Carlino 1999

Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999)

quodlibetarian model:

academic theatre, in which someone discourses on a dissection with others watching

title page woodcuts in 15-16c editions of Mondino dei Liuzzi's Anatomie showing dissections: lector (holding book or standing above body, pointing), sector (dissector), ostensor (translating text into vernacular, indicating body parts to sector) and cadaver (12-9)

• prominence of book in lector's hands increases with time
• "scission between the theoretical activity of the physician-anatomist and the practical example directed toward an empirical examination of the cadaver" (19)
• despite text's emphasis on actual dissections, it repeats some mistakes of Galen and Avicenna, showing that "the anatomy lesson ... turns out to be little more than a ritual to celebrate the ancient classical authorities on the subject thruogh a reading of their texts" (20)
• "person of the physician anatomist ... becomes merely a student of texts" and "the dissection of the cadaver by the sector becomes a ritualized exercise void of any significant investigative aim" (20)