Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
14 - The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls Are equal bow with men: the odds are gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15.67–70The works of William Shakespeare often look back from the early modern period upon the sensibilities of the medieval world, illuminating similar anxieties about culture, identity, ethnicity, and gender. In his plays, taboo subjects of medieval literature and history are given centre stage, acted out for an early modern audience coming to grips with its own fraught place in history. Shakespeare's dramas (Antony and Cleopatra perhaps more explicitly and completely than any other) feature numerous instances of emasculation, yet these are seldom considered in corporeal terms. Recent scholarship on early modern castration shares a number of curious features: the majority of the discussion takes place in relation to a very select number of Shakespearean sources, and the references are invariably contextualized through psycho-analytic theories of phallic lack. Through the new historicist and cultural materialist turn of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century academia, Shakespeare has become recognized as the spokesperson for Western sensibility in general, not just a historical time and place in particular – and the deep-seated fear of effeminization or castration that is extracted from his work does indeed often appear more modern than early modern. The anachronistic moves that have been made in these studies can be conceptualized through three specific types of ‘cuts’: a temporal cut that removes Shakespeare's plays from their contemporary contexts; a textual cut that removes drama from its social functions; and finally an often horrifying and graphically illustrated corporeal cut found in early modern medical compendia.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 295 - 313Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013