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The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Katharine Park
Katharine Park*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
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Extract

On the 17th of August 1308 Chiara of Montefalco died in the small Umbrian monastery of which she had been the abbess. Her fellow nuns did not take any steps to preserve her body. Nonetheless, for five days it remained uncorrupted and redolent of the odor of sanctity, despite the blazing summer heat. At that point— not wanting to tempt fate further—the community decided to embalm the precious relic. In the words of Sister Francesca of Montefalco, testifying some years later at Chiara's unsuccessful canonization procedure, “They agreed that [her] body should be preserved on account of her holiness and because God took such pleasure in her body and her heart.” They sent to the town apothecary for “balsam and myrrh and other preservatives,” as the apothecary himself testified, and they proceeded to the next step in contemporary embalming practice, which was evisceration.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1994

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Footnotes

*

This article was initially presented as a paper at the New England Renaissance Conference in 1990. I am grateful to Caroline Bynum and Joan Cadden for criticism and comments on earlier drafts.

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