Description
Book SynopsisExplores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal. The author reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. She tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles.
Trade Review"Guerrini ably shows how anatomy emerged as a science within the institutional and courtly spaces of Louis XIV's France. Her beautifully illustrated and richly woven account explores the relationship between the emerging fashion for dissection and the mechanical philosophy, showing how and why dead bodies were enrolled into the wider transformation of European learning in the seventeenth century. Navigating between the pan-European Republic of Letters which made and disseminated new anatomical knowledge, and the promise and constraints of courtly patronage, Guerrini displays an assured grasp of her subject." -Emma Spary, University of Cambridge
