Richard Sugg

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. For many, it was also an emphatically Christian phenomenon. And, whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. It survived well into the eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. This innovative book brings to life a little known and often disturbing part of human history.

The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians

Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires

Don’t be fooled by Tinkerbell and her pixie dust—the real fairies were dangerous. In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from the Fallen Angels and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Despite their modern image as gauzy playmates, fairies caused ordinary people to flee their homes out of fear, to revere fairy trees and paths, and to abuse or even kill infants or adults held to be fairy changelings. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on in places well into the twentieth century. Often associated with witchcraft and black magic, fairies were also closely involved with reports of ghosts and poltergeists. In literature and art, the fairies still retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats, Christina Rosetti’s improbably erotic poem “Goblin Market,” or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years, the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. As changeable as changelings themselves, fairies have transformed over time like no other supernatural beings. And in this book, Richard Sugg tells the story of how the fairies went from terror to Tink.

A Dangerous History

Fairies

How dangerous were fairies? In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from fallen angels, and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Despite their modern image as gauzy playmates, the fairies feared by ordinary people caused them to flee their homes, to revere fairy trees and paths, and to abuse or even kill infants or adults held to be fairy changelings. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on in places well into the twentieth century. Often associated with witchcraft and black magic, fairies were also closely involved with reports of ghosts and poltergeists. In literature and art fairies often retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats, to the improbably erotic poem 'Goblin Market' or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. This book tells the story of the many fairy terrors which lay behind Titania or Tinkerbell.

a dangerous history

Respected scholar Richard Sugg reveals the true history of vampires, exploring their cultural origins in a globetrotting tale of superstition, horror and strangeness. Sugg makes seemingly bizarre beliefs, practices and incidents comprehensible by showing in detail how vampires arose from a world of everyday "magic".

Death, Terror, and the Supernatural

The Real Vampires

Just as museum exhibits of plastinated corpses, television dramas about forensics, and books about the eventual fate of human remains provoke interest and generate ethical debates today, anatomy was a topic of fascination-and autopsies a spectator pastime-in England from the mid-Elizabethan era through the outbreak of civil war. Rather than regard such preoccupations as purely macabre, Richard Sugg sees them as precursors of a profoundly new scientific and cultural discourse. Tracing the influence of continental anatomy on English literature across the period, Sugg begins his exploration with the essentially sacralizing aspects of dissection—as expressed, for instance, in the search for the anatomical repository of the soul—before detailing ways in which science and religion diverged from and eventually opposed each other. In charting this transition, Sugg draws his evidence from the fine detail of literary language, moving from sermons to plays, medical textbooks to sonnets, and from sensational short tales to Thomas Nashe's proto-novel The Unfortunate Traveller. As Sugg shows, the study of anatomy first offered to positively revitalize many areas of religious rhetoric. In time, however, the rising forces of early scientific enquiry transformed the body into an increasingly alien and secular entity. Within this evolution the author finds a remarkably rich, subtle, and unstable set of attitudes, with different forms of violence, different versions of the interior body, and implicit social, religious, and psychological stances variously cooperating or competing for supremacy.

Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England

Murder after Death

John Donne is now a strong candidate for the most popular Renaissance writer after Shakespeare. Paying tribute to the living vitality of Donne's literary voice, and the kaleidoscope of social detail embedded in his writings, Richard Sugg offers a vibrant engagement with the author's work, life and times. He shows how Donne's fiercely original mind produced remarkable and challenging new images of selfhood, love, friendship, and of a natural world marked by the unstable movement from religion to early science. To fully appreciate Donne's life and writing it is necessary to comprehend the strangeness of his social and intellectual milieu: the peculiar mixture of splendour, violence and suffering which spilled across his path in the streets, theatres and churches of seventeenth-century London, and the attitudes and ideologies expressed within them. This book offers readers not just Donne, but his world.Richard Sugg is the author of ten books, including The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (2nd edn 2015), A Singing Mouse at Buckingham Palace (2017), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). He is currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust. A 3rd updated edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires will be appearing shortly. His work has appeared widely in international press, radio and television. He has previously lectured in English and Cultural History at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.

John Donne

What was the soul? For hundreds of years Christians agreed that it was the essential, immortal core of each individual believer, and of the Christian faith in general. Despite this, there was no agreement on where the soul was, what it was, or how it could be joined to the material body. By focusing on the spirits of blood which were alleged to join body and soul, this book explores the peculiar problems, anxieties, and excitement generated by a zone where spirit met matter, and the earthly the divine. It shows how pious but rigorous Christians such as John Donne and Walter Raleigh expressed their dissatisfaction with existing theories of body-soul integration; how prone the soul was to being materialised; and how an increasingly scientific medical culture hunted the material aspects of the soul out of the human body.

Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England

The Smoke of the Soul

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Picking our way through the bloodstained shadows of this remarkable secret history, we encounter medicine cut from bodies living and dead, sacks of human fat harvested after a gun battle, gloves made of human skin, and the first mummy to appear on the London stage. Lit by the uncanny glow of a lamp filled with human blood, this second edition includes new material on exo-cannibalism, skull medicine, the blood-drinking of Scandinavian executions, Victorian corpse-stroking, and the magical powers of candles made from human fat. In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. Now accompanied by a companion website with supplementary articles, interviews with the author, related images, summaries of key topics, and a glossary, the second edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of medicine, early modern history, and the darker, hidden past of European Christendom.

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

What would Christianity be like without the soul? While most people would expect the Christian bible to reveal a highly traditional opposition of matter and spirit, the spirit forces of the Old and New Testaments are often surprisingly physical, dynamic, and practical, a matter of energy as much as ethics. The Secret History of the Soul examines the forgotten or suppressed models of body, soul, and human consciousness found in the literature, philosophy and scripture of the ancient and classical worlds. It shows how the spirit forces of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old and New Testaments tended to be quantities not entities, and to be closely bound up with the dynamic physical flux of the human body, rather than cleanly abstracted in some absolute immaterial realm. Forces such as menos and thymos, nephesh, pneuma and dynamis not only blurred the line between body and soul, but were potent and transferable, being used, in New Testament culture, to effect magical cures or bestow magical power. Related to this surprising lack of body-soul dualism is a lack of dualistic afterlife in either Homer or Hebrew scripture, where Hades and Sheol are the sole post-mortem destinations. The Secret History of the Soul restores the living strangeness of a spirit world filled with potent energy and practical magic, in cultures which had not yet glimpsed the abstracted soul of later Christianity.

Richard Sugg

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