The criminal corpse has been – and, in some contexts, continues to be – a significant site of state power, criminal justice, scientific anatomy and popular medicine. As the chapters in this volume show, various factors were at work in the practice of execution and the treatment of the executed body in the past, assuming different forms at different times and places. Common themes certainly emerge. Across many of the historical contexts studied here, attacks on the dead criminal body were a key means by which states sought to convey messages about, and shore up, their authority in the absence of alternative (more subtle but no less powerful) forms of social control. On many occasions this came into conflict with ruling-elite sensibilities about the sight of pain, suffering and death. The influence of popular beliefs about the body, death and the afterlife (and of the ruling authority’s understandings of such beliefs) on the forms of execution and post-mortem punishment put in practice likewise comes through in several of the chapters. So too, finally, does the agentive power of the criminal corpse; its ability to resist or even invert the intentions of those who try to claim a monopoly over it, either though the subversion of the execution crowd or through popular memory. These common themes of course mirror the several metanarratives described above which have each sought to provide overarching explanations for penal practice and change in Europe and wider afield. But the chapters in this volume suggest that technologies of social control, sensibilities and religious and cultural attitudes have acted in distinctive ways within different historical contexts. They open up the possibility, therefore, by way of conclusion, that it might be better to think in terms of models of common themes and interrelated factors, which assume unique forms at different times and places, rather than thinking of continuity and change within the confines of a single process.