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Catttt Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary
ritual desecration
1. Does "In each case the body was regarded as...." refer to "the three examples exhibited in exhibiton: An eighteenth-century foetus, A bodiless baby, and a wax model femaleA wax model female" or to "public hanging, drawing and quartering commonplace" ?
2. What does "ritual desecration" mean? Does it mean "a ritual in which things are made empty of sacredness"?
Context:
The exhibition demonstrates how radically attitudes to the body can change. An eighteenth-century foetus (‘human preparation in glass jar’), its sightless eyes and placid expression curiously lovely, wears bead bracelets on its pale limbs, grave goods as a homage to what must have been routine calamity. A bodiless baby’s head suspended in formalin is perpetually asleep, the lace edging her bonnet like a corolla fringing a mermaid’s sea-flower. A wax model female by the eighteenth-century artist Giovan-Battista Manfredini provocatively holds up the skin of her belly to reveal her viscera, out of which bulges a shiny pregnant uterus. Still vital-seeming, her docile nakedness draped in a Virgin blue cloak, she is greatly more disturbing than the sanitised models of the von Hagens school, reminding us how alien is even the recent past, when neonatal death was to be expected and public hanging, drawing and quartering commonplace. In each case the body was regarded as precious, sanctified, its public mutilation a ritual desecration, its anatomical revelations a testimony to the ingenuity bestowed on man by God.
2. What does "ritual desecration" mean? Does it mean "a ritual in which things are made empty of sacredness"?
Context:
The exhibition demonstrates how radically attitudes to the body can change. An eighteenth-century foetus (‘human preparation in glass jar’), its sightless eyes and placid expression curiously lovely, wears bead bracelets on its pale limbs, grave goods as a homage to what must have been routine calamity. A bodiless baby’s head suspended in formalin is perpetually asleep, the lace edging her bonnet like a corolla fringing a mermaid’s sea-flower. A wax model female by the eighteenth-century artist Giovan-Battista Manfredini provocatively holds up the skin of her belly to reveal her viscera, out of which bulges a shiny pregnant uterus. Still vital-seeming, her docile nakedness draped in a Virgin blue cloak, she is greatly more disturbing than the sanitised models of the von Hagens school, reminding us how alien is even the recent past, when neonatal death was to be expected and public hanging, drawing and quartering commonplace. In each case the body was regarded as precious, sanctified, its public mutilation a ritual desecration, its anatomical revelations a testimony to the ingenuity bestowed on man by God.
Top answer
No, it is a ritual or ceremony in which something sacred to a *** is destroyed in a dishonorable and insulting way.
- No, it is a ritual or ceremony in which something sacred to a *** is destroyed in a dishonorable and insulting way.
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5 Answers
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No, it is a ritual or ceremony in which something sacred to a *** is destroyed in a dishonorable and insulting way.
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Can you please give an example or explain it more in the above context, please?
and what is your idea about my first question?
and what is your idea about my first question?
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In each case:
Case 1: foetus in a jar
Case 2: bodiless baby's head
Case 3: a wax model female
In the middle ages, dissection of a dead human for medical studies was prohibited on religious grounds as a ritual desecration.
Case 1: foetus in a jar
Case 2: bodiless baby's head
Case 3: a wax model female
In the middle ages, dissection of a dead human for medical studies was prohibited on religious grounds as a ritual desecration.
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Thank you. I appreciate it. So, I think the sentence " its public mutilation a ritual desecration" should mean that "making changes in body was some kind of blasphemy those days, because it questioned the perfectness of human body which was created by a perfect ***". Right?
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