As Marcel Mauss pointedly remarked in his call for a combined psychological and sociological approach to the study of human behaviour: ‘the body is man's first and most natural instrument’ to give meaning to one's social and material environment. It is the pivotal site of interaction between person and society, while it embodies notions of personal and communal identity: it is with the body that we experience, perform, communicate. By contrast, the lifeless and decaying body, the cadaver, typically evokes a sense of fear and alienation – it is ambiguous, ‘matter out of place’ and thus abject, yet it forcefully presents us with a premonition of our own fate. As an abject ‘other’, the cadaver is a fluid category exposing the limitations of the human need to order and control oneself and one's environment, which can be manipulated to express society's innermost fears and anxieties. Like other categories of embodiment, moreover, the opposition between living and dead body is never absolute; it is near-impossible to identify the transition between the two states, as Augustine had already acknowledged around AD 400. These days, with our medical advances, the boundary has become even more blurred.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the cadaver was constituted as a location in which ideas about moral purity and impurity were rendered visible. The image of putrefaction and corruption – a fragmenting and viscous body – was a powerful instrument warning society about the dangers of sin, while concepts of stasis and equilibrium were valorised as the essence of primeval human being. Stories about restless revenants intent on evil circulated widely, at the same time as reports of the miraculous conservation of saintly bodies.