Chapter 1 considers the use of castration as a means of turning the body into a money-making instrument. Castration for the purposes of creating castrato singers was a relatively rare but culturally prominent means of changing the body. The procedure created a body with unique erotic and commercial capital, which was bound up with the rise of commercialised forms of literature. The instrumental nature of castrato bodies promoted a vision of embodiment in which the body appeared as an object that could be exploited, whether for monetary gain or sexual pleasure. Hostility towards castrati arose because such men were felt to violate not only the categories of male/non-male, but those of master/servant; castrati worked for a living, but were perceived to have power over those whom they entertained. Even accounts of the sexual potency of castrati were, I argue, opportunities to objectify these anomalous bodies. The subjective experience of the castrato emerges only rarely: first, in narratives of castrato marriages, and second, in operatic roles which embrace the castrato’s sexual liminality.

The risk of acquiring a modern tongue, rather than using a dead language like Latin as a lingua franca, presented new hazards that worried families more than institutions. The risk was that the experience of full immersion in a modern language abroad in order to ‘perfect its knowledge’ could tempt the young mind to adopt foreign habits. In Elizabethan England, it wasn’t only Italian fashion that was being criticised as all travellers who returned home from foreign lands were ridiculed by popular satirists for their new manners. There is evidence that dowdy Englishmen were offended by their compatriots wearing extravagant clothing, displaying foreign manners and modifying their native language after years spent abroad. Polite conversation was a broad term that included different types of social occasion, as well as diverse types of performances and social skills. Indeed, when reporting on their soirées in France and Italy, many English visitors stressed the different nature of their interactions. Usually they distinguish French conversations from what Italians called conversazioni, and indeed the latter then assumed the meaning of social gatherings, in contrast with the gallant French version.