Stages of dismemberment : the fragmented body in late medieval and early modern drama

With a focus on visual representations of beheading, dismemberment, and mutilation in medieval and early modern drama, this study traces the impact of the Reformation on the semiotics of the body.

What emerges from this exploration of violent spectacle is a sense of the complex and powerful ways in which the legacy of the pre-Reformation religious drama informed the commercial drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.