Altering the Female Body

The main sex-specific way in which the female body was surgically changed in the early modern period was by mastectomy, the removal of the breast, in whole or part, usually as a treatment for cancer.Footnote ³ Such surgeries have often been overlooked by medical historians, who have understandably assumed that these operations were too dangerous to have been attempted on any regular basis. Removing a breast to treat a slowly spreading cancer was, after all, a quite different prospect to amputating a limb which was mangled beyond repair and bleeding dangerously; the former required a prior commitment to excruciating pain and danger which is now almost unthinkable. Nonetheless, as this book discusses elsewhere, early modern people were, remarkably, prepared to undergo non-emergency surgeries in order to secure both longevity and quality of life. This was particularly the case for women facing cancer, a disease feared by patients and physicians alike, and known to cause a slow, agonising death if left untreated. As the French surgeon Pierre Dionis put it:

Mastectomy was, therefore, a recognised part of the surgical repertoire: though not common, it was an option available to most experienced surgeons. Methods for the operation are detailed in numerous prominent medical textbooks, including those by Richard Wiseman, James Cooke, and William Salmon.Footnote ⁵ They usually follow a similar method to that described by Beckett above. The breast was cut around the base, most commonly with a knife similar to that used in limb amputations, but sometimes with a sharp wire. With the breast removed, the surgeon would attempt to remove any tumour that remained visible, either by excision or using a hot iron cautery. They then used cautery or styptic powders to stem the flow of blood, before dressing the wound and hoping for the best. As is often the case for this period, what we know of patient experiences of this procedure is pieced together from second-hand accounts. There are no autobiographical accounts from this period from women who underwent mastectomies – the first known example is Frances Burney’s evocative description of her mastectomy in 1811.Footnote ⁶ It is abundantly clear, however, that such surgeries were immensely traumatic for everybody involved. Many surgeons admitted that they dreaded these operations, during which the life of the patient and the reputation of the practitioner were in imminent danger, and in which the suffering of the patient could disturb even a hardened operator. One Medical Dictionary advised readers that women undergoing mastectomy might ‘shriek and cry in a manner so terrible, as is sufficient to shock and confuse the most intrepid surgeon, and disconcert him in his operation’.Footnote ⁷

Notwithstanding the evident sympathy many surgeons had for their patients, however, medical accounts of mastectomy also show that these operations were an exercise in which groups of professional men exerted their power to control the female body, even to the extent of granting life or death.Footnote ⁸ As was the case for castrati, this dynamic was manifested in texts’ inattention to the phenomenological experience of the person whose ordeal they described, either from a somatic or a psychological perspective. Accounts of cancer surgery in medical textbooks sometimes talk in detail about the symptoms and living situation of the patient prior to surgery; as I discuss below, cancer was linked to a number of causes including mastitis and amenorrhea. In descriptions of the mastectomy itself, however, the subjectivity of the patient is pointedly erased. By their own admission, surgeons operated not on a person, but on a breast, assiduously seeking to ‘devide the good from the evill’.Footnote ⁹ As this book will demonstrate at various points, there was a general tendency in early modern accounts of surgery to objectify the person under the knife. In cases of mastectomy, however, this tendency seems to be have been amplified. Dionis, for instance, assured the readers of his Chirurgical Operations that ‘[t]his Operation is easier than is imagined before ’tis performed; for the Breast separates as easily from the Ribs, as when we divide the Shoulder from a Quarter of Lamb’.Footnote ¹⁰

This impulse to deny both the psychological and physical experiences of mastectomy patients extended beyond the operation itself. Moreover, this is not only an effect of scarcity of evidence. Mastectomy surgeries were less common than (for example) limb amputations, but there is evidence that they were taking place semi-regularly throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the 1700s, newspapers reported the operations of the great and good: on 8 February 1728, for instance, an announcement in the London Evening Post reported that ‘the lady of Sir Challenor Ogle’ had undergone an operation to remove a cancer in her breast, ‘and there is great Hopes of her Recovery’.Footnote ¹¹ The obituary pages also recorded the deaths of numerous women during or shortly after surgery.Footnote ¹² However, despite the fact that mastectomy survivors existed, they are virtually invisible in the historical record. Medical texts may detail the dressings and medicines used in the days and weeks after surgery, but they end abruptly thereafter. This is a stark contrast to narratives of limb amputation described in Chapter 4, which emphasise return to functionality as part of the recovery narrative. Neither do mastectomy survivors appear in the popular texts which valorised, demonised, mocked, and sympathised with other kinds of ‘altered bodies’. In short, they are conspicuous by their absence.

Amazons

In one arena, however, the effects of mastectomy were being discussed. As colonial activity burgeoned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lurid tales reached England of unimammarian women living in remote parts of the world, often in gynocentric societies. Such accounts often blended mythology, history, and ethnography, and could be found in a variety of texts. From the fourteenth century, manuscript copies of Sir John Mandeville’s Voyages and Travailes circulated in French, and later in English translations and editions, including a printed edition in 1582.Footnote ¹³ John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis (published in 1650 and in an enlarged edition in 1653) featured a comprehensive catalogue of human variation and bodily modification, which included Amazons.Footnote ¹⁴ Likewise, Thomas Heywood’s 1624 Gynaikeion sought to provide a ‘history of women’ arranged under the names of the nine classical muses. Throughout these varied reports, however, the main features of Amazons and Amazon society remained the same. Most authors agreed that the Amazons were an ancient society, though their exact origins, and their current geographical location, were confused. Prose histories of the seventeenth century repeatedly asserted that the Amazons were an offshoot of the Scythian people. Heywood, for instance, attested that the Amazons were originally Scythian women who migrated while their husbands were away at war and formed their own society, while others believed that the Amazons warred with the Scythians or bore children by them.Footnote ¹⁵ Many texts drew on the works of Plutarch and Virgil, in which numerous stories circulate of couplings between Western heroes and Amazonian princesses. In some versions, Theseus abducts and then marries Antiope, sister of the Amazonian queen Hippolyta; in others, he weds Hippolyta herself.Footnote ¹⁶ Alexander the Great was also reputed to have been visited by and fathered a child with the Amazon queen Thalestris.Footnote ¹⁷

Whatever their origins, authors were clear that Amazons lived either entirely without men, or with men in subservient roles. In 1582, for instance, Mandeville’s Voyages and Travailes was printed and described (with considerable imaginative licence) how a New World tribe of warrior women would ‘suffer no men to live among them, nor to have rule over them’, instead periodically inviting men to copulate with them.Footnote ¹⁸ Fourteen years after Mandeville’s account appeared in print, Sir Walter Raleigh published his own, more detailed version of the Amazon story as part of the Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana. It stated confidently that Guianese Amazons partnered with local kings for one month each year, during which they would ‘feast, daunce, and drinke of their wines in abundance, and the Moone being done, they all depart to their owne Provinces’. Moreover,

Amazons’ famously ferocious and gynocentric societies were closely indexed to their most distinctive bodily feature: the removal of one breast. Though Raleigh noted that ‘that they cut of[f] the right dug of the brest I do not finde to be true’, most other accounts disagreed.Footnote ²⁰ Mandeville specified that Amazon girls of noble birth had the left breast removed by cautery to allow them to better bear a shield, while ordinary girls had the right breast removed to befit them for a bow and arrow.Footnote ²¹ Heywood asserted that ‘the right brest they burne off, that with the more facilitie they may draw a Bowe, thrill a Dart, or charge a Launce’.Footnote ²² Meanwhile, Bulwer argued that there existed a number of different Amazonian tribes, among whom breast removal was a common practice:

All these reports had in common a fascination with the anomalous body of the Amazon, akin to that which characterised reports of castrato bodies. Here, as there, bodily difference was bound up with racial Otherness, and both had potential to titillate. It was no coincidence that Bulwer’s and Mandeville’s texts both contained pictures of Amazon women with their chests partially or fully exposed. Heywood’s text similarly teased readers with its description of Amazon dress: ‘Their garments cover not their bodies round; their right side is still bare towards their brest; their upper roabe which is buckled or buttoned above, descends no lower than the knee.’Footnote ²⁴ In such discourse, Amazons were both objects of lust and causes for fear. While procreative, they evaded the structures of marriage and patriarchy, and engaged in sex for pleasure as well as for reproduction. Moreover, unlike other sexually promiscuous female figures, the Amazon could not be stereotyped as a prostitute; as Simon Shepherd acknowledges, ‘[t]he propertied Amazon cannot be cast aside, as would a whore. And she imitates men in using social power for sexual exploitation. Hence the nightmarish turning of the tables.’Footnote ²⁵ Instead, Amazon women were understood to use their bodies and exercise their sexuality in ways which were not easily defined. In Kathryn Schwarz’s insightful Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance, she shows how Amazon stories influenced representations of contemporary femininity, including depictions of Elizabeth I. Often, argues Schwarz, stories about Amazons envision them becoming domesticated, turned into obedient wives and mothers. Yet their attraction remains in their ‘queerness’, an alterity of desire which reveals rigid heterosexual and homosocial structures as cultural rather than natural.

As Schwarz shows, the underdetermination of Amazons in terms of location and origins allowed them to embody a range of anxieties around homosociality, gender roles, and sexual desire. Looking at the Amazon body through the lens of early modern surgery raises other questions – namely, can we also consider these bodies as doing cultural work which extended to early modern survivors of mastectomy? The repudiation of heteronormative structures and of traditional motherhood implicit in the Amazons’ self-alteration speaks in unexpected ways to discourses about cancer and mastectomy, in which images of maternity were omnipresent. As I have described elsewhere, cancer was believed to be far more common in women than in men, with diagnoses of breast cancer far outstripping all others. The language in which cancerous growth was described often mirrored that used about foetuses: each drew nourishment from the woman’s body, and was ‘delivered’ with much pain and hazard. In practical terms too, maternity and cancer were close companions. Cancer was often believed to have its origins in ‘burnt’ humours concocted in the womb, particularly when the menses were stopped.Footnote ²⁷ This was thought to be a decisive factor in the high incidence of cancers in post-menopausal women. Even more commonly, tumours were thought to start with mastitis, which in turn could be caused by problems with breastfeeding, or by not breastfeeding.Footnote ²⁸

The possible extent of linkage between Amazonian and medical mastectomy is apparent in pictorial representations of both phenomena. Figure 2.1, for instance, shows Amazons as they are represented in Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis. The images are remarkable in several respects. They pointedly show the healthy breast alongside the missing one, and relegate the wound left by amputation to a linear scar. Attention is further diverted from this scar by the figures’ lavishly draped clothing, jewellery, and weaponry, all of which attest to the Amazons’ status as at once warlike and feminine. Moreover, the images are double: both the removal of the left and of the right breast are shown, despite the limited educational utility of this repetition. We may usefully compare these images to Figure 2.2, an illustration from a 1674 translation of Johannes Scultetus’ The Chyrurgeon’s Store-House (originally Armamentarium Chirurgiae, 1655), in which the images marked I to IV show the mastectomy operation. While the styles of these two representations are markedly different, certain aspects of their presentation are strikingly similar. In Scultetus’ image as in Bulwer’s, the intact breast is revealed, with the figure’s clothing draped suggestively around the waist as if in the act of disrobing, though in Scultetus’ image the flowing locks and jewellery which suggest a continuing feminine identity are absent. The faces of these figures, like those of Bulwer’s Amazons, are blank despite the pain which is evidently being inflicted in Scultetus’ image. The repetition of the figure in Scultetus’ image has more explanatory value than in Bulwer’s, but the urge to itemise the body is the same, even to the extent of showing the amputated breast. Correspondingly, the quasi-divine power of the disembodied hands descending into the scene, as if from heaven, describes a surgical power of remaking which is akin to the classificatory power of the ethnographer. As I will discuss below, people living with one-breasted bodies were under-represented on stage and in text. However, when such bodies could be viewed at a remove – within the confines of an ethnographic or medical text – they drew on a shared visual language in which the altered female body was both a desirable and a fearful object.

Figure 2.1 Detail from John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis: = Man Transform’d: Or, the Artificiall Changling (London, 1653).

Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online (EEBO) www.proquest.com

Figure 2.2 Detail from Johannes Scultetus, The Chyrurgeons Store-House (London, 1674).

Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online (EEBO) www.proquest.com

We might then read the unimammarian Amazon body and the body of the mastectomy survivor in parallel. In Amazons, one-breastedness was an effect of a society in which maternity took a back seat to martial valour; it was, as Bulwer asserted, the physical means of ‘discarding the tendernesse of their Sexe’.Footnote ²⁹ Gail Kern Paster similarly recognises,

While Amazons did not necessarily shun motherhood, they were commonly said to give their male children to others to raise. The Amazon’s willingness to relinquish some of her maternal capacity, and some of her children, may have resonated with critics of wet-nursing, who saw the practice as indicating an unnatural paucity of maternal instinct.Footnote ³¹ Meanwhile, the survivor of medical mastectomy was an unwilling participant in ‘gestating’ the tumour which might kill her, and which she attempted to expel through the painful and life-threatening experience of surgery. This sinister inversion of the process of pregnancy and birth was often bound up with perceived failure in or unwillingness to breastfeed one’s child, though writers stopped short of blaming women for their illness. Whether early modern people perceived these similarities, and how that perception might have affected the experiences of mastectomy survivors, is opaque. No accounts of cancer surgery, medical or otherwise, make the link between the altered body of the mastectomy survivor and the Amazon. Nonetheless, I shall argue that this absence may itself say something about the way in which altered female bodies were placed – or displaced – in early modern culture.

Abject Alteration

As I have described, early modern ethnographic texts usually highlighted the Amazons’ altered bodies. Amazon one-breastedness was strongly indexed to sexual freedom and a gynocentric way of living. The anxieties over maternity and sexuality Amazons provoked were also relevant to the bodies of early modern mastectomy survivors, though their exact relationship was unclear. In order to understand more about how images of the Amazon body might have impacted on the lived experiences of mastectomy survivors, I argue that one needs to look not only at those texts in which Amazon one-breastedness is present, but at those in which it is curiously and conspicuously absent.

Sexually altered female bodies were automatically excluded from many of the literary forms in which altered male bodies appeared. Unimammarian bodies were not deemed aesthetically useful in the same way as gelded male bodies. Hence, while castrati dominated the pages of newspapers and periodicals, Amazons were largely forgotten. Amazons did appear, however, in several seventeenth-century dramas, and in these plays, the missing breast is just that – missing. The absence is particularly striking when one considers early modern audiences’ love of stage effects such as crutches, limps, and what Farah Karim-Cooper describes as ‘the spectacle of dismemberment’.Footnote ³² The image of a one-breasted woman, with the site of her mastectomy bared, would seem at first to be a gift to cross-dressing boy actors, who might utilise their naturally flat chests in the service of theatrical realism. One would imagine, too, that the missing breast would be a boon to playwrights, who so keenly played on the ideas of missing parts and no-thingness implied by the Amazon’s correlate, the eunuch. Yet neither of these possibilities is realised. Shakespeare’s Hippolyta, for instance, makes no mention of bodily difference, and neither does her husband-to-be, Theseus.Footnote ³³ John Weston’s 1667 The Amazon Queen makes much of the Amazons’ sexual freedom, but neither the women nor their lovers mention their having one breast.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’sThe Sea Voyage (1622) features an unspecified desert island populated by ‘Amazons’ who fulfil their ethnographic stereotypes by eschewing male authority while taking the play’s shipwrecked male protagonists as temporary lovers. These women are said to be ‘shaped like Amazons’ in their social and sexual habits, but again, there is nothing in the text to suggest that they are one-breasted (5.4.44).Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, by the end of this play, the ‘Amazons’ are reunited with the husbands they thought had been lost at sea, and traditional – that is, patriarchal – domesticity is restored.

These are all dramas in which the unimammarian body supposedly associated with Amazon women is quietly sidelined. On occasion, however, the omission of one-breastedness from representations of the Amazon on stage becomes positively conspicuous. In Jasper Maynes’ 1648 The Amorous Warre, which features supposedly historical Amazons including the queen Thalestris, the play’s protagonists sleep with what they believe are Amazons, only to later discover that they have in fact been tricked into ‘cheating’ with their own wives. The men have explicitly evaded an encounter with unimammarian women, and their response highlights the distinct lack of such bodies on stage:

Meleager’s assurance that his bed partner found him ‘entire’ again hints at the possibility of male castration as an equivalent to female mastectomy, a threat which is raised by the thought of an anomalous female body and must be dismissed along with it. The invocation of the razor here as the instrument of mastectomy is perhaps significant, since this device was associated with both surgical procedures and with the removal of that masculine appendage, the beard. However, the integrity of the male protagonists’ partners is stressed – they assuredly had breasts, had escaped the razor, and were whole and perfect. It appears that while missing arms and legs may be staged, and missing testicles may be heard of, if not seen, missing breasts are outside the realms of dramatic possibility.

The reluctance of early modern playwrights to stage the Amazon unimammarian body may be partly a facet of the general absence of America and its peoples from the early modern stage which has been observed by Gavin Hollis. In his book on the subject, Hollis notes that early modern plays rarely discuss the possibilities offered by European colonisation of America, and even less frequently frame those possibilities in positive terms, despite the concerted efforts of the Virginia Company’s ‘promotional machine’.Footnote ³⁷ Since Amazons were often believed to hail from Guiana, they came under the ‘American’ umbrella, and as elsewhere in this book, issues of gender, disability, and race intersect to render the body Other along multiple registers. Nonetheless, I contend that the determined inattention paid to Amazon one-breastedness on stage also reflects discomfort about altered female bodies in general. Viewed alongside the refusal of medical writers to discuss the anomalous bodies of mastectomy survivors, these Amazon absences indicate that early modern audiences had a problem with viewing sexually altered women ‘in the flesh’. Ethnographic accounts of Amazons benefited from the conceptual distance imposed between readers and people who were clearly racial and social Others, even to the extent of explicitly picturing the one-breasted body. However, to imagine the site of mastectomy was horrifying when it was closer to home, that is, when it was presented on stage, or related to ‘real’ cancer surgeries. Though other kinds of bodily difference were certainly under-represented and misrepresented in early modern texts, this reluctance to picture the results of surgical alteration was particular to breast amputation. Moreover, the effect of such omission was to deny the subjectivity and continued narrative of the mastectomy survivor. As Sarah Covington notes of early modern ex-soldiers, ‘scars … were corporal evidence of healing as well as damage – a memorializing faultline on the body that reminded the veteran of the “before” and “after” that his life had taken upon the injury he suffered’.Footnote ³⁸ The denial of the mastectomy scar precludes any possibility of ‘memorializing’ the female experience in the same way.

What made these altered bodies so different from others? Modern ‘psycho-oncological’ studies tracing women’s experiences of cancer recognise that removing the breast has unique social significance. Mastectomy, it is argued, excludes women from a patriarchal culture in which their participation is always contingent and fragile:

In other words, there is no clear place for the non-breasted or one-breasted woman in a culture which commonly deems that feature unattractive, and which indexes attractiveness to social value. Early modern and modern perceptions of beauty do not always correlate, and as I have detailed elsewhere, the early modern breast signified in culturally specific ways.Footnote ⁴⁰ Arguably, the close physiological connection between lactation and menstruation which was prevalent in early modern medicine made breasts a somewhat problematic site of eroticism.Footnote ⁴¹ Nonetheless, mastectomied Amazonian bodies might likewise have been excluded from view because it was simply too difficult to square the sexual titillation offered by exotic half-naked women with the perceived unattractiveness of a missing breast.

While this observation goes some way to explaining the absence of one-breasted Amazons on stage, it does not fully account for the silence that surrounds recovery from mastectomy in other kinds of early modern text. To do so, we need to consider again the subject/object status of the body. Early modern lived experience, as this book will demonstrate, entailed intersubjectivity.Footnote ⁴² However, it also required as its ground a distinct ‘self’ which could be said to act, sense, and have experiences; in other words, to relate to the ‘outside world’ requires an ‘inside’ identity, even when that identity is itself materially grounded. To understand why the self–other distinction may be threatened by mastectomy, it is useful to turn to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980). Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva identifies as ‘abject’ those things or phenomena which undermine our sense of physical and psychic integrity. The abject is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’Footnote ⁴³ Witnessing the permeability of the bodily envelope through the abject is profoundly disturbing to one’s sense of one’s own subjectivity, as Josh Dohmen summarises:

Read in this way, the mastectomied body is ‘abject’ along multiple registers. Like any wounded body, the body after mastectomy displays to viewers the fragility of the boundary between life and death, and between the interior of the body and the outside world. On the most basic level, the mastectomy operation brought life and death into uncomfortably close proximity; it was arguably even more dangerous than a limb amputation, so much so that many surgeons shunned the operation in favour of palliative care.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, the unimammarian body is abject not only because it is hurt but also because it makes visible the material relations between one body and another. That is, by removing one breast, attention is drawn to the nutritive function of the remaining breast, and thus to the state of infancy in which mother and child are imperfectly separated. As Ashley Denham Busse explains:

The positioning of the altered female body as abject is recognised by modern psycho-oncology, with Parton et al. describing how women after mastectomy felt ‘outside normality’, such that ‘discursive resources were limited for capturing embodied experiences, and … the women’s subject positioning subsequently became unsettled and fragile’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In an early modern context, this effect is heightened by the longstanding association of women’s bodies (healthy or otherwise) with abjection. While they do not employ Kristeva’s overtly psychoanalytic methodology, historicist readings of early modern drama have broadly agreed that the functions of the lactating, menstruating, leaky female body persistently troubled playwrights and authors.Footnote ⁴⁸ The illimitability of the female body was suspected to pervade everyday life, from the effects of maternal imagination on a growing foetus to the menstruating woman’s ability to curdle milk with a glance.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, the classification of anomalous female bodies as abject follows what Schwarz describes as the ‘familiar pattern of abjection, which consolidates the center by exacting its price from the margins’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Making the anomalous female body marginal repositions maleness and able-bodiedness as normal, makes male sexual desire the criterion for social acceptability, and quells perceived threats to this ‘normality’ posed by Amazon women who elude heteronormative social structures and accepted definitions of ‘ability’.Footnote ⁵¹ This is, as Schwarz observes of Shakespeare’s dead female characters, an easier project to fulfil when the troublesome women in question are deceased, since ‘death might fix a particular condition of worth; whether necrophilic or necrophobic, history digests its victims in the service of its authors’.Footnote ⁵² While not necessarily dead, the abjection of one-breasted women seems to follow the same principle: marginalising and repudiating bodies works better when those bodies are not around to assert themselves as subjects. Nonetheless, the very need for repudiation implies a continuing blurring of boundaries; as Schwarz argues, ‘Attempts to fix a particular condition of worth collide with the polyvalence of that counterfactual “what if?”’Footnote ⁵³ The threat posed by abjection is never extinguished because the project of repudiating the abject is always incomplete. Thoughts of mastectomy crept into early modern plays even as the characters insisted that their partners ‘had breasts’, revealing a fascination with the twin qualities of maternity and death evoked by the one-breasted body.

When the maternal body met the altered body, then, the result was more unpalatable than intriguing, since to look upon this body was to risk a collapse of personal identities. Jokes could not be made about mastectomy as they were about castration or limb loss. Amazons might be imagined as vocal and powerful on stage, but only if the matter of their altered body was suppressed. Furthermore, in this respect art imitated life. While numerous medical texts gave instructions for mastectomy operations, and a few supplied accounts thereof, details about the lives of women after mastectomy are, remarkably, entirely absent from early modern writing of all kinds. This book will show early modern texts populated by amputees, prosthesis users, and people with ‘altered bodies’ of all kinds. Mastectomy survivors are not in those texts.

Conclusion

In 1734, a letter written to the editor of The Prompter, complaining about castrati, suggested an extraordinary means of resolving the ‘opera problem’:

Clearly, this letter-writer was not in earnest. The Prompter was a publication whose main concern was satirising and gossiping about the theatre and its inhabitants, not proposing experimental surgeries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet, the outraged author had not pulled their suggestion from thin air. The sterilisation of women had been mooted before, in the same texts in which Amazonian mastectomy was described, and like this practice (and like some kinds of eunuchism), female sterilisation was believed to have originated in Africa and the Middle East. The 1658 Rare Verities, for instance, attested that

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that ‘nympha’ in this period referred to labia minora; this author clearly believed that their removal would impede female sexual pleasure, though an internal operation was required to truly sterilise the female patient. John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis (1653) and Nicholas Venette’s Mysteries of Conjugal Love (1707) both similarly suggested that female castration might have been undertaken in the ancient world or more recently in Africa and the Middle East.Footnote ⁵⁷ Again, both questioned how the operation could have been completed without killing the patient. Venette suggested that the ‘castration’ had in fact been a kind of chastity belt, or perhaps the stitching up of the women’s ‘privities’. Bulwer, however, took a more credulous view:

Stories about the sterilisation of women were exceedingly rare, much rarer than those about Amazons. Nonetheless, the terms in which such tales were framed underline how ethnography functioned as a way of thinking about different kinds of bodily change, whilst keeping the physical and social implications of bodily alterity safely at arm’s length. They also demonstrate how sex-specific alterations to the female body were consistently indexed to the illimitability of female desire. By forcing a comparison between castrati and neutered women, the Prompter’s letter-writer actually demonstrated their non-equivalence. Despite his feigned naivety, the author knows that spayed women cannot have an instrumental value like that of castrati. Eliminating the risk of pregnancy for women who wander the streets creates a different kind of commodified body: not opera stars, but prostitutes.

‘Spayed’ and unimammarian female bodies functioned similarly to provoke conflicted reactions in the (overwhelmingly male) authors by whom they were described. On one hand, it is clear that such bodies were a source of fascination, and sometimes of titillation. On the other, surgical changes to the female body – especially when focussed on sexual characteristics – were a cause for anxiety. Wounds, even when healed, showed the permeability and impermanency of the bodily envelope. Female bodies likewise threatened illimitability and unboundedness. The combination of the two was therefore experienced as a threat to personal identity. Furthermore, this threat was experienced more profoundly because, as the following chapters will show, early modern models of embodiment were unfixed, often dwelling on indeterminacy and change. In this climate, stories of surgically altered bodies were almost always stories of male bodies. The phenomenological experiences of surgically altered women were obfuscated and ignored in order to maintain the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ on which authors’ and audiences’ sense of subjective identity depended.