Proposed panel session at Sixteenth Century Society Conference 18-20 August, 2016 in Bruges, Belgium. Submission deadline is Feb 1st, 2016 to eileen.sperry@stonybrook.edu

Hamlet's existential soliloquy, questioning whether "to be, or not to be" while clutching the skull of poor Yorick, presents death as a corporeal binary—the body may be only living or dead, with no space in between. However, the reality of death, particularly in early modern England, was considerably messier. The decomposition of the body, whether ante- or post-mortem, was markedly more visible than in modernity. Plague outbreaks exposed the dying and rotting bodies of the infected with terrifying regularity. Anatomical theatres transformed dissection from the surreptitious practice of grave robbers into a public display of humanistic investigation. Authors, artists, and scientists of the period began to question characterizations of death as a hard and fast boundary, and instead focused on practices of dissection and the process of decay as ways of exploring the nature of humankind's transition from one world into the next. This panel will investigate the ways in which the lines between life and death are interrogated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How is decay represented and theorized? When does a body cease to be a person, and become an object? Are representations of the decaying or dissected body considered taboo or un-representable, and when and how are those limits tested or broken? How does the body's frailty affect conceptions of the self or the understanding of the soul? Is decay destructive, or transformative?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The practice of dissection and anatomy theatres
- Tomb and memorial design, and the rise of the transi tomb
- Plague and quarantine practices
- Theologies of the body and corporeal resurrection
- Beliefs and controversies regarding purgatory and the Reformation
- Literary representations of the body in death
- Specifically vulnerable kinds of bodies, such as women or the disabled