The Project and Background

A new, major five year research programme bringing Leicester academics in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, and the School of Historical Studies together with colleagues from the University of Hertfordshire and Oxford Brookes University is examining the fate and archaeology of the the corpses of executed criminals. Overseen by Prof. Sarah Tarlow, the project has received generous funding by the Wellcome Trust.

Between 1752 and 1832 the bodies of executed murderers were legally denied burial in consecrated ground. Instead they were donated for anatomical dissection or ‘hung in chains’ (displayed in a gibbet). This new research programme brings together scholars from archaeology, medical and criminal history, folklore, literature and philosophy to explore the ways that the dead body of the criminal could still be powerful. Their emotional power was exploited by the State to enforce conformity with the law, they were exploited as sources of scientific or medical knowledge; they gave meaning to places in the landscape (‘Gibbet Hills’ and so on). At a popular level, their touch was believed to cure disease; their ghosts to stalk the living and their bodies to be places of lurking malevolence which might threaten our comfortable lives (as Frankenstein’s monster did).

This project uses the criminal corpse as a focal point from which the team can explore the many ways that human bodies were understood in the period between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and how attitudes that took shape at that time continue to affect our ambivalent feelings about how the dead should be treated.

Project Themes

The project has identified several key themes of study:

• Strand 1: The criminal justice system and the criminal corpse
• Strand 2: Harnessing the power of the criminal corpse in an expanding anatomical and medical world of Georgian society
• Strand 3: Placing the criminal corpse
• Strand 4: The dead sustaining life: criminal corpses in European medicine and magic, 1700-1900
• Strand 5: The criminal corpse in pieces
• Strand 6: The criminal corpse remembered: historical and contemporary perspectives on power, agency, values and ethics

Personnel at Leicester and Beyond

Professor Sarah Tarlow, University of Leicester (Project director)

Professor Owen Davies, University of Hertfordshire

Dr Elizabeth Hurren, Oxford Brookes University 

Professor Peter King, University of Leicester

Dr Shane McCorristine

Dr Floris Tomasini

Zoe Dyndor, Research Fellow

Francesca Matteoni, Research Fellow

Richard Ward, Research Fellow

Stephanie Maksimovic, Project Administrator

Related Projects

•  Changing beliefs about the human body project

Publications

• Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, belief and the dead body in early modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 2011)