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
Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture 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 male body is a paradox – at once strong and resilient, yet fragile and vulnerable, arguably even more vulnerable than the female form which has its generative organs safely tucked up inside. Nations have been founded on the virility and power of the male body, but if that virility is lost, empires can be lost with it. Castration is therefore often a conversational taboo; references to it elicit a cringe, a grimace, a protective stance and yet it has been part of the bodily discourse as long as humans have communicated. In the modern age, castration (surgical or chemical) is punitive, either a legal sentence for unspeakable crimes or a violent, illegitimate action. In an era bombarded by advertisements for Viagra, Cialis, and other ‘male enhancement’ products, the male genitalia (particularly the penis) are treated as if sacred. Gary Taylor's study, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood, captures the essence of this dialogue in a foray into all facets of emasculation (including his own vasectomy) and its history from the dawn of time to Tori Amos. Taylor argues that castration calls into question
the binary categories of human thought – the binaries of Augustine or Claudian or Freud, obviously, but also our own binaries, the binaries that organize postmodernist academic discourse. The eunuch confuses not only the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ but the categories ‘nature’ and ‘accident,’ ‘biology’ and ‘culture,’ ‘reality’ and ‘representation,’ ‘essentialism’ and constructionism'.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013