hee that startles at the sight of the Corpes [sic] of a man dead by the common course of Nature, most patiently and contentedly beholds them in the Amphitheater mangled and all to be goared with their owne blood."1 This distaste for bloody spectacle does not prevent Hakewill from praising early modern advances in dissection, for he goes on to denounce his own institution's late arrival into the field of anatomical study. "I haue often not a little wondred," he writes, "that an Vniversitie so famous in forraine parts as this of Oxford, was neuer to my knowledge provided of a publique Lecture in this kind, till now." While condemning early physicians who "butchered the bodies of the dead" and "mangl[ed]M their flesh "into gobbets," Hakewill proclaims the developments of anatomy as "so profitable to bring vs to the knowledge of our selues, and consequently of our maker."2 For Hakewill, anatomy as practiced in his day carries no traces of cruelty, and watching a body taken apart in the dissecting theatre encourages intellectual curiosity and spiritual devotion rather than the peculiar brand of savage interest nurtured in the gladiatorial amphitheatre.
