In the celebrated The Body Emblazoned (1995), Jonathan Sawday places the dead body at the centre of enquiry into the Renaissance culture of dissection. The abstract idea of theological knowledge about the body (Hoc est corpus meum), which had been given visibility by the dogma of transubstantiation in 1215, was now under a knife, which cut through a corpse. That which was revealed was assigned a non-theological status as well as a rational, not to say empirical, function. From now on, it will be possible to arrange and rearrange the elements constituting the bodily knowledge, displayed both as a corpse and as a nomos on a dissecting table.

Sawday 's argument, however, not only draws attention to how what was seen on the table of the Renaissance culture of dissection was constructed rationally and discursively, but also, how the Renaissance culture of dissection divided the bodies (or their parts) into those that mattered or did not matter. At the same time, Sawday's The Body Emblazoned marks a shift in the field of Renaissance studies from logocentric towards corporeal investigations. A multitude of volumes and conferences that followed and whose subject-matter is bodies tremulous, bodies single-sexed, bodies enclosed, bodies intestinal, bodies consumed, bodies carnivalized, bodies effeminized, bodies embarrassed, bodies sodomized, bodies castrated, or approximate bodies is an example par excellence of this shift.