In 1686, John Moyle published An Abstract of Sea Chirurgery, a book for aspiring ships’-surgeons who had yet to actually work at sea. Moyle gave instructions for many kinds of minor surgeries and physic. Particularly striking, however, was his advice for a surgeon preparing for engagement day:

The scene brings home the dangers which attended military service in this period. Moyle fully expected that at each engagement with the enemy, he would be required to amputate so many arms and legs that he would need a designated barrel in which to stow the disembodied parts. Nor was Moyle some reckless sawbones; it was hard, he admitted, to ignore the ‘sad schreeking’ of the men under the knife, but it had to be done.Footnote ² The text gives detailed instructions for conducting amputations, and for tending to the patient immediately afterward. However, it leaves many questions unanswered. What happened to Moyle’s patients when they got back to shore and re-joined civilian society? How did they view their radically changed bodies? What did they make of the fact that a part of themselves had been tossed overboard by Moyle and his mate?

This book is about questions such as these, and about people whose bodies were permanently changed by medical intervention. Patients of all kinds frequently disappear from recorded history after undergoing surgery. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical texts like Moyle’s generally focussed intently on the act of operation and its immediate aftermath, but infrequently followed up their cases. Yet surgery created an extraordinary range of bodily anomaly. Castration, amputation, mastectomy, facial surgery: all had life-changing psychic and social effects about which we know remarkably little. In recent years, the history of people with disabilities in the early modern period has begun to be studied. These works have told us something of the experiences of people with congenital and acquired disabilities and diseases, particularly from an economic point of view.Footnote ³ This book takes a different approach, focussing on how anomalous bodies shaped and were shaped by more metaphysical concerns: beliefs about the nature of embodiment, about soul and body, and about personal identity.

In his Sea Chirurgery, Moyle’s concern was with the short-term survival of his patients. His disposal of the amputated limbs, however, recalls a situation envisioned by John Donne half a century earlier, as he worried about how the risen body would be (re)constituted:

Donne’s vision was one in which the body was endlessly susceptible to partition. While this malleability was frightening – one might literally fall apart over the course of a lifetime – it was also thrilling, hinting at new corporeal possibilities in which the body could be remade. Thus, narratives about bodily dismemberment emphasised construction as well as destruction. Only a few years after Moyle wrote of discarding amputated limbs, Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel was published in English, and described the reattaching of a severed head:

Satirist, ship’s-surgeon, preacher-poet – the issues of ‘coheareance’ raised in discussion of altered bodies affected all those concerned with personal identity, and this book will work across genres to reconstruct attitudes to bodily alteration. Texts which are not traditionally ‘literary’ have a central place here, as I argue that documents from newspapers to receipt books contributed to a cultural milieu in which bodily difference was both a tool for thought and a social issue. However, paying close attention to the role of the altered body in early modern society also reveals just how many such bodies populate the canonical literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. I will show that understanding the material circumstances of bodily difference in this period can shed new light on familiar texts by Hester Pulter, Joseph Addison, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and René Descartes, among others. This in itself is not entirely new; the ‘bodily turn’ among early modern literary scholars has been underway for some time.Footnote ⁶ However, this book will take a particularly integrative approach, drawing from medical history, disability studies, and phenomenology in order to focus intently on issues of embodiment. Thus, for example, in my reading of Titus Andronicus I focus on the fine detail of Lavinia’s disability (her use of the writing staff) in conjunction with phenomenological theories of prosthesis which interrogate the identity-forming powers of such ‘auxiliary organs’. Similarly, Donne’s interest in contemporary science is well known. By paying particular attention to his writings on the matter of bodily identity after death, however, one can detect a conflict between Donne’s academic orthodoxy on the matter of bodily resurrection and his personal horror of bodily partition and decay.

To consider metaphysical and pragmatic concerns as thus closely intertwined is particularly apt to a period in which the arts and sciences had not yet been separated. Curious minds such as Donne’s read omnivorously in medicine, philosophy, religion, and politics, adopting good ideas and idioms wherever they found them. Moreover, if early modern thinkers were wide-ranging in their intellectual vocabulary, I argue that they were similarly fluid in their thinking about embodiment. As I discuss below, it has often been suggested that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a monist view of embodiment, in which flesh and mind were virtually indistinguishable, gave way to a dualist model influenced by Descartes. While that trajectory holds true in places, this book will show that if one listens to the stories told by early modern people, it is equally evident that there was no clean division between old and new modes of thought. Castrato bodies were treated as commodities, but castrati were also viewed as characterologically different on account of their physical difference. Flesh could be grafted from one individual to another, but apparently retained a sympathy for its original owner even over vast distances. The faithful declared their belief that God would make their bodies anew, yet feared being buried without all their body parts. By examining the altered body in a variety of contexts, I will contend that attitudes to bodily anomaly pushed the boundaries of thinking about embodiment and identity. Through their varied responses to bodily difference, we see that early modern people were epistemologically multilingual, strategically employing a view of embodiment which was more monist, more dualist, or somewhere in between, depending on the circumstances in which they found themselves. Moreover, their stories often show how messily these different models fit together. The body may seem at once to be mechanistic object, and acting, feeling subject – the mind’s prison and its mode of expression. Scholastic, economic, and social background all made a difference, but the end result was improvisational, flexible, and heteroglossic.

To consider these questions as provoked in particular by the altered body is to engage with the question of bodily normalcy and disability in general. My focus in this book on bodies which were altered by surgery is motivated by several factors. This category is, pragmatically speaking, a more manageable subset than that of ‘people with disabilities’, which might include the temporarily impaired, the chronically unwell, and the elderly among others. People with acquired impairments were less subject to providentialist narratives in which disability was understood as a divine portent or punishment, and discourses around such people were therefore more open to other kinds of metaphysical questions. Perhaps most importantly, looking at people with surgically altered bodies opens a space for considering early modern categories of bodily difference and disability. In this book are amputees and other people we would readily identify as ‘disabled’, and who were recognised in the early modern period as unfit for work and eligible for welfare assistance. However, the category of ‘altered bodies’ also includes people whose bodies could not straightforwardly be categorised as impaired. Castrati, for example, were certainly physically anomalous, but their bodies were created as a means to an end, and in some cases served to bring them fame and fortune. The matter is complicated further when one considers that the very term ‘disabled’ is culturally inflected. Disability scholarship of the past decade has increasingly questioned the terms in which we can address past experiences of bodily difference. Lennard J. Davis, for instance, has long contended that we should ‘assume that disability was not an operative category before the eighteenth century’.Footnote ⁷ ‘Disability’, he argues, emerged as a concept in relation to industrialisation, and before that point, ‘deformity’ was a more commonly used term. Moreover, he contends, congenital ‘deformities’ were differentiated from bodily differences acquired later in life.Footnote ⁸ Irina Metzler likewise grapples with the difficulties of using modern terminology to describe medieval conceptions of difference, arguing that ‘“Disability” is a term that only makes cultural sense in the present.’Footnote ⁹ Her analysis, like those of Elizabeth Bearden and Chris Mounsey, searches for a phrase which will encapsulate the high degree of individual variation between people who were all, in the modern sense, ‘disabled’.Footnote ¹⁰ For Metzler the idea which best fits is that of ‘liminality’, a sense of being not only on the edge of a category but in between the categories of sick and well, static and dynamic.Footnote ¹¹ For Mounsey and Bearden, the concept of ‘variability’ most appropriately describes the wide experiential differences which exist between sensory impairments, intellectual disability, physical disability, and so on.Footnote ¹² Variability, argues Mounsey, is ‘a concept that enshrines uniqueness, has the patience to discover the peculiarities of each individual and by doing so captures particular people rather than an “institutionalized representation of disabled people”’.Footnote ¹³

While such formulations encourage nuance, they are not always up to the task of describing what was common, as well as different, between people with various kinds of bodily difference. Disability studies has traditionally been an activist discipline, which has advocated for people with disabilities based on treating them as a group with similar social and economic concerns. Thus, at the same time as emphasising variability, Mounsey contends that ‘each person’s disability (under whichever banner it may subtend) is unlike any other person’s, while the experience of being disabled is the same for each disabled person’.Footnote ¹⁴ The term ‘disability’ may be a blunt instrument but it is often a politically expedient one. With this in mind, both Bearden and Metzler thus adopt a disability studies model in which ‘impairment’ describes the biological fact of physical difference, while ‘disability’ denotes the restrictions that impairment involves, which are determined by environmental and socio-cultural factors (the provision or otherwise of assistive items, or equality legislation, for example). This approach too has its problems, and in their Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell collapse the impairment/disability distinction in order to ‘recognize disability as a site of phenomenological value that is not purely synonymous with the processes of social disablement’.Footnote ¹⁵ As they argue, ‘Environment and bodily variation … inevitably impinge upon each other.’Footnote ¹⁶ In the scenarios described in this book, social and environmental factors are so deeply imbricated in constructions of embodiment as to make sharp distinctions unhelpful. I therefore use ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ here more or less interchangeably, alongside the more precise term ‘bodily alteration’.

Though they remain unresolved, these debates demonstrate that there are multiple ways in which the distinction between normatively bodied and other-bodied might be configured, and multiple axes along which normalcy and non-normalcy might be plotted. One aspect of disability history which remains underdeveloped is the intersection of disability, deformity, or other degrees of ‘impairment’ with race and gender.Footnote ¹⁷ The difficulty for early modern scholars attempting to develop this intersectionality is immediately apparent in the fact that most chapters of this book feature far more writing by and about men than by and about women – and no writing by people of colour. This is instructive in itself; in my sources, the white male body is, as ever, the paradigm for considering subjectivity. Nonetheless, considerations of gender and race also inform the stories in this book in subtler ways. Chapter 2, for instance, considers how the ‘exotic’ one-breasted body of the Amazon woman teetered between abjection and erotic spectacle. In Chapter 5, the appearance of the raced body in discourses about bodily resurrection is connected to uncertainty about the spiritual status of non-whites and non-Christians.Footnote ¹⁸ Altered bodies could be radically different in their affects depending on what kind of body was being altered, as well as on what kind of alteration took place.

As this lability indicates, the body in early modern culture is a particularly slippery subject (or object). The definitional status of the body is bound up with material practices that reshape the flesh and cultural mores which determine its uses, such that the body may be seen both as individuated and as interacting with a socio-cultural ecology. The topic is further complicated by the dominance in much early modern thought of the humoral model, which has loomed large in literary criticism of the past two decades. According to the neo-Galenic model of bodily function, ebbs and flows in the body’s fluids, or humours, might affect not only one’s physical state but one’s mental processes, a symbiotic relationship so close as to be impossible to pull apart into ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Thus Gail Kern Paster, a leading proponent of the ‘bodily turn’ in Renaissance literary studies, describes how

Paster sees somatic and emotional experience in this period as indivisible; early modern people, she argues, would have found it odd to differentiate between mental and physical health. Because emotions were not experienced in isolation, health itself was also profoundly relational. As such, she contends, in studying early modern literature and history we should be thinking less of the embodied soul and more of the ensouled body. The maelstrom of somatic, relational, emotional, and cognitive experience was apprehended as an ‘ecology of the passions’, in which each aspect depended on relationships within and without the bodily envelope.Footnote ²⁰

Paster’s work has been seminal in understanding aspects of early modern culture and literature; this emphasis on bodily materiality has produced a whole genre of Shakespearean criticism, often intersecting with the study of gender and race.Footnote ²¹ At the same time, however, other scholars have warned against overlooking the importance of the immaterial soul in early modern culture. Jonathan Sawday and Angus Gowland are foremost among those who analyse descriptions of the emotions, and even of the body itself, in terms of intellectual and spiritual curiosity.Footnote ²² Gowland, for example, insists that ‘What was fundamental in conceptions of passions and the human subject was not materialistically conceived “embodied emotion”, but the relationship between the functions of the body and those of the soul.’Footnote ²³ For these critics, the embodied soul retains supremacy over the ensouled body.Footnote ²⁴ The ‘subject’, they argue, is the thinking soul; the body is objectified by comparison. Comparing early modern ‘passions’ with modern ‘affect’, Benedict Robinson offers a third option, in which the passions are ‘kind[s] of cognition’, ‘qualities of a substance’ rather than substances in and of themselves.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, all these scholars position the difference between ensouled bodies and embodied souls as, to some extent, one of chronology. What is being described here is a shift, over time, from a monist to a dualist conception of the body. The reasons for this shift have been explored in great detail in works including Roy Porter’s influential Flesh in the Age of Reason, which identifies a number of contributing factors to the conceptual division of soul from body.Footnote ²⁶ Descartes’ Meditations is, of course, prominent among these factors. However, the popularity of Cartesian dualism depended on a raft of social, cultural, and economic changes, many of which are touched upon in this book. The following chapters will show how the new science of the seventeenth century arguably encouraged natural philosophers to think of the body as a composition of parts which might be removed and replaced, and how a mechanistic view of the flesh was likewise fostered by the rise of automata. The execution of Charles I, and later, the Glorious Revolution, brought into question the idea of the noble body, while the later seventeenth century witnessed a ‘crisis in paternity’ which lent new urgency to issues of inheritance.Footnote ²⁷ Economic factors loom particularly large here; I will argue that with the rise of consumer culture, the body might be viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, manipulated, and enhanced. Such changes were communicated and facilitated by the rise of print culture, particularly advertisements and newspapers. Most crucially, all these changes took place against a backdrop of innumerable armed conflicts which created a steady supply of amputee or otherwise anomalous bodies.

This is not to imply that conceptions of embodiment followed a neat track from Renaissance to Enlightenment. It is very often the case that procedures or phenomena which are commonly taken to have contributed to the segregation of body from mind may, under the right circumstances, be read in the opposite direction. When the body was carved up, augmented, or examined, discussions emerged which might as easily insist on the ‘person-ness’ of the body as on its ‘thing-ness’. The contested boundaries between things and people have been recognised in recent scholarship in a number of works on subject–object relationships in the early modern period. In particular, scholars have noted the ability of objects to shape subjectivity, acting as interfaces between the flesh and the wider world which transform the potentialities and boundaries of the body. In Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass’s Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, they explain:

As this book will explore, when the categories of object and subject are interrogated, the body itself may appear as either or both object and/or subject, a shaping influence on the mind or a constitutive part of it.

This flexibility can be difficult to envision from within the confines of a post-modern society which has embraced a mechanistic view of both flesh and, increasingly, experience. One of the ways in which this book seeks to access the different dimensions of early modern selfhood is through the application of phenomenological theory. Branches of phenomenology are almost as numerous as phenomenological critics, but here I borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Drew Leder, and Valerie Sobchack in viewing embodiment, and ontology, as a combination of biological facticity and experiential, relational biography. These scholars have in common that they view the self as a ‘double-sided’ entity. As physical beings with senses, they argue, we possess both thing-ness and the capacity to apprehend other things in the world; that is, ‘intentionality’. Various phenomenologists describe this double-sidedness in different ways. In Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, he writes of the subject body (corps sujet), lived body (corps vécu), or one’s own body (corps propre).Footnote ²⁹ The body is, he finds, both ‘me’ and ‘mine’, that which is experienced and that from which all experience takes place.Footnote ³⁰ In Ricoeur’s formulation, selfhood is divided into idem and ipse: the first, the quality of material sameness, and the second, encompassing tastes, values, and the continuation of character over time.Footnote ³¹ Whatever the terminology – and I have largely avoided specialist terms in this book – the ramifications of this double-sidedness for the study of depictions of embodiment are primarily ones of elucidating what is already felt to be true. The body, according to phenomenology, has the curious property of being both ‘here’ and ‘there’ – both that which experiences things and that which is experienced as a thing by others. Neither of these facets is divisible from the other, and therefore, as Stephen Priest observes, ‘body-subject and world are dialectically related: they are mutually constituting’.Footnote ³² Moreover, phenomenology is itself mutually constituting with much work in the history of emotions and sensory history which I have described above. Bruce Smith, who coined the term ‘historical phenomenology’ to describe his work on histories of sex and sound, argues that this method ‘directs attention to the sentient body … positioned among the cultural variables set in place by new historicism and cultural materialism’.Footnote ³³ The same might equally be said of many works by historians of disability, literature, sensation, or emotion seeking to reconstruct how it felt to have a particular kind of body in the past.

In light of the flexibility which I argue characterised early modern approaches to embodiment, it seemed inappropriate to order this book in terms of chronological or even generic categories. Rather, it is – to borrow Mark Breitenberg’s phrase – a ‘collection of interventions’, themed around varieties of bodily alteration.Footnote ³⁴ Each chapter thus ranges widely over different kinds of texts from different points in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century. Though I have tried to provide a sense of change over time where this is evident, I repeatedly found that textual influences behaved less neatly, light-footedly skipping generations and genres.

Bodily alterations in this period often took place through necessity – the need to save the patient by removing an arm or leg, for example. However, this was not always the case. Chapter 1 considers the use of castration as a means of turning the body into a money-making instrument. Elective castration for the purposes of creating castrato singers was a relatively rare but culturally prominent means of changing the body. As I argue, the procedure created a body with unique erotic and commercial capital, which was bound up with the rise of commercialised forms of literature. In this respect, therefore, the (literally) instrumental nature of this altered body 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.

Chapter 2 examines another sexually altered body, that of the female mastectomy survivor. Such women may, I argue, be viewed as correlates to castrati in that they too were often exoticised: the figure of the one-breasted Amazon was an erotic and ethnographic spectacle. In this guise the mastectomied woman was also, like the castrato, sexually dangerous and functionally unique, with her bodily alteration believed to confer martial advantages. Unlike castrati, however, the altered status of the Amazon body was consistently obfuscated, and was never linked to instances of medical mastectomy. This occurred in spite of the fact that mastectomy was well known as a cure for breast cancer in the early modern period; indeed, the cancerous body and the Amazonian body had troubling parallels, both being perceived as rejecting or perverting maternal function. The absolute exclusion of one-breasted bodies from the stage and from domestic narratives reveals how far the status of the altered body was determined by patriarchal social structures.

The theme of morally interpreting the altered body continues in Chapter 3, where I look to varieties of facial surgery and prosthesis. Facial surgery in this period was frequently a grim necessity, and was often framed as such. Nonetheless, the early modern period saw the development of medical procedures aimed as much at the augmentation and transformation of the face as at its restoration to ‘normality’. As I show, these advanced procedures – which included tooth transplants – brought into question the morality of changing one’s appearance. These issues were heightened in discussions of a rare but fascinating operation, the Tagliacotian rhinoplasty. Promising to graft a new nose on to the faces of men afflicted by syphilis, this operation potentially, and controversially, disguised the results of sexual licentiousness. In the hands of satirical authors, however, the Tagliacotian rhinoplasty became something even more rich and strange. It was suggested not only that the graft might be taken from another person’s flesh, but that the grafted part might retain a sympathetic connection to its original ‘owner’. Once again, the nature of the connection (or lack thereof) between a person’s flesh and their ‘true’ identity was foremost in such discussions. Hester Pulter’s poem on the subject is a witty, sharply satirical admonition against sexual incontinence. Anticipating later works by Butler and Addison, it demonstrates how rhinoplasty became a vehicle for voicing larger concerns about embodiment, sociability, and morality.

Chapter 4 turns to a more common form of bodily alteration: amputation. This procedure is well documented in early modern medical literature, but attitudes towards amputees remain obscure. Looking to descriptions of prostheses in this period, I argue that prosthetic arms and legs were ideally imagined as articulate and mobile. They were strongly linked to a narrative of rehabilitation in which the amputee regained the ability to walk, ride, and in general to ‘perform’ able-bodiedness. This trend at once indexed a person’s character to their bodily abilities and suggested similarities between the prostheticised human body and a machine or automaton. In the latter section of the chapter, this reading of prosthetics informs a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Focussing on Lavinia’s plight after her hands and tongue are amputated, I argue that her use of a staff to write the names of her attackers is, pragmatically speaking, unnecessary. What is necessary, however, is that Lavinia utilises objects in order to resist her own object-ification. That is, by making signs, she resists others’ reading of her mutilated body as a passive sign, and regains a degree of agency. As ever, however, objects have meaning as well as people. Lavinia’s staff may allow her to reclaim her subjectivity, but it can as easily recast her as the perpetual rape victim or freakish supercrip.

All kinds of bodily alteration in this period were inflected by the spiritual question of what happened to the body after death. In Chapter 5, I look to the problematics of the altered body in relation to the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Beginning with a scholarly and literary perspective, I show how theorists attempted to square the fact of bodily change with belief in the resurrection of the same body. In John Donne’s poetry and sermons, this conflict is both anguished and productive, yielding rich depictions of the body’s scattered parts and their heavenly reunion. Issues of embodiment surfaced in a refracted form in miracle accounts which featured the supernatural restoration or replacement of amputated limbs. The ‘Miracle of the Black Leg’ was one such account; this unique tale featured a saintly surgery in which a diseased white limb was replaced with a leg from a black corpse, prompting questions about whether that flesh could really ‘belong’ to its new body. Finally, I look to burial practices. Theoretical expositions of the body’s fate after death often contrasted with the way in which ‘real’ people chose to bury their bodies and body parts; the latter often demonstrates the flexibility with which they considered embodiment.

Chapter 6 examines a different kind of bodily anomaly which informed some of the early modern period’s most influential thinking on cognition and nociception – phantom limb syndrome. This curious phenomenon is clearly described in texts by Ambroise Paré. It comes to the fore, however, in the work of René Descartes, who found in this bodily anomaly a fascinating test case for his theory of ‘non-resemblance’ in the senses. As I explore, the nature of phantom limbs seemed to Descartes to confirm his idea that pain sensations occurred in the mind rather than in the body, thus reaffirming his notion of the body as object. In this capacity, phantom limbs occur in other contemporary texts, including in the first known autobiographical description of phantom limb syndrome. Looking closely at Descartes’ published works and correspondence, however, we can see how the strangeness of phantom limbs challenged this philosopher to re-examine his own thinking about perception and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Finally, in the book’s Conclusion I consider what early modern narratives of bodily alteration might tell us about the twenty-first-century desire to augment and transform the natural body.