The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore

by Piero Camporesi, Tania Croft-Murray (Translator)

What significance did the body have for the obsessively religious, superstitious, yet materially bound minds of the pre-industrial age? The human body was a constant prey to disease, plague, unhealthy living conditions, the evil effects of druggery and nutritional deficiency, yet the saints seemed to testify to the existence of life beyond this, to a tangible Garden of Eden where all suffering was reversed. The right to entry to this haven was also seen in corporeal terms. The practice of abstemiousness, self-inflicted torture, even the courting of humiliation could trigger visions of beatitude, of the longed-for paradise. In this extraordinary and often astounding book, Professor Camporesi traces these experiences back to various documents across the centuries and explores the juxtaposition of medicine and sorcery, cookery and surgery, pharmacy and alchemy. He opens the window on a fascinating and colourful, if at times violent, of levitating and gyrating saints, gardens full o

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Bodies, Occult, Folklore

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Piero Camporesi was an Italian historian of literature and an anthropologist. He was a Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna.

Reviews

[L]

Umberto Eco, in the introduction to Juice of Life: "If one were to decide to read at one sitting, one after the other, all of Camporesi's books, one would experience horror, glut, the desire to flee this orgy of shredded flesh, mouths, groins, slime, and greed. Camporesi's books are to be tasted a sip at a time, to escape the obsession of the body triumphant, with all of its miseries and glories. To read them all in one swoop would be like eating cream puffs for a week and nothing else, or swimming for a week in one's own excrement (and it would be the same thing)."

I don't come across enough history writers I could describe as "off the shits." His writing is both frustrating and addictive; he takes you down labyrinthine sentences crammed with bizarre, arcane, and often unattributed details. Gross and verbose.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

not quite as insane as the other two camporesi books i read, and has some overlap with them since it's about perceptions of the body, but still has some bangers:

"An upturned axis mundi, a sad parody of the pure, healthy and luxuriously verdant tree, of vigorous and fecund vegetation overflowing with life-giving juices and sap; a feeble shadow of arboreal life, of aromatic and salutory herbs, Man, nature’s discard, a living and walking incarnation of decay, like a contaminated and worm-infested blood clot, was the chosen pasture ground of the immortal earthworm which gnaws and devours (‘esca vermis qui semper rodit et comedit immortalis’), a lurid ‘thing’, which rotted and became contaminated. A bag of excrement producing nothing but a foul stench, infected blood, purulent sperm, a ball of filth. ‘Man is nothing but fetid sperm, a bag of dung and food for worms. After man comes the worm, and after the worm, stench and horror. And thus is every man’s fate’ (St Bernard)."

"Mechanics when applied to the problems of the human body, provided models, inspiration and suggestions. Sartorial and furriers’ techniques came in handy when sewing together dismembered parts of the human body; particularly so when reassembling the intestine, ‘some directly’, as the surgeon, Giovanni Andrea dalla Croce, noted, ‘following the practice of furriers in sewing together furs or as a sack is sewn together, so should a wounded intestine be sewn.’ Both the ‘manner’ in which this was done and the ‘materials’ for sewing (needles, pins, thread, silk, linen) transport us to the furrier’s shop. The gravest danger (apart from the pain) was the wounds sewn in this manner ‘easily reopened, rotted and festered’.
Certain techniques bordered on the surreal. Were it not for the fact that these are ‘surgiens’ who describe them, such methods might be taken for nightmares or the visions of an unhinged mind: but it appears that ants really were used to knit the soft parts of the body together, like the intestine:

Some practitioners, according to Albucasis, joined together the edges of the wound with the heads of large ants, whose bodies were then severed from their heads once they had sealed the wound with their mandibles, the head alone thus remaining attached to the intestinal
The use of ants is disliked by many, because they are not always to be found everywhere and after a short while they putrefy and fall off.

If one is to believe the words of this technical authority, it would appear that this amazing expedient was attempted by a few people in Italy, too, and not just in the Arab world."

"It is hard to understand nowadays that one of the problems that beset the old world most and of which it was most acutely fearful, was the sense of material decay, the nightmare of universal putrefaction. Modern techniques for the preservation of meat and food in general (freezing, the effects of cold and heat, the exclusion of air to prevent the process of fermentation, hibernation and the miracles wrought by cloning) have eliminated from the canvass of our perceptions the stench of animal decay, the stink of corruption and the repugnant emanations of rotting bodies. But for century after century, indeed, for millenia, the techniques of conserving meat were identical with those used for conserving human corpses."

[Zynab · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exceptional for the excerpts and lively summaries of many rare primary sources it engages with, but unfortunately couched in an outdated thesis (first pub. 1983 and it shows) and writing that doesn't ask many questions + consistently betrays a narrow conception of the medieval & early modern religious mindset.

[Emily Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a very small subset of people who want to read a book like this… and they will love it!!!

[Annefey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the translation in Dutch.

What an astounding, intense, delightful tsunami of bizarre gems from history. Hardly organized, with chapter titles that mostly mislabel the content, so that one almost misses the profound philosophical and theological insights. It wasn't easy reading, but having reached the last page, I will miss it!

[Azygos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non ho capito bene che cosa ho letto, ma so che non sono riuscita a staccare gli occhi dalla pagina e che lo stile salmodiante, ipnotico, serpentino di Camporesi, mai sperimentato prima, mi ha risucchiata in un mondo oscuro e non sempre comprensibile.
Una lettura non classificabile, per me, ma estremamente interessante.
Unica annotazione: una eccessiva ridondanza sia di parole che di concetti, che non per questo però chiarifica veramente il discorso a una non iniziata come me. Sembra talvolta più un insieme di brevi saggi con sovrapposizione parziali che un vero e proprio testo unico, che sviluppi un discorso coerente dall'inizio alla fine.
Leggerò comunque certamente dell'altro di questo interessantissimo storico.

[Helen]

Utterly fascinating views of the body within a highly religious context, both clerical and popular.