Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe [Hardcover ed.] 0815348649, 9780815348641

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
List of figures......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 11
List of abbreviations......Page 13
Introduction: Castrates, crossings, and pejorative sexual scripting......Page 14
1. Male castration and/as disability......Page 17
2. Transsexuality......Page 22
3. Sexual impairment and the making of modern sexuality......Page 23
Notes......Page 26
PART 1: Inceptions......Page 28
1. Making defective men: Physiology, medicine, and the therapeutics of castration......Page 30
1. Medical transformations; gender effects......Page 33
2. Castration therapeutics......Page 44
3. Toward a medical genealogy......Page 49
Notes......Page 50
2. The castration conundrum: Civil law creates sexual disability......Page 53
1. Roman rights and wrongs......Page 54
2. Exemplary unmanning......Page 62
3. Evasion and exclusion......Page 70
4. Castrates and legal animosity......Page 77
Notes......Page 78
3. Marrying castrates, or: how to make a disabled social subject......Page 83
1. The dialectics of the religious castrate......Page 85
2. The canonists on castration......Page 91
The triumph of “true semen”......Page 98
4. Marriage, scandal, and disability......Page 102
5. Instantiating disability......Page 109
Notes......Page 110
PART 2: Negotiations......Page 114
4. Playing the eunuch......Page 116
1. Someone wanting something, singing something......Page 119
2. Menacing eunuchs......Page 125
3. Castrates, couples, and cons......Page 132
4. Conclusion, or conflating castrates......Page 137
Notes......Page 139
5. The spectacular crossings of castrati......Page 143
1. Foundations......Page 146
2. Rising discord......Page 155
3. Cacophonous controversy......Page 161
4. Muffling the (semi-)men......Page 170
Notes......Page 172
6. Exotic others: Racial mappings on the castrate body......Page 175
1. Defamiliarity breeds contempt......Page 177
2. Access and (the anxieties of) race......Page 189
3. Eliding complicities......Page 197
Notes......Page 200
Conclusion: A history of interlocking vilifications......Page 204
Notes......Page 209
References......Page 210
Index......Page 245

Citation preview

Eunuchs and Castrati

Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility toward gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today. Katherine Crawford is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of three books, including The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (2010). She is interested in the ways that gender informs sexual practice, ideology, and identity in early modernity.

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Eunuchs and Castrati Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe

Katherine Crawford

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Katherine Crawford The right of Katherine Crawford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Crawford, Katherine, 1966- author. Title: Eunuchs and castrati : disability and normativity in early modern Europe / Katherine Crawford. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005138| ISBN 9780815348641 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351166362 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Eunuchs--Europe--History. | Castration--Europe--History. | Sex--Europe--History. | Sex--Social aspects--Europe. Classification: LCC HQ449 .C73 2018 | DDC 306.7094--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005138 ISBN: 978-0-8153-4864-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-16636-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

For Kathryn. Without whom not.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction: Castrates, crossings, and pejorative sexual scripting

viii x xii 1

PART 1

Inceptions 1

15

Making defective men: Physiology, medicine, and the therapeutics of castration

17

2

The castration conundrum: Civil law creates sexual disability

40

3

Marrying castrates, or: how to make a disabled social subject

70

PART 2

Negotiations

101

4

Playing the eunuch

103

5

The spectacular crossings of castrati

130

6

Exotic others: Racial mappings on the castrate body

162

Conclusion: A history of interlocking vilifications References Index

191 197 232

Figures

1.1 Anatomical Illustrations. Albucasis (Aby-al-Qasim) “Surgery.” Ms.89 bis, fol.23. France, 14th C. Musee Atger, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Medecine, Montpellier. (Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY) 3.1 Colossal bust of Attis, Phrygian god and companion of Cybele, who, in an orgiastic frenzy, is said to have emasculated himself. Imperial Rome. Ludovisi Collection, Cat. 239. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, Italy. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) 5.1 Portrait of Italian castrato Pasquale Potenza c.1730-?, by unknown artist. Oil on canvas, 18th century. Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna, Italy. (Photo: Universal Images Group/Art Resource, NY) 5.2 Pier Leone Ghezzi, The Famous Castrato: Il Farinelli. Recto. Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk, on paper. 12 x 8 1/8 inches (305 x 207 mm.). Gift of Mr. Janos Scholz. 1985.87. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY, USA. (Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum/Art Resource, NY) 5.3 William Hogarth, Berenstat, Cuzzoni and Senesino c. 1725. Illustration from Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century ... With over two hundred illustrations by George Paston [pseudonym of Emily Morse Symonds], (London, 1905). (Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY) 6.1 Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, Le Grand Seigneur dans le sérail avec le Kislar Agassi (1714). In Recueil de cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris: L. Cars, 1714). New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection. 6.2 Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo, La sultane servie par des eunuques blancs et noirs (c. 1777). Musee des Beaux-Arts Jules Cheret, Nice, France. (Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

29

75

132

140

146

164

165

List of illustrations 6.3 Seray Agasi ou Chef des Eunuques blancs. From a set of illustrations with Turkish costumes at the court of Constantinople. 1720. Ottoman dynasty. OD-6-4 Planche 16. Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France. (Photo: BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY) 6.4 Kizzlar Aga Portrait from A briefe relation of the Turckes. Istanbul, Ottoman dynasty, 1618. Album leaf painted in opaque watercolor and ink, with découpage on paper. Inscribed. AN 1974,0617,0.13.4.v. British Museum, London, Great Britain. (Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)

ix

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173

Acknowledgments

“What happened to castrati who didn’t ‘make it’?” Kathryn asked. I did not know the answer, although it turned out other people did, but the question sent me down the path that led to this book. With castrati lodged in my head, Bettina Dennerlein and Monika Gsell invited me to the Universität Zürich in 2013 for the conference “The Surgical ReConstruction of Sex.” The paper I presented there explored castrates and desire, a subject I developed at “Desiring History & Historicizing Desire: Sexuality in Early Modern England” at the Huntington Library in September 2014. Many thanks to Melissa Sanchez, Will Stockton, and Ari Friedlander for the rich conversations and enduring connections. In June of 2017, I gave the Elizabeth Scarborough Lecture at the meeting of Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Science, which gave me the opportunity to discuss the ethical implications of castration with a wise and willing group of interlocutors. William Caferro invited me to write an essay about the Renaissance, and then let me write about Sporus, which was kind and generous in so many ways. Many people read, talked, listened, inspired, and just plain old encouraged me, even when they probably could have lived happily without my nattering on about early modern surgical techniques and their attendant consequences. For their reading suggestions, qualms, quibbles, queries, and comments, my thanks to Celia Applegate, Ruth Rogaski, Elizabeth Covington, James Epstein, Peter Lake, Nancy Reisman, Rory Dicker, Leora Auslander, Kate Hammerton, Lynn Mollenauer, Jennifer Heuer, Brian Ogilvie, Barbara Kaeser, Jennifer Fay, Leah Marcus, Lynn Enterline who “loaned” me a book about Atto Melani (I really ought to return it!), Donna Caplan, Ari Bryen, Kimberly Welch, Holly Tucker, Aimi Hamraie, Ruth Mazzo Karras, Lisa Jane Graham, Todd Reeser, Jeffrey Merrick, Rachel Fuchs (who is very much missed), Lisa Leff, Emily King, Katherine Johnson, Carita Pollan, Laurel Schneider, Emilie Townes, Ellen Armour, and Barbee Majors. Susan and Bill Schwarz have been unstintingly supportive in about a billion ways. Several people read, commented, gently pointed out infelicities, corrected mistakes and prevented missteps (any that remain are all mine): Kathryn Schwarz, Sarah Igo, Stacy Simplican Clifford, Joy Calico, Martha Feldman, and Maria Bednar (the formatting genius) – I am profoundly grateful to all.

Acknowledgments

xi

The Interlibrary Loan folks at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt tracked down all manner of strange things for me. I am also grateful to the staff in the Rare Reading Room of the British Library for all the giant tomes they retrieved for me. Archivists and librarians at the Countway Medical Library, Wellcome Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Houghton, Widener, and Loeb Libraries at Harvard University were unfailingly helpful. I am grateful to Alexandra McGregor, Kitty Imbert at Routledge, and the readers to whom they sent the manuscript for comments, suggestions, and encouragement. Vanderbilt University and College of Arts and Science supported me with research leave and resources. Some material, which appeared originally in “Desiring Castrates, or How to Create Disabled Social Subjects,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16/2 (Spring 2016): 59–90 and “Sporus in the Renaissance: The Eunuch as Straight Man,” in The Routledge History of the Renaissance, ed. William Caferro (2017) is used here with permission. Thanks to all my parents, George Crawford, Holly Crawford, Bernard Frischer, and Jane Crawford who supported me in their myriad ways. Mom gets a special shout out for reading the whole thing. Twice. And thanks to James and Isabel for being sweet. This book is for Kathryn. It is not quite an answer to her question, but I offer it in the hope that the questions and conversations will continue forever and always.

List of abbreviations

D C CT I GLQ JHS RQ SQ MGH CC BM SD NRCF

BNF KJV

Digest Codex Justinianus Codex Theodosianus Institutes of Justinian Gay and Lesbian Quarterly The Journal of the History of Sexuality Renaissance Quarterly Shakespeare Quarterly Monumenta Germaniae Historica Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Edited by Larissa Taylor. D. S. Brewer, 2013. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler. New York, 2000. Sex and Disability. Editors Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow. Duke University Press 2012. Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux. Edited by Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 volumes. Van Gorcum, 1983–1998. Bibliothèque nationale de France King James Version of the Bible

Introduction Castrates, crossings, and pejorative sexual scripting

The French poet Paul Valéry asked of Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters, “But who will explain to me all these eunuchs? I have no doubt that there is some secret and profound reason for the almost obligatory presence of these persons so cruelly separated from many things, and in some way, from themselves” [Mais qui m’expliquera tous ces eunuques? Je ne doute pas qu’il y ait une secrète et profonde raison de la présence presque obligée de ces personnages si cruellement séparés de bien des choses, et en quelque sorte d’euxmêmes] (Valéry 1929, 67). To reframe and expand Valéry’s query, why do people keep writing about eunuchs? Why are they characters in books and on television shows? Why do historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars devote so many articles and books to what was (is) a presumably small fraction of the male population? As a topic, castration generally makes people uncomfortable, and yet, castrated men figure in law, medicine, and literature; on the theatrical stage, on the opera stage; and in psychoanalytic, gender, and queer theory. How did men who have either been born without functional genitals or suffered from the damage or destruction of them come to occupy such a range of cultural positions? One answer in part might be that eunuchs and castrati served a variety of high profile roles in the past, as the range of meanings associated with common terminology suggests. “Eunuch,” from the Greek εὐνοῦχος and the Latin eunu-chus and derived from the Hebrew sa-rı-s, can refer to a castrated man generally, a harem attendant, or a court officer. “Castrato” more specifically refers to a male castrated as a boy to retain a high singing voice, and typically describes opera singers. Both terms accumulated negative connotations over the centuries. I recognize disabled people have resisted labelling that identifies them by their disability, but I will generally use the term “castrate” except in quotations or when a specific identifier is more appropriate (Reusch in CC, 30–31). I do this in order to challenge the ways that the population of men who were deliberately castrated has often been rendered invisible. Still, even considering their prominence as officers, harem attendants, and singers, castrates are a numerically small group that of necessity does not reproduce itself. The attention to castrates, sometimes bordering on fascination,

2

Introduction

in the twentieth century rests heavily on Sigmund Freud and his theory of psychosexual development in which castration played a central role. In On the Sexual Theories of Children (1905), Freud posited that both male and female children assume that everyone has a penis, and that castration, or the fear of it, determined both male and female gender and sexual maturation. The male child fears losing his penis by castration, while the female child considers herself to have been already and irrevocably mutilated. This leads the girl to penis envy, and the boy to sublimation and, if all goes well, heterosexuality (Freud, Standard Edition 7: 135–243). Of course, for Freud it did not always go well, but the ideal of heterosexuality as man/woman or male/female had, and has, normative standing. For my purposes, two problems mark Freudian attention to castration. First, Freud did not recognize that his views were culturally located. If castrati were no longer on the opera stage in Freud’s Vienna, they were still ghosted in the voices of women who sang their parts. If Ottomans no longer posed a threat to the Hapsburg dominion in which Freud lived, the racialized sexual exoticism of the harem still swirled about the reputation of the sultan and his empire (Alloula 1986; Yeg˘ enog˘ lu 1998; DelPlato 2002; Roberts 2007; Beaulieu and Roberts 2002). Second, Freud’s notion of castration hinged on the fear that men feel about damage to their vulnerable genitals, but the theory nonetheless subordinated actual physical debility to presumed psychic damage.1 To take just one highly influential theoretical intervention in which this is apparent, Laura Mulvey’s feminist psychoanalytic account of the male gaze features castration as a central theme. Mulvey’s 1975 article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argued that phallocentrism “…depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (1999, 833). The male gaze creates the protagonist as active, and the (female) object of his gaze as passive. Male scopophilia enables his erotic control, while at the same time the protagonist’s fear of castration is staved off by voyeuristic, often fetishistic attention to the female character. Mulvey’s central examples, Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), both directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Jimmy Stewart, feature protagonists who are disabled, but not actually castrated. Jeff Jeffries in Rear Window is immobilized in a cast and confined to a wheelchair; Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo has a phobic fear of heights. For Mulvey, disability in both films is a kind of impotence or castration, but actual castration is off the table.2 Although psychoanalytic accounts avoid actual, physical castration, they have inspired attention to castrates that considers their gendered and sexual location. Literary critic Gary Taylor has taken up castration as a matter of masculinity through readings of Freud, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and Thomas Middleton (1580–1627). Freud’s theory, as Taylor has emphasized, posited complete ablation of the penis and testicles, but castration in most classical and early modern contexts referred to the loss of the testicles. For Taylor, Freud’s “regime of the penis” replaced the earlier “regime of the scrotum” (2000, 96, 108). The shift in emphasis is crucial to understanding

Introduction

3

changing concerns about castration: Where reproduction was the primary (legitimate) purpose of sex in early modernity, pleasure became central in modernity. Although his interest is in masculinity, Taylor points to the fundamental structure of sexual identity for much of human history: Men and women were defined by their relation to reproduction – as were castrates. Sexual identity in terms of the modern notion of preference and pleasure was not operative for early modern castrates, but understanding how sex shaped social and cultural identity was. Because of the overwhelming dominance of reproductive sex as legitimate, scholars across many disciplines have been attracted to castrates as individuals who embody sexual and gender non-normativity. With their non-binary physicality, castrates offered historians, literary critics, and musicologists ways to think about how gender flexibility functioned in the past. To highlight here just some of the salient interventions with more detailed discussions of particular areas of scholarly inquiry in the relevant chapters below, historians have concentrated on the gender liminality of castrates. For Kathryn Ringrose, Byzantine castrates served as a third gender mediating between the other two. With their distinctive beardless, elongated appearance and specific habits of dress, Byzantine castrates mediated gender boundaries that constrained “normal” men and women. Ringrose emphasizes that the separation of castrates from family obligations and their incapacity for procreation made them “perfect servants” both at the Byzantine court and in religious contexts. As “an alternative gender category,” Byzantine castrates flourished until the twelfth century, when a more rigid gender binary began to prevail (Ringrose 2003).3 Like Ringrose, Shaun Marmon understands castrates for their liminality. Castrates in Islamic contexts traversed gender boundaries, but also the worlds of the living and the dead. Countering the propensity to vilify both Islam and castrates, Marmon traces how castrates in premodern Islamic society utilized corporeal ambiguity to maintain their role as guardians of the holy site of Medina and the tomb complex of the Prophet Muhammad. Gender is less explicit for Marmon, but the mediating function is enabled by the castrate’s physical ambiguity (Marmon 1995).4 In Shaun Tougher’s view, castrate mediation was also less about gender, and in the case of ancient Rome, more about sex and power. Castrates could signify lack in ways that highlighted the fertility or fecundity of emperors, and could indicate the literally transformative power of the ruler to change (male) bodies into something else. On these terms, castrates came to symbolize royalty, and once associated with courts and rulers, were difficult to dislodge (Tougher 2002).5 In a more gender-inflected analysis, Mathew Kuefler has traced the elaboration of voluntary male chastity under Christianity in terms of the notion of the “manly eunuch.” In the context of the late Roman crisis in masculinity, Christianity offered voluntary sexual continence as a marker of superior masculinity. Becoming a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” [Matt. 19:12, KJV] was better than actual castration in this model, enabling Christianity to associate sexual self-control with the religious power structure that was the Catholic

4

Introduction

Church (Kuefler 2001). In multiple contexts, then, historians have come to understand castrates as mediating figures. Their ability to cross – or “trans” – was a function of gender ambiguity that served instrumental purposes. Castrated singers were of course actually instruments. Moving past an earlier focus on specific musical works and in line with efforts to analyze the role of the singer in music history, several musicologists have situated castrati in terms of their problematic relationship to gender and sexual norms within the history of music and musical performance. Dorothy Keyser mapped out how cultural understandings of castrati determined viewing practices around crossdressing on stage (Keyser 1987/1988). Roger Freitas has provided a model for how to proceed with a queer analysis of castrate sexuality in his excavation of the life and loves of the castrato Atto Melani (Freitas 2009; 2003). Combining musicology with a cultural anthropology approach, Martha Feldman has extended the interest in singers to nuanced questions of vocal production that locate the castrato in social context. Understanding the castrato as a hybrid figure in terms of reproduction, economics, and representations, Feldman is especially interested in castrati within the patronage system, arguing that they were imbricated in “male social reproduction” in various ways (Feldman, 2015, xvii). The castrato, it seems, is no longer “a shadowy tale in the history of music,” but has moved to a central position in scholarship on the voice, the history of singing, and the processes of music production (Bergeron 1996, 167). The musicologists offer a rich abundance of analytic attention to castrati, which tends to understand castration as enabling. But castration was also disabling: castrates were denied entry into the routines of social life. Critics have answered Paul Valéry by highlighting the disproportionate symbolic importance of castrates in matters of sexuality and gender, demonstrating their singular liminality as they mediated gender boundaries and binaries, and emphasizing that their unusual and astonishing vocal gifts confounded gender expectations. The essay that is this book does something different: it takes up the combined claims that castrates were (often deliberately) physically and socially disabled castrated men who were effectively transgendered medically and culturally. The combination of disabling and transgendering put castrates at odds with normal and normate social and cultural values, and, I will argue, served as an epistemological point of origin for pejorative notions of deviant sexual identity.

1. Male castration and/as disability Scholars of disability studies suggest the question: What does it mean to understand castrates as disabled subjects? Disability scholars have offered several ways to answer this question. From the medical model, I assume that castration is a biomedical event that affects quality of life. The medical model of disability typically assumes that curing disability is both an option and an objective. But castration was imposed medically and rendered the body as disabled. Hence, I rely on the social model of disability as well. This model

Introduction

5

posits that disability is caused by how society is organized, and understands the need to remove barriers that limit access, independence, and equality. Many men and boys were deliberately castrated, and thus disabled relative to the normative expectations about men and reproductive potency. Many more men probably suffered genital impairment from injury or disease, although these men are less accessible to the historical record. Given that aspects of masculinity were defined by strength and potency understood in part as a function of the testicles, intentionally damaging them and destroying their efficacy was a significant form of social disability. Lennard J. Davis has argued that “normalcy must constantly be enforced in public venues…must always be creating and bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing, deconstructing images of normalcy and the abnormal” 2010, 14). Davis notes that the word “norm” dates to 1855 and its cognates, “normality” and “normalcy” appeared in 1849 and 1857 respectively. Notions of human norms, and thus disability with respect to them, are in part the result of the rise of statistics and the development of eugenics in the nineteenth century (ibid., 4–8).6 Castration was a social disability in the sense that many of the barriers associated with it were conventional. The alterations to the body had effects and consequences, but neither the medical nor the social model alone can account for how castrates negotiated their way in the world as genitally altered men. Critical or “crip” disability studies combines concerns that the medical model reduces disability to (correctable) impairment and works to understand disability in terms of institutional and systemic efforts that dis-able persons in various ways. This project seeks to understand the medicalization involved in the intentional disabling of boys and men in terms of the institutional structures that justified and encouraged castration. The close association, which is really antipathy, between eugenics and disability points to a further intersection with this project: the eugenic program of “improving” humankind rested heavily on reproduction; castration forestalled reproduction. In eugenic terms, sterilization was to prevent “undesirable” people from reproducing and had been part of public health discourse, medical practice, and legal discussion since at least Francis Galton in the nineteenth century.7 In his history of involuntary sterilization, Philip R. Reilly notes that two-thirds of state legislatures enacted sterilization laws to prevent socially or physically “undesirable persons” from reproducing (Reilly 1991, x). Castration in the United States had another complex relationship to eugenics in the form of the lynching of black men accused of raping white women. As part of the lynching “ritual,” mobs deliberately and theatrically castrated black men as a form of Biblical revenge for his “crime” (Hale 1998). Legal castration, while considered by a number of states, was almost entirely rejected as too brutal a punishment.8 The deliberate sterilization of men places castration within the bailiwick of eugenics and within disability studies more broadly. In her essay about race and disability, Michelle Jarman has pointed out that the widespread cultural understanding of disability as a personal misfortune enables people to

6

Introduction

overlook or dismiss violence against disabled persons (SD, 90). Jarman’s subject is twentieth-century eugenic castration, but her argument propagates in two directions with respect to the history of castrates. First, when castration as a deliberate practice was utilized to create beautiful voices, people at the time looked past the problems that infertility would cause in a culture devoted to reproductive sexuality (Neubert and Cloerkes 1994, 41–44). In Italy, where castration of boys was carried out and where Catholic notions of celibacy (a form of non-reproductive sexuality) retained cultural power, observers regarded castrates with a simultaneous shrug of indifference and embarrassment about the process of castration. Elsewhere in Europe, commentators often bracketed castrates as apart from communal norms. A castrate might be absorbed back into his natal family, but his contribution to the next generation was monetary, rather than genetic or biological. The castrate exemplifies another aspect observed by disability scholars: the tendency to regard disabled people as at once sexually deficient and sexually excessive (Mollow in SD, 286). As we shall see, critics routinely applied these contradictory characterizations to castrates, enabling the development of a double bind in which castrates were simultaneously incapacitated and held responsible for sexual transgressions of all sorts. Part of the reason for this simultaneity rests in how contemporaries understood sexuality as an aspect of masculinity. Todd Reeser has argued that early modern masculinity operated on a ternary model in which masculinity was the (unstable) point between excess and lack, both of which were defined as feminine. Early modern gender norms cast women as lacking control over their desires and prone to lustful behavior. In contrast, critics believed men to be moderate, self-controlled, and in matters of sex, considerably less libidinous than women. As sexually disabled men in a cultural environment that privileged potent masculinity, castrates were literally lacking in testicles, but thought to be inclined to sexual excess. Although highly variable, masculine ideals have hegemonic power whatever their particular historical manifestations. Within early modern gender schemes, castrates did not have access to several definitional aspects of masculine embodiment. Like many forms of disability or impairment, castration results in physical changes that were (are) believed to alter the relationship of the body to the expression of gender that body is capable of presenting.9 Also like many disabilities, the alterations to the body were both visible and not. Pre-pubescent castration created physiological effects that could appear on the body, but whether these were entirely legible, I will argue, is actually significant. Because of their low androgen levels, castrated men (and hypogonadal men generally) had less circulation to the skin and their levels of hemoglobin in the blood tended to be lower. Because of decreased melanin and increased carotene, castrates were inclined toward pallor or sallow skin, which was soft and prone to fine wrinkles. If castration was before puberty, the long bones of the arms and legs tended to elongate as they matured because the absence of androgens slowed epiphyseal closure of the bones. Castrates with long limbs

Introduction

7

were often susceptible to osteoporosis, along with curvature of the spine, as they aged. If some castrates were unusually tall, many were also inclined toward a female fat distribution pattern, with a tendency toward larger hips, buttocks, and breast tissue (gynecomastia). To the envy of some men, castrates did not go bald (Ali and Donohoue 2011, 577.1). Although some historians have emphasized that castrates were legibly different in appearance, I have my doubts.10 Almost every element could be found in men with intact genitals, and many castrates could and did “pass” in many contexts.11 Disabilities can be invisible depending on context, and which bodies and minds are marked as disabled has been a contested and contentious issue. Issues of mental “competency,” for instance, have been especially fraught.12 Except for castrated singers (who revealed themselves on stage often in dazzling ways), the more telling differences were the most hidden. Castrates had feminine pubic hair patterning. The penis tended to be small.13 Medically, the castrate’s ability to achieve coitus depended on what sort of procedure had been performed and when. If the testicles were disabled but the spermatic cords left alone, the castrated man could have erections and ejaculate. He would be sterile, but he could engage in intercourse.14 Bilateral orchiectomy, which involves the removal of the testicles, effectively caused permanent sterility, and when done early (by age seven), usually resulted in impotence but engorgement was possible, especially if the neurophysiology was undisturbed. When performed later (on boys nine or older but generally pre-pubescent), the results were sterility, but some subjects could attain erection, intromission, and ejaculation of sterile seminal fluid. Testosterone necessary for erection can be produced in interstitial cells in sufficient quantity to facilitate these functions. Similarly, bilateral subcapsular evacuation of the testicles – which seems to have been the preferred operation in early modernity – resulted in sterility, with residual testosterone produced in the lining of the testes enabling erection and ejaculation. Bilateral vasectomy, which involves excision of the vas deferens entirely or in part, results in sterility and impotence if the blood vessels are destroyed. Neither vasotomy (cutting into or across the vas deferens) nor vasostomy (cutting an opening in the vas deferens) necessarily result in either sterility or impotence because the area can heal sufficiently to recanalize (Melicow 1983). The hormonal effects of low androgen levels can affect the texture and color of the skin, as well as cause female hair patterning and fat distribution (Cheney 2003, 31, 161–166). Urologists have determined that erectile capacity is far less dependent on testosterone than is the sex drive (Campbell’s Urology, 1986, 708). Removal of the testicles reduces testosterone drastically, but serum follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone can rise after castration, causing the adrenal glands to produce extra testosterone.15 The amount is comparatively small and idiosyncratic in its effects on individuals, but it can support erection and ejaculation. In early modern contexts, the visibility of genitals was limited, and the recognition of what we would now identify as hormonal differences lacked a consistent vocabulary.

8

Introduction

Historians of disability point out that multiple reactions to disabled people operated in the past. To take one relevant example, local communities generally considered early modern “idiots” to be asexual, but colonialist and eugenic discourse considered many of the mentally impaired to be sexually uncontrollable. Even more basically, referring to “disabled people” historically might be seen as problematic.16 The notion of disability did not really apply until eugenics (negatively) and the disability rights movement (positively) categorized people by impairment and notions of productivity. Until then, communities routinely provided support for individuals with physical and/or mental deficits (Nielsen 2013). Economic productivity became a crucial marker in the twentieth century. Sarah Rose argues that the ability to work marked those who were not able to do so as disabled. Rose sees the late nineteenth century as the crucial period in which many with physical or mental impairments who had been contributing members of the farm, household, and wage economies were removed to the margins of society and marked as disabled.17 But the deep origins of exclusion abound in pre-modern contexts and economic organizations. As Colin Barnes has noted, the emphasis on corporeal “perfection” in classical antiquity and Jewish ritual are just two expressions of the complex formulation that rendered imperfect bodies and minds as problematic. Early modern attitudes included a tendency to link physical deformity with evil and impairments, either physical or mental, as divine retribution for sin. Theologians depicted witches as deformed women. Shakespeare rendered Richard III as a monster of body and mind signaled by his deformity. Treatment of individuals suffering from mental disorders was notoriously brutal (Barnes 2010). Bias against disabled individuals was (is) culturally deeply ingrained (Thomas 1982). Considering castrates as disabled opens an avenue to analyze how ambivalence was constructed in the past. Castrates were often ridiculed, demeaned, and openly regarded as freaks, but they could be valued for their disability. The classic case is the harem guard, considered to be the “safe” protector of female sexual virtue (although this was more complicated than the popular understanding suggests). This kind of castrate was often literally valuable: harem guards were usually slaves and quite costly to purchase. The other obviously valuable castrate was the castrato singer, whose voice – created by a combination of castration, years of training, and a certain amount of luck – enabled some to make fabulous fortunes and many to support themselves and their families through their musical abilities. Understanding castrates historically reveals how paradigms of disability were constructed around a particular kind of person whose body was both known and unknown to his contemporaries. One recurrent issue that runs throughout this project is the uncertainty of knowledge about the castrate. From theologians who debated for centuries whether a castrate could engage in sexual congress, to theater audiences who were treated to “real” and “fake” castrates (all played by presumptively “normal” men); from medical theory

Introduction

9

that posited very different modalities of corporeal change because of castration, to ecstatic and/or violent responses to acknowledged castrati on the musical stage, the disabled body of the castrate was always only partially known and understood. I presume that historical understandings of impairment – here, bodily and associated with sexual capacity – continue to shape modern conceptions. Castrates are no longer surgically engineered for public purposes, but changing historical conditions have enforced and reinforced the repression of disability difference embodied by the castrate. Following Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, my intention is to challenge the “ablest silence” embedded in early modern culture and accounts of it by modern critics. I understand this project as a contribution to disability activism in that castrates encountered institutional and attitudinal barriers and the construction of their disability made protest or resistance next to impossible. This essay reveals the astonishing amount of labor that went into erecting and maintaining these barriers. Where modern disability activism has raised awareness and challenged ableist assumptions, the normative repression of difference constructed around castrates hindered, perhaps prevented, both self-acceptance and collective action. I take understanding how this happened as part of challenging not just invisibility, but the mechanisms of concealment created by multiple regimes of knowledge.

2. Transsexuality As suggested above, castration meant that men lacked a crucial aspect of the male body, which made their behavior and appearance more feminine. Castrates became like women. In sexual terms, this made them lusty, libidinous, and irrational – all significant disabilities relative to normative masculinity. Accordingly, in many contexts, intact people treated castrates like women, or at least as deficient men. I am not arguing that castrates were transsexuals, although early modern medicine kind of thought they were. I am arguing that explaining the castrate and locating him in culture created patterns of gender thinking about genitally altered bodies. Castrates did cross boundaries, including corporeal, gendered ones. In this sense, they were transgendered, and in most (perhaps virtually all) cases, the castrate had little or no say in the decision to castrate or its transgendering consequences. The obvious link between castrates and transsexuals is that male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals who choose (and can afford) surgery are often castrated. In fact, the most radical form of castration – complete ablation of the penis and testicles – is perhaps the stereotypical sex reassignment surgery in “popular” accounts. As scholars have pointed out, many MtF individuals do not have surgery, but along with the characterization of a “woman trapped in a man’s body” or a “man trapped in a woman’s body” for female-to-male (FtM) transsexuals and the flamboyant drag queen, these are prominent aspects of transsexuality that continue to circulate.18 The medical culture and

10

Introduction

gender theory of modern transsexuality that has made these elements available are both relatively new, but the historical perspectives offer ways of destabilizing gender binaries around transgender and transsexual ideas in a variety of contexts (Bettcher 2014; 2012). Mary Weismantel, for instance, has challenged the heteronormative reading of the archeological past, pointing to several finds that defy the modern male/female dichotomy in most things social and cultural. Gabriela Cano understands the hero of the Mexican Revolution Amelio Robles (born Amelia Robles Ávila) in transgender terms. The complicated gender crossings of Charles-Geneviève-Louis-AugusteAndré-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810), known as the Chevalier d’Éon, involved both transvestism and transgender understandings of the self. Broadly, work on “third sex” individuals in Native American culture, histories of intersex individuals (until recently usually called hermaphrodites), and records of cross-dressers “passing” (or not) have contributed to crucial rethinking of presumptions that the gender binary is natural (Jacobs et al. 1997; Von Stackleberg 2014; Steinberg 2001). Understandably, trans activists and theorists have been especially engaged in the project of creating political, legal, social, and cultural space for trans people in contemporary culture. The historical questions have often been framed in terms of finding progenitors from heroic gender resistors to victims of intolerance. Their suffering reveals why we have to insist on more and better structural support for all transgender people, without distinctions of class, race, or nationality. The direction of discussion is in terms of individuals at odds with normative structures positioning themselves or aspiring to position themselves in terms of their understanding of their gender and/or sexuality in trans terms. But castrates historically were almost always produced against their will or because they had a medical condition that necessitated castration. Whatever the castrate thought of his gender or sexuality before castration, after it, he was medically, culturally, and socially located as neither male nor female, and not in a good way. Commentators deployed “scientific” “facts” of feminization against castrated men, and these “facts” contributed to a template for gender disparagement of non-conforming men more broadly. Understanding castrates in terms of trans theory and trans politics is part of the goal; revealing how ideas about changing gender were imbricated in the politics of early modern castration can in turn support trans activism aimed at unpacking the pejorative lineages of transphobia.

3. Sexual impairment and the making of modern sexuality Although my chronological and geographical focus is on early modern Europe, this project analyzes how castrated men figured in the development and delineation of central questions about modern sexuality. It ranges back in time to Greco-Roman sources and forward to fictional castrates in the twenty-first century. I consider castrates as harem attendants, especially in the

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11

Ottoman Empire, but I do not work extensively in Ottoman sources. Nor do I venture into the historical sources regarding Indian and Chinese castrates or deeply into Byzantine ones. I confess to my own linguistic limitations, but I include travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources as well as scholarly analysis of castrates in these cultural contexts. I am recurrently concerned to put geographically, chronologically, and culturally distant locations in conversation with perceptions of castrates in Europe from early modernity forward. Part I, “Inceptions,” lays out the medical, legal, and religious frameworks that determined the possibilities for castrates in early modern culture. Opening with ancient understandings of castration and its effects, Chapter 1, “Making Defective Men: Physiology, Medicine, and the Therapeutics of Castration,” analyzes how Hippocratic, Aristotelian, and Galenic traditions understood castration to alter male physiology in the direction of the feminine. Early modern medical practitioners knew that castration caused sterility, but how it did so and what additional effects might result from castration were in dispute. Castration was also a therapeutic technique, but the drastic effect of sterility made some physicians leery of its value, even as the “medical exception” allowed castrates to be created in numbers while evading laws that forbade castration. As they are crucial not only to medical understandings of castration but also to the status of castrates, the legal dilemmas around castration are the focus of Chapter 2. “The Castration Conundrum: Civil Law Creates Sexual Disability” loops back to antiquity, concentrating on Roman civil, secular law. Roman law allowed some castrates (called spadones, and referring to men who lost function of their genitals) to marry, make wills, and manage their family lineages. At the same time, laws against castrating humans established castration as formally unacceptable. With the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire, castration became part of the punishment structure throughout the Middle Ages, with some laws favoring it over other forms of bodily mutilation or capital punishment. The association with punishment and the purpose of castration – to render a man incapable of generation or advanced standing in his community – colored the reception of laws around castration when Roman law was revitalized in the twelfth century.19 In their efforts to resolve contradictions around castration, jurists actually altered the original meaning of Roman law to render the castrate as a person who no longer had access to fundamental social structures such as marriage and inclusion in the patriline. Chapter 3, “Marrying Castrates, or: How to Make a Disabled Social Subject,” continues the general argument of Chapter 2, focusing on how barring castrates from marriage created social disability. Drawing on the medical tradition, theologians debated the effects of castration on sexual capacity. Some allowed that partial function was sufficient for marriage, while others privileged reproductive capacity in ways that barred castrates from marriage. For the most part, theologians maintained flexibility on the question – until

12

Introduction

deliberate castration for musical purposes became socially significant. In response to the variety of standards, Pope Sixtus V issued a brief, Cum frequenter (1587), forbidding castrate marriage. Although the papal brief left a small loophole, subsequent theologians rapidly closed it, confirming the social disability of castrates. Medicine, law, and theology described castrates as physiologically transgendered and bracketed outside of social norms. Part II, “Negotiations,” examines how castrates, as disabled and transgendered, figured in different cultural venues. Castrates as characters in plays, on the opera stage, as exotic and racially marked castrates in travel narratives, and in poetry and fiction refracted anxieties and desires. The fears and fantasies of altered bodies and their (im)possibilities cumulated into a formidable archive of pejorative scripting against castrates as sexually and gender non-normative, dangerous, and often, repellent. Within early modern popular culture, castrates as characters on stage brought man-made sexual disability to broader audiences and explained to viewing (and sometimes reading) publics what made castrates special – and peculiar. Chapter 4, “Playing the Eunuch,” traces how castrates were depicted on stage, how they were believed to behave, and how those depictions changed over early modernity. Their gender and sexual mobility enabled creative theatrical plotting, but also instantiated castrates as feminized, unreliable, and unstable in their gender and sexual performance. As for the opera stage, Chapter 5, “The Spectacular Crossings of Castrati,” follows the emergence of castrates as singers, from qualms over castration for singing purposes to the eruption of hostility toward castrates as disrupting gender expectations and threatening notions of sexual propriety. As gender boundaries grew more rigid over the eighteenth century, concern grew into rejection of the castrate as aberrant and unnatural. If theater and opera provided narratives of castrates as deviants, encounters of westerners with castrates in the Muslim world, especially in the Ottoman Empire, provided additional layers of racialized disability. Chapter 6, “Exotic Others: Racial Mappings on the Castrate Body” examines how these encounters gradually produced a narrative of radical othering. Black and Muslim castrates could not be readily accommodated into western social vocabularies. White, Christian castrates functioned as a connector in that they could be incorporated into western understandings of genitally disabled men, but they were also contiguous with black castrates, whose genital difference was extreme in a way that excused western castration in comparison. At the same time, the continuum of castrates became increasingly unbearable. Exotic castrates were used as markers of the difference between east and west, but they also reminded westerners of the vitiated consent with which castrates were produced, undermining the certainties of cultural difference. In cultural terms, castrates were prone to conflate the physical and social, the libidinal and mercantile, and of course the masculine and the feminine around the castrated male body. The extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance,

Introduction

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social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reflect anxiety about the unreliability of the altered – disabled and transgendered – body. In recognizing castrates as disabled because of the (deliberate) alteration of their genitals and transgendered because forcibly dislocated from the physical and social expectations of the biological sex, we can see the historical lineages of sexual stigma and reconstruct the development of hostile accounts of gender non-normative persons.

Notes 1 Jacques Lacan’s revision of the castration complex as the symbolic lack of an imaginary object in which castration is not about the penis as an actual organ, but rather about the imaginary phallus, moves away from the physicality of castration as articulated in Freud. The multiple phases of the Oedipus Complex are understood as negotiations over the phallus, which are resolved in renunciation and a loss of jouissance. The process does not hinge on physicality, but on language and the development of the psyche in linguistic terms. See especially Lacan (1991, 208–227; 1977, 324). 2 Attempts to recuperate female spectatorship include Hollinger (1987); De Lauretis (1984). 3 For castrates as servants in China, see Mitamura (1970). Although not interested in gender, Mitamura suggests how non-reproductive castrates at the Chinese court provided forms of mediation. Some Chinese castrates married either before or after castration per Jay (1993). 4 As in China, some castrates in Islamic contexts had families before castration. See Ayalon (1999). 5 Elsewhere, Tougher has argued against Wittfogel. See Tougher (2002, 47). 6 See also Davis (1995), which traces the emergence of deafness as a disability in eighteenth-century Europe in support of his argument that disability is always a historically constructed discourse. See (1995, 2, 50–72). On eugenics and disability, see Haller (1984). 7 Even Alexander Graham Bell supported the idea, focusing his interest in eugenics on preventing the emergence of a deaf population created by deaf couples having deaf children. See Bell (1884). 8 Reilly (1991, 28–29) located one case of state-sanctioned castration in 1864 in Texas. Castration as punishment does have its advocates, notably Cheney (2003), who argues for vasectomy to curb crime, violence, and a variety of physical maladies. Cheney advocates vasectomy in a medical environment, but he is clear that he considers castration the cure for a variety of what he considers to be social ills. 9 “Impairment is the functional limitation within the individual caused by physical, mental, or sensory impairment. Disability is the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical or social barriers” (Barnes 1991, 2). Generally, “disability” is used as the more capacious term, covering both the physical, anatomical, or mental issue, as well as the social and cultural environment attached to it. Metzler (2013, 3–10) has emphasized that a distinction between “impairment” (usually physical) and “disability” as the social construct attached to that impairment ought to be separated in historical analysis. 10 Long (1996, 108) maintains that castrates were recognizable by appearance in antiquity. 11 The question of passing, which is not available to many disabled people, is taken up from a variety of perspectives in Disability and Passing. Disability passing refers

14

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Introduction “to the way people conceal social markers of impairment to avoid the stigma of disability and pass as ‘normal’” (1). See also Siebers (2004). See for instance Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Peschel and Peschel (1987, 582) call the castrate’s penis “infantile.” Modern studies have confirmed that if a boy is castrated in this manner between the ages of nine and twelve, erectile function and ejaculation remain possible. See Melicow (1983, 749–753). Most studies are on rats, mice, hamsters, and occasionally horses. The variability within animal populations is significant. See Ellis and Turek (1980). For an analysis of the transformation of the historical treatment of disability, see Kudlick (2003); Stiker (1999). See also Trent (2017). The classic statement of transsexuality is by Benjamin (1966), who categorizes transsexuality on a scale linking desire to change sex to sexual orientation. The language of being trapped in the wrong body was the nineteenth-century re-writing of the notion of a “female soul in a male body.” Karl Ulrichs adapted it in reference to gender “inversion” in his defense of homosexuality. See Hekma (1996). Guilds, for instance, expected required men to be married if they were to become masters (Roper 1989, 136). Membership in municipalities sometimes depended on marriage (Watt 1993, 82), and participation in local offices often did as well (Rocke 1996, 132).

Part 1

Inceptions

This essay begins with the premise that presumptive sexual normality is a power structure that disadvantages those who do not have it. Like whiteness in critical race theory, sexual integrity is understood as a natural referent, with privileges that accrue to those who have it and disadvantages to those who do not. Understandings of the physiological effects of castration as altering masculinity (or male gender expression) in the direction of the feminine have been used to justify demarcating castrates as inferior. Marked as transgendered in body, castrates suffered from social disability constructed in part out of law, medical practice, and religious ideology. As critical race theory has insisted, one of the purposes of law, securing justice for those subject to it, is actually not neutral in its organization or effects. The same may be said for medical theory and practice and for many aspects of religious culture. This first part of the essay that is this book argues that law, along with medical and religious culture, operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity, and to create and extend prejudice against those who do not enjoy such integrity. Medical understandings of the fungible body combined with (unspoken) legal norms based on genital integrity created a transgendered, disabled social subject whose relation to religious norms was rendered as deeply problematic.

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1

Making defective men Physiology, medicine, and the therapeutics of castration

In his ruminations on castration, the English physician and natural philosopher John Bulwer (c. 1606–1656) invoked the often-repeated origin story of the practice: Many fantasicall reasons have been framed and ends propounded to introduce Eunuchisme, and this way of degrading men from their manhood. Semiramus was the first that caused young Male children to be made Eunuches, therein offering violence to Nature, and turning her from her appointed course, by a tacite Law, as it were stopping the primigeniall Fountaines of Seed, and those ways which Nature had assigned for the propagation of Posterity, that so she might make them have small voices, and to be more womanish, that conjoyned with her, she might the better conceale her usurpation and counterfeit manhood. (Bulwer 1653, 354–355) Bulwer does not query the veracity of the story, which is irrelevant to his purposes.1 He is interested in castration altering male bodies. For Bulwer, castration causes declension: men lose their manhood, a change that he understands to be necessarily for the worse. The reasons for castration being inherently negative are that the direction of change is unnatural and demeaning to men, making them feeble and deceptive – like women. How does castration change male bodies? Bulwer recounts the basic understandings available to him, citing Galen’s explanation that the testicles influence the heart, “so that the Testicles cut out, only not the other Fountaine is destroyed, but the heat of the very heart is lessened and debilitated.” Aristotle’s view is a bit different and Bulwer cautions that not everyone agrees with it. Aristotle, “thinks the Heart is stretched by the Testicles, and therefore relaxed when they are cut away, and so a common principle affected, because the strength of the Nerves is relaxed or loosened in their originall or beginning.” Regardless of who is right, Bulwer avers, a man whose testicles have been removed “becommeth womanishe” (Bulwer 1653, 355–356). Bulwer followed a long tradition in which a man who lost his testicles or testicular function became if not female, at least dubiously feminine.

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Castrates did not become actual women, but alterations to their physiology made them look, sound, and behave like women. Medically, then, castrates were transsexuals. That is, surgical intervention to alter the body changed its fundamental orientation to the world from male to female. It was not exactly akin to modern transsexual medicalization in that castration was the only intervention, and castration alone did not render men as women. The modern psychological explanations (which are much debated, but still commonly deployed) did not apply.2 As intersex activism has made clear, disrupting sex organs has profound effects on the body, mind, and social functioning of the individual whose body has been altered (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Castrates resemble modern intersex individuals in that surgery was usually performed to excise healthy tissue.3 Cheryl Chase has argued that surgery on intersex children is the literalized production of normative sexed bodies. Modern surgical protocols since the 1950s have privileged genital conformity as a matter of psychosocial well-being (Chase 1848; Matta 2005). Children with ambiguous genitals are “corrected” without their consent by means of the removal or refashioning of irregular genitals. Because it is easier to “make” a girl than a boy, many intersex infants are castrated (testicular and penile tissue removed) and frequently lied to about what has been done to them. Activists and scholars have objected to the pressure applied to parents to agree to procedures in order “normalize” ambiguous genitals, as well as to routine misrepresentation of the dangers of genital non-conformity (Dreger and Herndon 2009). To be clear, historically, most men and boys who were castrated in the premodern past do not seem to have understood themselves in psychological terms as women, but gender asymmetry in genital surgery made the effects of castration on men far more socially significant than efforts to alter female physiology. In a cultural context that linked masculinity to reproductive potency and tied social norms to the ability to procreate, castration literalized the production of a non-normative body. The cases involving women were usually framed as efforts to lessen perceived excessive masculinity (Behrend-Martínez 2007, 79).4 If castrating a woman “helped” her conform to nature, male castration in early modern theory and practice subverted nature. Following Aristotle, men were more perfect than women, and nature tends toward perfection. Women might (and occasionally did) become men, but men, as more perfect beings, should not degenerate into women.5 Castration meant human intervention unnaturally altered male bodies in the direction of the feminine. This chapter historicizes our understanding of early modern medical practices of and around castration in terms of transsexuality and deliberately disabling boys and men by destroying or removing their testicles. I recognize that twenty-first-century knowledge of corporeal physiology is both more extensive and epistemologically different from early modern practices and beliefs. Early modernity did not know about hormones, although physicians described hormonal changes often with remarkable accuracy, usually within a humoral theory of human physiology. Thomas Laqueur has argued that early modern

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medicine understood the human body in terms of a “one sex” model, with the male body being the norm and the female body being a lesser version of that norm (Laqueur 1990). Critics of Laqueur have taken exception to his argument on a variety of grounds, but within anatomical and surgical traditions that regarded bodies as a balance of humors, the notion that men and women existed along a spectrum of cold/hot/wet/dry qualities had therapeutic relevance.6 Within early modern schema, castration made men more like women in fundamental and extensive ways. The aporia in premodern physiological knowledge required that commentators and observers explain corporeal changes in ways that cohered with a value system that we no longer fully embrace, but which informs how we comprehend corporeal gender and sex transformation. Simply put, early modern ideas about effeminacy, deception, and declension of the sort outlined by Bulwer remain embedded in modern ideas of transsexuality and sexual disability. Using medical knowledge to alter the body permanently takes on particular resonance when the alteration is to the genitals. By effectively destroying the testicles, physicians and surgeons sundered men from the usual paths of sociability. Castrates were disabled social subjects who could not marry or (technically) become priests (see Chapter 3).7 Excluded from the usual life trajectories, castrates were marginalized in ways that occluded group identification that is now considered a crucial element in the development of sexual or gender identity. In medical terms, the dominant frame of understanding insisted that damaging or destroying testicles made men more like women, and this change was a bad thing. At the same time, from Antiquity on, physicians and natural philosophers believed that castration had therapeutic value. Physicians and surgeons castrated men to treat a variety of diseases, and medical practitioners insisted that castration enabled men to avoid other diseases altogether. If the therapeutic benefits had to be weighed against the corporeal effects caused by castration, therapeutic applications allowed for the continued persistence of castration. From debilitating urinary problems to changes in appearance, castrated male bodies moved, often unevenly, partially, or erratically, toward effeminacy. The meanings of castrated men as surgically created semi-women at the very least unsettled the gender binary, and in many ways created bodies that fundamentally changed gender by removing or disabling the testicles. Medical beliefs and practices created castrates as precedents for marking non-gender conforming bodies. Medical alteration meant that castrates became subject to what Tobin Siebers has called an “ideology of ability.” While their specific disability was not always obvious, castrates were denigrated and marginalized for their lack of sexual able-bodiedness (Siebers 2008, 8).8 The physical impairment of castration was not on the level of other impairments that people suffered. The genitals were (and still are) far more hidden than mangled arms or missing legs or blind eyes or many other disabilities.9 Castrate disability was in many ways social: whether as effeminate, impotent, or hypersexual, castrates were overlooked, denigrated, or dismissed

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Inceptions

as social subjects. Rendered as less than fully human and lacking a collective identity, castrates inhabited the exclusions that reinforced the ideology requiring individuals to be genital and gender “normal” for social inclusion.10

1. Medical transformations; gender effects How castration worked in medical terms was both obvious and opaque before the advent of modern surgical techniques, detailed human anatomy, and knowledge of hormonal effects on human bodies. Medical authorities understood that castration rendered animals, including humans, sterile, but they were divided on whether and how castration changed the body systemically. Intimately related to larger philosophical framings about the relationship between human nature and physiology, ancient knowledge varied on why, how, and to what extent castration essentially altered the body versus creating superficial or cosmetic effects. Castration has been a topic of medical inquiry at least since Antiquity because it prevents procreation. The castration of animals has been traced to prehistoric human populations, but one of the earliest and most influential written accounts of procreation and castration dates to the Hippocratic corpus (Hippocrates: c. 460–c. 375 BCE).11 In the Hippocratic tradition, men and women both produce sperm, with the testicles serving as the passage for male sperm. The entire body contributes to concocting semen, but the brain provides specific, human content (Hippocrates 2012, 474.3. See also 480.8; 2012, 542.1). During intercourse, bodily humidity turns the semen into foam, which is carried through the veins to the spinal cord and the kidneys to the testicles (2012, 470.1). Semen provides matter for the fetus and stimulates desire for intercourse. If both partners ejaculate semen in the uterus and the woman retains the seed, she will conceive (2012, 475.1–477.5). Although there are male and female versions of semen in this model, a man deprived of his kind becomes more like a woman. Men who injure their testicles “become impotent, do women’s work, live like women, and converse accordingly” (1995, 22 [p. 127]).12 Hippocratic genecology accepted female contributions to human generation while nonetheless assigning them lesser value. Aristotelian gender politics made the deprivation of male semen a more significant cause of bodily transformation. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) denied that women made semen. In generation through intercourse (the most common of the four modes of reproduction Aristotle identified), the female provided matter in the form of menstrual blood. Aristotle defined “female” by the fact that the fetus grows in her body, and “male” as generating in another by means of semen that was elaborated throughout the body and completed in the seminal ducts. The testicles do not have an active role in semen production, but do serve as a mechanical delivery device, weighing down the seminal ducts to slow the semen down and allow it to become fully elaborated (Aristotle 1943, 787b–788a). The process of elaboration begins with the first digestion of nourishment in the stomach and intestines, and

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continues with the second digestion in the veins and liver (where it is transformed into blood). The blood is then purified in the third digestion, which takes place when the heart provides vital warmth. The fourth and final digestion occurs in the seminal ducts, where the blood turns into semen. It becomes dense, white, and replete with internal bodily heat in the form of pneuma, which makes it fertile.13 In Aristotle’s scheme, only the male contribution was relevant to generation. The female contribution, menstrual fluid and the womb for carrying the baby to term, were mere matter, the least important of Aristotle’s four causes. The role of the testicles as a weight to lengthen the elaboration process was important for Aristotle in another way: when that weight was removed, the tension between the testicles and the heart relaxed. This caused the castrated man to dissipate the heat generated in the heart, enabling his entire body to move toward a colder humoral disposition. For Aristotle, this loss was evident in the inability of castrated men to get erections (on which point, Aristotle was incorrect), and then in a variety of physical changes in the direction of the feminine: “Women do not go bald because their nature is similar to that of children: both are incapable of producing seminal secretion. Eunuchs, too, do not go bald, because of their transition into the female state” (Aristotle 1943, 784b; see also 746b). Castrates got colder, moister, and softer like women. In sum, Aristotle wrote: “And when one vital part changes, the whole make-up of the animal differs greatly in appearance and form. This may be observed in the case of eunuchs; the mutilation of just one part of them results in such a great alteration of their old semblance, and in close approximation to the appearance of the female” (Aristotle 1943, 766a). In addition to regarding men as more perfect beings (and, again, nature tends toward perfection in Aristotle’s philosophy), Aristotle considered changes that debilitated the testicles to be unnatural because all things have a natural function. Testicles were indirectly crucial to identity: they enabled one of man’s central purposes, which was to provide the important elements for reproduction.14 In Aristotle’s understanding, then, castration made men more like women and disqualified them from a definitional aspect of masculinity. Galen’s (Claudius Galenus, 130–200) conception of castration, while diverging from Aristotle’s in significant ways, put the testicles even more at the center of male identity. Removing testicles in male animals made them sluggish, inclined to corpulence, and lacking in sex drive. Based on these observations, Galen reasoned that testicles produce and distribute masculine heat by means of semen fabricated throughout the body that was purified when blood passed through the testicles. The vital element was already in the blood, but the final digestion in the testicles changed the semen into its white, foamy form and made it generatively potent (1992, I: 12.4–5, 12.10–12; 1968, 2.17.7).15 The testicles have little ontological significance in Aristotle’s scheme; they have far more in Galen’s, in which the testicles have two crucial roles. First, the testicles as glands contribute the heat that diffuses through the body in the process of elaboration (1992, I: 15. 34, 48).16 As in Aristotle,

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Inceptions

semen in the form of blood purifies as it passes through the body, but for Galen, final digestion occurs in the testicles, where the blood obtains its vital spirit and the semen becomes generative (“…while lingering in the vessels, undergoes coction and clotting”) (1992, I: 15.19. See also I:16.9–11; II: 3.6; 1968, 2: 14.7).17 This is the second crucial function of the testicles. Galen located the vital part of male reproductive capacity in the testicles, and a man without them was incapable of generation even if he could achieve erection and intromission. Operating on the assumption that every body part was structured toward its functional end, Galen described the testicles as diffusing virility throughout the body. Using the analogy that the ingestion of noxious substances could be demonstrated by their excretion that indicated they had suffused throughout the body, Galen maintained that the effects of the testicles were integral to the complexion of the entire body (1992, I.16.1–15; see also 1968, 2:14.7). Castrating men, Galen emphasized, “is not safe,” and results in the whole man becoming “colder and weaker” (1992, I:15.35,37). The changes to the body because of castration were “no small indications of their power to change the quality of the entire body” (1992, I: 15.45).18 Although he agreed with Aristotle and others that castration feminized the male body, Galen insisted that the reason removing the testicles had such extensive effects was because they played a crucial role in the entire morphology of the male body. Although Aristotle’s philosophy dominated through the medieval period, especially after the scholastic contributions of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Galen’s physiology shaped debates over the medical and social status of castrates. Galen counted the testicles among the principal members (along with the brain, liver, and heart) not only because the species depends on them, but also because of the effects of their removal on the individual. Galen insisted, “The heart is the source only of living, but the testicles [are] the source of living well” (Galen 1992, I: 15.49). One might expect Galen’s suggestion that castration was detrimental because it interfered with the pleasures of sex to be taken as a positive good once Christian antipathy toward sexual pleasure took hold. Instead, evasion was more common, as with medieval anatomist Master Nicholas (c. 1200) who skirted the personal pleasure issue, preferring to dispute the rank of the testicles in more anatomically neutral terms. Nicholas followed Galen in describing testicles as principal members, along with the brain, liver, and heart. The testicles were different from the other three, Nicholas allowed, since the ducts that apparently are derived from the testicles might better be attributed to the kidneys (Nicholas 1974, 729). Because men could not live without a brain, liver, or heart, the testicles might seem to be in another category. In linking them to the kidneys, Nicholas secured the testicles to a body part that was fundamental to existence. The status of the testicles was hardly settled, and it mattered a great deal in terms of what to make of castrates. Surgeon Giovanni da Vigo (ca. 1450– 1525) dropped the necessary tie to individual existence, recurring to Galen’s formulation: “The stones be numbred among the principall members, which

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nature hath made for generation, …and they are also of greate feeling” (Vigo 1586, 16r). Similarly, English surgeon and anatomist Thomas Vicary (c. 1490–1561) agreed that the testicles could be “called a principall member, because of generation.” Vicary also specifically identified the penis (“yard”) as a principal member, indicating that pleasure had something to do with the status of male genitalia (87). English royal physician Helkiah Crooke (1576– 1648) was having none of it: “But for the Testicles there is no necessity of them, for Eunuchs live without them” (1651, 180). For Crooke, a principal part had to be integral to the survival of the individual, which testicles were not. Was it living well or living at all that mattered? French royal physician André du Laurens (1558–1609) tried a different resolution that produced a new problem. Du Laurens considered the complete change in “eunuchs and the castrated” (1661, 329) to be indicative of the centrality of the testicles on a personal level but he emphasized Galen’s populationist point, remarking: Now the testicles are not required for life, for the castrated live well without them…We confess that they are not necessary, neither for living, nor for the preservation of the individual, but only for the propagation of the species: because the propagation of the species does not happen except by procreation; and procreation by means of the semen. Now the semen takes its form in the testicles, which serve the spermatic vessels subordinately, as preparatory as well as ejaculatory. [Or les testicules ne sont point necessaires à la vie, car les chastrez vivent bien sans iceux…Nous confessions qu’ils ne sont point necessaires, ny à la vie, ny à la conservation de l’individu, mais seulement pour la propagation de l’espece: car la propagation de l’espece ne se faire que par la procreation; & la procreation par le moyen de la semence: Or la semence prend sa forme aux testicules, ausquels servent subordinément les vaisseaux spermatiques, tant preparans qu’éjaculatoires]. (1661, 331) In this view, the individual was insignificant, but the human population as a whole depended on functional testicles, which justified their inclusion among the principal members. But this implicitly raised the question of whether a man lacking testicles would be truly human. Some refused the testicles the status of principal parts precisely to avoid engaging whether castrates enjoyed fully human status. This is what the editor of physician and botanist Nicholas Culpepper (1610–1654) did, dropping the testicles from the list in 1668. He listed only the liver, heart, and brain and reiterated the argument that men can and do live without testicles (Fisher 2006, 70). The French barber-surgeon Ambrose Paré (c. 1510–1590) also discounted the testicles as principal parts, but highlighted Galen’s quality of life argument: “And moreover in his book de Semine comparing the Testicles with the Heart, hee makes them the more noble by this reason, that by how

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much it is better to live wel and happily, than simply and absolutely to live” (Paré 1649, 62). For Paré, losing testicular function did not remove a man from humanity, but did make a man’s life considerably less worth living. Wherever they stood with respect to the castrate’s quality of life, medical commentators did not dispute that damaging, destroying, or removing the testicles had drastic effects on the male body. Bartolomeo della Rocca Cocles (1467–1504) summarized: “gelded parsones, which after they have loste bothe theyr testycles, be very much chaunged from the nature of menne, into the nature of women” (Sigs. Dii(v)–iii(r)). The widely read Spanish physician Juan Huarte (1529–1588) summarized the changes that a castrate endured upon losing his testicles, noting that the castrate would lose (or never develop) a beard, lack vigor, and get stupider. The loss of rational capacity made castrates like women (1698, 417–418). Surgeon (and many would add “quack physician”) John Marten (1670–1737) agreed: “by the loss of them a Man receives very great prejudice, both as to strength and activity of his Body, and also as to the acuteness of his Reason and Understanding” (1708, 355). For Paré, the proof that testicles “breed or encrease a true masculine courage” was confirmed, “by Eunuchs or such as are Gelt, who are of a womanish nature, and are oftentimes more tender and weak than women” (Paré 1649, 93). Not all the changes were entirely consistent, but all agreed that castration made the male body more female, feminine, or womanly. Feminization was most obvious among castrates who endured complete ablation of all the sexual organs. Operations that removed the penis as well as the testicles required the insertion of a shunt or artificial penis to keep the urinary tract open. Although rare, Johannes Scultetus (1595–1645) reported a case in Ulm in 1635, in which a man with gangrene had to be fully ablated and thereafter required “a pipe” in order to urinate (1674, 337–338). Paré included an illustration of such an object (Paré 1634, 877). John Marten claimed that castrates deprived of their penises carried quills in their hats, “in a way of jolly Ostentation, that it may be known what they are, and think they have made a good Bargain in exchanging the natural Conduit for their Urine for that artificial one, they always placing in the Quill to discharge their Urine” (1708, 359).19 Benjamin Bell noted rather soberly that the tube does not need to be very long, but that it was indeed necessary (Bell 1791, 1: 540). The castrate who required mechanical assistance to urinate had been altered in ways that made him resemble a woman. Literary critic Gail Kern Paster has identified the association of the female body with a lack of control over bodily fluids as a product of medical theory confirmed by early modern experience. The demands of pregnancy and childbirth caused many women to suffer from incontinence, which led to the female body being associated with leakiness. Women bled and cried more than men, and women seeped milk when nursing (Paster 1993, 23–63).20 Fully ablated castrates were also prone to incontinence, and a man who had to use a tube to urinate often had to sit to use it.21 As Paré put it: “Those that have their yards cut off close to their bellies, are greatly troubled in making of urine, so that they are constrained to

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sit downe like women” (1634, 877). Du Laurens reminded readers that castrates who lacked penises could not urinate without mechanical assistance, and certainly could not ejaculate semen (1661, 327).22 The man who lacked the equipment to urinate was barely a man at all, but even with the plumbing seemingly intact, the castrate had problems. Patricia Simons has argued that early modern Europeans understood masculinity in terms of the ability to produce and project both urine and semen. The semen had to have potency, and questions about projection or potency undermined a man’s claims to masculine privilege. The fully ablated castrate was obviously lacking, but even the castrate who had a penis and could ejaculate was dubious. Simons notes, “Managing the expenditure of semen was central to men’s regimen of self-control and health maintenance” (2011, 164). A man without functional testicles could not lay claim to an aspect of self-control that was crucial to notions of early modern masculinity. The castrate was disabled both physically and in a cultural sense relative to the ability to manage his seminal (and sometimes urinary) excretions like a man. Most of the physical changes were subtler than what happened to men who lost their penises. Corporeal feminization because of castration reordered the humoral body in ways that conflated physical and social meanings to disperse masculine physicality in the ambiguous, ambivalent castrated body. Medical historian H. F. J. Horstmanshoff has compiled a list of the effects commented upon by ancient medical authorities. Castrates usually had high voices; they did not get beards but they did not go bald; and their facial features were soft. Many had weak muscle tone with a tendency to obesity and gynecomastie. Castrates were of course sterile, but ancient observers noted a range of sexual effects included sterility, impotence, lack of sexual appetite, and conversely, the ability and desire to penetrate and ejaculate sterile seminal fluid. Many castrates were quite tall, with disproportionately long arms and legs and observable decalcification of the bones (1998, 92). Not only did early modern anatomists and surgeons confirm these observations, they also rendered them in gendered terms. Castrates had smooth, soft, pale skin like women, which several maintained was because castration deprived them of testicular heat (Du Laurens 1661, 329; Crooke 1651,179).23 As physician Jean Fernel (1497–1558) put it, “Further, their nature is altered to a colder one…their body grows pale, turns heavy, idle, obese, and less hairy, and…becomes feeble, soft, and unmanly” [molle et effoeminatum] (2003, 536–537). In addition to womanly skin, castrates had female hair patterns. The lack of a beard was a crucial marker of the castrate, and it went with a propensity for castrates to have a full head of hair (Benedetti 1998, 240).24 The no beard/never bald man was more like a woman, whose humorally cold, moist complexion kept her smooth and did not allow the burning off of hair that made men bald.25 As Will Fisher has argued for early modern England, the beard was a crucial marker of masculinity (Fisher 2001). Actors without beards, usually boys, played women on the English stage, deepening the association of appropriate hirsute appearance with

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(intact) men. As Bulwer put it, long hair on the head was compensatory: “Nature having allowed [women] in recompence of their smoothnesse and want of a Beard.” Men with long hair are, “quite contrary to the intention of Nature” (1653, 58). By substitution, the castrate, with his abundant hair, became unnatural. If skin and hair indicated that castrates were no longer entirely men in body, other indicators deepened the perception that they were verging on the feminine. Observers noted that the Adam’s apple was often absent or greatly reduced. Human castrates, while not exactly suffering from caponism, did incline toward a female fat distribution pattern, with a tendency toward larger hips, buttocks, and breasts (Aphrodisias 1555, 8r).26 Du Laurens noted that, “their flesh also acquired an all new odor and flavor” [leurs chars acquierent aussi une odeur & saveur toute nouvelle] he associated with women (1661, 329).27 Castrates looked, smelled, and felt like women. Moreover, these changes highlighted how castrates were out of sync with normative gender practices. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner as described in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales exhibits several problematic gender characteristics associated with castrated men. Physically, he is unimpressive: A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot, No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have; As smothe it was as it were late shave, I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare. (General Prologue, ll. 688–691) Although scholars are not certain whether the Pardoner is a castrate, the lack of facial hair, along with his effeminate appearance and manner, suggests he is.28 His long, blond, beautiful hair dressed fashionably – he has “heer as yelow as wex,/ But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex” (ll. 675–676) – supports reading him as a castrate. So does his behavior: the Pardoner sells (fraudulent) pardons and relics, indicating his moral insufficiency. He is also lascivious, as women were presumed to be, with plans to marry, but in the meantime, to “have a joly wench in every toun” (VI: 453). Described as the worst of the pilgrims because of his greed and lust (Miller 1955, 198), the Pardoner was both a product of and productive of medieval associations between castration, effeminacy, and corruption. The incipient effeminacy of the Pardoner would eventually take center stage. John Marten considered the castrate so effeminate that women cannot stand them: “How Sheepish and Womanish does a Castrated Man, depriv’d of his manly Parts, appear? How dead and wither’d, cold in Love Affairs, Beardless and Effeminate, is he? Women shun his Company, laugh at him, ridicule and deride him as not fit (indeed he is not) for their Conversation and Company” (1708, 360). The anonymous Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy (1749) commented that castrates caused Ancient Romans to grow “womanish

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in mind, gesture, and attire” (Secret Sexualities, McCormick 1997, 141). Literary critic Valeria Finucci reports that castrati in Italy often considered themselves to be “diminished males.” They used names with built-in diminutive forms and carried feminine accouterments such as make-up (2003, 239–240). In his 1830 novella, Sarrasine, Honoré de Balzac’s titular character sees an opera featuring La Zambinella at the Teatro Argentino in Rome and falls in love. Zambinella sings “coquettishly” and “displayed to him, united, living, and delicate, those exquisite female forms he so ardently desired” (ibid., 237–238). Sarrasine is rapturous in assessing Zambinella’s feminine perfection, and is immediately obsessed. Sarrasine breaks when he realizes he has been fooled into believing La Zambinella is a woman. The castrato’s feminine performance had been utterly perfect to Sarrasine (ibid., 246–247). In Eliza Haywood’s Philidore and Placentia: or L’Amour trop Delicat (1727), Philidore meets a Christian castrate whose obsession with the Bashaw’s wife leads to his castration: “they deprived me of all power of ever injuring their Lord, or any other person in manner I was about to do, and left me nothing but the name of man: thus wretched, thus become the scorn of both sexes, and incapable of being own’d by either” (ibid., 17). The Christian castrate is markedly effeminate. Described as beautiful, delicate and humorally “cold,” he gets himself into trouble because “I was no longer Master of my reason” with respect to his desire (ibid., 11). Examples across centuries, different language traditions, and cultural moments are more than plentiful, and most invoke medical markers of castration. The associations of castrates with effeminacy were sufficiently proverbial that examples of castrated men behaving in stereotypically masculine ways made news. Charles Burney asserted that there were castrates in history who were renowned for their bravery in battle, and he added, “I think Guadagni and Pacchierotti were so far from timid and pusillanimous, that they would seek danger rather than shun it, if called upon or irritated” (1935, 2: 528– 530). Benedetto Mojon argued that the example of the castrate general Narses undermined assertions that castrates were necessarily cowardly (1804, 25; see also Alciati 1548, col. 272). In many ways, the most important sensory marker of the castrate was the voice. Ancient authors knew that castrating a boy before puberty often resulted in retaining a higher pitched voice into adulthood (Claudian 1963, I: 261–264). Du Laurens cited Aristotle on the voice of castrates being feminine (1661, 330; see also Raynaud 1665, 65). As Crooke put it in his adaptation of Du Laurens, the changes in the voice were the result of, “sympathy and consent there is between the Chest, the Paps, the Seed, and the voice.” He explained more fully: “Even as we see it cometh to pass in instruments, which have a more acute or trebble sound when the strings are stretched, and a lower more remiss when they are loosened; right so in Eunuchs, the testicles being taken away and so the heart affected, the voice in very form becometh womanish” (Crooke 1651, 153, 179). Bulwer also called the voice of the castrate “womanishe” (Bulwer 1653, 356). Peter Lowe observed that, “if yong ones bee cut on both sides…they bee

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ever feeble and small voyced like unto women” (1634, 249). The castrate with the high, “womanish” voice was regarded as having a feminine temperament as well. Du Laurens was typical in considering the castrate’s voice to be a sign of weakness and lack of character (1661, 329–333). The dismissive medical comments cannot and should not hide the fact that the voice was both why castration endured and how it depended on the medical profession in order to persist. That castration before puberty meant that the usual drop in register failed to occur was widely known. When the fashion or preference for high male voices took hold in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, castration for musical purposes seems to have spread rapidly, albeit surreptitiously (Marten 1708, 356; Ancillon 1718, 38–39).29 Because castration of humans was technically illegal (see Chapter 2), physicians and surgeons claimed medical necessity.30 What physicians regarded as a procedure that produced significant feminization as a side effect became instead the deliberate genital disabling of boys to create durable feminine vocal registers (see also Chapter 5). The transsexualization of castrates was not complete, but removing or destroying the testicles moved castrates toward the female end of the humoral spectrum. The surgical procedure that was castration did much to create passivity as a fundamental corporeal condition of being and threw into doubt the castrate’s eligibility for full social status. Most medical accounts discussed castration as having already occurred, but the descriptions indicate that castration itself contributed to making the male body more feminine. The Byzantine Greek physician Paul of Aegina (Paulus Aegineta, c. 625–690) explains two methods of castration: There are two ways of performing it, the one by compression, and the other by excision. That by compression is thus performed: children, still of a tender age, are placed in a vessel of hot water, and then when the bodily parts are softened in the bath, the testicles are to be squeezed with the fingers until they disappear, and, being dissolved, can no longer be felt. The method by excision is as follows: let the person to be castrated be placed upon a bench, and the scrotum with the testicles grasped by the fingers of the left hand, and stretched; two straight incisions are then to be made with a scalpel, one in each testicle; and when the testicles start up they are to be dissected around and cut out, having merely left the very thin bond of connexion [sic] between the vessels in their natural state. (1846, 2: 379–380) The differences in method are significant: Compression is depicted as a process in which children are gently treated. The boy begins and ends as a child. Excision makes a “person” into a “eunuch,” a transition that suggests that a “eunuch” is not exactly a person. Compression as described by Paul allowed for the possibility that the process was not entirely disabling. Excision left no room for such an interpretation, verging even rhetorically on the removal of

Figure 1.1 This illustration of medieval surgical techniques reflects how castration was performed. Note the forced passivity of the patient. Credit: Albucasis (Aby-al-Qasim) “Surgery.” Ms.89 bis, fol.23. France, 14th C. Musée Atger, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Medecine, Montpellier. (Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

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personhood as both violent and permanent. Scottish surgeon Peter Lowe’s (c. 1550–1610) description of the early modern operation is both more detailed and more explicit about the bodily transformation castration effects: First, the body must be purged, and bled if need require; the night before the worke, the patient must eate little: the next morning about 8. or 9 houres the sicke shall be layd uppon a boord, in such sort, that his head and shoulders be lower than his bodie, so the Intestine shall reduce more easily, thereafter the sicke his legges and thighs must be tyed fast to the sayd fourme or table, as also his handes, then reduce the Intestine, Omentum, or both, with in the belly, which being done, some one shall hold fast his two fingers upon the hole of discent, that it fall not, then the incisor shall stand at the side of the sicke, and gripe the stone of the lose side, betweene the three formost fingers of the left hand, put up almost to the hole of the dissent, and make it appeare upon the poynt of the middest finger, holding it fast betweene the other two fingers, then make your incision with a…rasour upon the stone that is two inches large or thereabouts. Some doe use to make this incision lower downe in the codde, next pull out the testicle and separate the Dydimus from the Scrotum, till such time as you come to the hole of dissent, taking heed in over-lose pulling, in case the nerves and muscles, Cremastres, receive inflammation, or convulsion, and death. (1634, 250) Lowe went on to explain how to stitch the wound and protect it from infection with astringents, warning the physician or surgeon to look for intestinal involvement and to make sure the wound was fully healed (ibid., 251). Lowe’s description demonstrates how the operation itself feminized the male body. Bleeding the patient removed some of his masculine heat, as did restricting his food. The man is made passive by restraint and penetrated first by the razor and then by the fingers. Immediately, the castrated man becomes more vulnerable. His nerves have been loosened (a gesture toward Aristotle) and he is highly susceptible to disease and physical danger. The procedure that is castration put the male body in the feminine position in advance of making that body permanently womanly. Caspar Stromayr, a hernia surgeon who wrote an illustrated manual on how to perform a variety of procedures, depicted hernia patients about to be castrated as part of the therapeutic process. His images emphasized the passivity of the man as his testicles are removed, especially in comparison to the knife-wielding surgeon (1925, 196, 204, 221, 260, 265–266). Ancient authorities and the early modern physicians and surgeons who relied on them recognized that castration drastically altered the male body and made it physiologically effeminate. Medical opinion regarded castrates whose testicles had been excised as especially suspect, but saw even those who

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lacked some testicular function as deficient men. Despite – or perhaps because of – the lack of certainty on key issues, early modern extensions of Aristotelian and Galenic ideas about castration made the social stakes starkly apparent. Debates over how the testicles worked and what morphological role they served gradually pushed medical discussion to define castrates as decidedly – but not essentially – female.

2. Castration therapeutics Why, if castration made men more feminine and that change was socially adverse and physically unnatural, was castration considered a viable medical practice? The answer, as with many unpleasant medical procedures, is that the therapeutic value was worth it to the overall health or life of the patient. This tempered the pejorative associations of castration and complicated the valuation of body transformations wrought by radical genital surgery. Often lost in discussions of castration are its therapeutic dimensions, and yet, the complex reactions to castration’s transformative effects depend on understanding why and how castration could be seen as a positive practice. Commentators attributed a variety of beneficial health effects to castration. Aulus Cornelius Celsus (1st century CE) reported that castrates rarely suffered from persistent joint pain associated with gout (podagra) or gout of the hand (chiragra) (1971, Vol. 1, 4.31.1).31 Surgical manuals and medical texts dating back to the Middle Ages prescribed castration for diseases including epilepsy, elephantiasis, leprosy, and satyriasis. Belief in the efficacy of castration to treat these diseases continued in early modernity.32 Crooke noted that castration, “in old times it was accounted a singular remedy for the Leprosie to cut off the Testicles, and to this day we…apply Epithymations to them, and find that they do wonderfully corroborate and strengthen the whole frame of the body” (1651, 179). The treatment here required that the testicles be retained and a plaster applied to them as a way to help the heart. Where Crooke reserved castration for serious conditions, other medical manuals recommended it to cure relatively trivial complaints, including varicose veins and varicocele (Browe 1936, 53–62; Horstmanshoff 1998, 89). Physicians supplemented ancient therapeutics of castration with new ones, particularly around venereal disease. Hugh Ryder (active c. 1685) described a patient who had contracted “a Virulent Gonorrhaea” that did not respond to dietary changes or medicines. The man developed a substantial “Tumour of the Scrotum,” and after several lesser surgical attempts to help the man, Ryder resorted to castration: “I deferred no longer, but having made the Ligatures above each Testicle, I cut them both off, and applied the actual Cautery, leaving the Ligatures till the Cauteriz’d Parts should separate; I afterward laid open the Testicles, and in the Center of each I found a hollow Groove able to contain a Horse-bean, filled with yellow, sordid Matter, such as we usually see flow from Fetid Gonorrhaea’s” (1693, 54–56). Richard Wiseman (c. 1622–1676) offered a harrowing list of treatments for diseases he

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had seen in his medical practice primarily caused by venereal disease. Wiseman described a young man who sought the removal of his testicles because one was ulcerated, “from a Gonorrhoea, or upon any Venereal account” (1686, 549).33 Vigo blamed, “having companie with a filthie woman, or that hath had latelie the flowes” for producing conditions that led to excision of one or both testicles (1586, 113r). Despite the risks inherent in any surgery before the advent of modern antisepsis, physicians and surgeons allowed that castration could have legitimate medical uses. By far the most common therapeutic use of castration was for the treatment of hernias.34 Although numbers are difficult to obtain, the practice seems to have been widespread. Patrick Barbier reports that more than five hundred boys were castrated to treat hernias in the French parish of SaintPapoul in the late seventeenth century (Barbier 1996, 16; see also Millant 1908, 151–152). Katharine Park has described the lively medical culture in early modern Italy around specialist practitioners, including astonishing numbers of empirical surgeons renowned for their skill treating hernias (Park 1998). Cauterization, trusses, and a variety of poultices and medicines had their champions, and surgeons who accepted the need for castration usually did so only after trying other solutions.35 As the extent of both castration and other forms of therapy indicate, hernias seem to have been quite common. The type of hernia that might require castration is usually what modern medicine understands as the inguinal hernia, which is a protrusion of part of the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity (the omentum) or part of the intestine through a weak point in the abdominal wall at the inguinal canal, a passageway near the groin. As Michael McVaugh has pointed out, the inguinal hernia involved the dilation of the inguinal ring in the abdomen, through which pass the spermatic cord (called the didymus in medieval and early modern texts) and the investing fascia. Because of their reliance on an incorrect Galenic understanding of the didymus as an open tube that essentially could empty into the scrotum, surgeons opted to disable the didymus by severing or otherwise destroying it, often scarring it to block off the tube permanently. To do this, surgeons pulled out the testicle and followed up the didymus to its highest point, while packing any loose intestine back in the abdomen along the way. The main choices were to tie off the didymus or cauterize it (McVaugh 1998, 132–134). Many surgeons combined the two. Vigo emphasized cauterization, but also knotted off the didymus after tucking any stray intestines back inside (Vigo 1586, 119r). Alexander Read (1580– 1641) preferred to cauterize the spermatic vessels, regarding cutting them as “dangerous,” albeit sometimes necessary. He advised caution in cases in which the peritoneum was not ruptured but threatening to do so, preferring in such instances to treat with binding and cauterization (1687, 599, 601). John Banister (1533–1610) considered cauterization combined with excision to be the appropriate option for a ruptured inguinal hernia. After securing the patient, he advised removing the testicle and binding the didymus, “so as

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none of the nutrient vessels may passe any nourishment from them.” Once the ligatures were in place, he recommended that the surgeon, “doe cauterize the end with a hot iron, for feare of fluxe of bloud” (Banister 1633, 108–109). Practitioners emphasized that castration was sometimes the only option (Culpeper 1788, 261; Vigo 1586, 29r, 113r–119r, 162r, 414v). Hieronymus Brunschwig (c. 1450–c. 1512) recommended that wounded testicles be removed so that the patient is “in no peryll of dethe” (1525, Ch. lii). Realdo Columbo also expressed reluctance about removing testicles, but allowed ablation might be necessary in cases of intestinal hernias (1559, Ch. 13, p. 236). Dutch physician Paul Barbette (c. 1620–c. 1666) stressed caution before resorting to surgery, but sometimes removing the testicles was necessary to save the patient. He preferred tying off the didymus: If these things succeed not, draw forth the Testicle, and by Incision take off as much flesh as may be done without injury to it; then restore it again into its place. But if there be no hope of curing this Rupture by the recited means, draw forth the Hernious Testicle as far as you may, then pass once or twice a Silken Thred above the Tumor by the Process of the Peritonaeum, then pass both ends of the Silk through the Orifice it self, so that which was on the right side, may be on the left, and that of the left, on the right; and having ordered that the process of the Peritonaeum may be tied with a knot, then cut off the Testicle, letting both the ends of the Silk hang out of the scrotum, and so cure it as another Wound. (ibid., 81–82) In addition to advocating truss therapy and minor surgical procedures before resorting to castration, Barbette took care to outline conditions that might lead to the mistaken assumption that castration was required. Several surgeons, including Barbette, indicate that the operation could be tricky. Vigo explained how to excise a “corrupt” stone, warning: “Note, that this kinde of hernia [carnosa], is not cured by the way of resolution, nor by the way of incision without great difficultie and daunger of death. Wherefore the Chirurgion must admonish the patients friends of the daunger” (1586, 117r). Wiseman distinguished ruptures from relaxed hernias, but “No Hernia intestinalis is without danger: those made by Relaxation are least dangerous” (1686, 149). The gradations mattered in that ruptures were always more complicated to cure, and more likely to require (or seem to require) radical excision. Apothecary and physician Sir John Colbatch (c. 1666–1729) reported on a case in which a herniotomist in Hanover treated an omental rupture, but the patient’s bladder was damaged because the caul was removed as well as the hernia (1698, 97). Even in cases of inguinal hernia, it was sometimes possible to avoid castration. Vigo advised opening the testicle, and if at all possible, removing any putrefaction. If this can be accomplished, the testicle can be restored; if not, the didymus must be cut and the testicle removed

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Inceptions

(1586, 116v). Many surgeons considered the thorough approach of castration appropriate because hernias could become gangrenous and fatal if untreated or incompletely addressed. Despite its therapeutic uses, castration had its share of critics. Early modern commentators argued that castration, as a surgical solution to hernias, was not just dangerous, but often unethical. After explaining that techniques for cauterizing and excising hernias destroyed the testicles, Lanfranco of Milan (b. c. 1250) expostulated against castration as the practice of unscrupulous physicians: “Oh, you wretched surgeons who will imperil a man’s life for sake of a pitiful fee, a life which is worth more than gold or silver. A person can live out a long life with his hernia. Therefore, I advise no cutting.” He prescribed plasters, limited activities, dietary adjustments, and above all, trusses to be worn all the time (2003, 177).36 Guy de Chauliac (c. 1290–c. 1367) preferred to avoid “drawynge oute” the testicles in cases of “fleschy aposteme” [abscess], but if medicines failed, Chauliac advised, “kytte the skyn of the testicles (ie. privie stones). And if the flesche may frely be departed fro[m] the testicle, kytte it and drawe it out. And if you may noght and that the same testicle be corrupte, bynde the dyndyme aboue and kytte it and cauterice it and drawe it al oute and afterward sewe the wounde” (1971, 172).37 Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562) hesitantly allowed that there were medical conditions that required castration and emphasized that there were better times of year and in the lifecycle to do it. Like Lanfranco, Falloppio denounced the practices of empirics who carried out castrations, warning that these practitioners seemed unconcerned that, “men become effeminate and inept at generation” [gli uomini divergono effeminati et inetti] (1647, 197v). Peter Lowe also railed against what he regarded as cavalier practices: In this disease there is great abuse committed by a number of unskilfull ignorant people, voyde of all conscience and feare of God, who for every simple kind of rupture, makes incision and cuts away the production of the Periton and Stone: if the dissent be on both sides, they cut off both the stones, which renders a man sterile,…What shall we that are Christians think of those ignorants, who altogether cut away all those parts without hope of recovery, and that for a little peece of money. Such should be severely punished, and not to have company with Christians. Yet perhaps some of these deceivers will say, that I speake for malice, because I cannot doe that operation: for answere to such, I have oftentimes seene that operation done, and have divers times done it my selfe, the which I doe now repent in committing such a haynous sinne. (1634, 248–249) Historian Edward Behrend-Martínez has found indications of popular skepticism about hernia operations, and the express belief that they were pretexts

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for castration. An eighteenth-century surgeon commented: “The day being selected, the parents abandon the house because they lack the courage to listen to the cries of their son: some of the assistants are disturbed, others are troubled, and no one looks clearly at the actions of the surgeon, in this manner giving approval to what he does. He carries out his bloody show, pulling out the balls, while pretending to have left them inside” (2007, quoted at pp. 129–130). Over time, surgeons resorted to the removal of testicles less frequently and came to recognize castration as a separate category of operation that only sometimes included inguinal hernia. Joseph de La Charrière (d. 1690) recommended castration in cases of significant damage to the testicle itself or to the blood vessels that supply it. If a testicle turned black or septic, these were also conditions that required castration (1712, 104). Scottish surgeon Benjamin Bell (1749–1806) described all the types of hernia and their treatment in detail, but reserved excision for cases of cancer. In these situations, “Whenever a scirrhous or cancerous tumor is so situated as to render its total removal by the knife quite practicable, it ought always to be done” (1791, 1: 515).38 M. de La Vauguion and James Cooke also described the removal of testicles in cases of sarcoma (La Vauguion 1702, 49–51; Cooke 1693, 207–208). William Salmon (1644–1713) differentiated between a hernia that involved the testicle (which had to be removed) and situations in which the tumor could be excised without destroying the testicle: “If the fleshy substance is fixed fast to the Testicle, so as it cannot be separated, ‘tis certain, that if you design a Cure, you must come forthwith to Castration” (1698, 1: 728).39 Charles-Gabriel Leclerc (1644–1700?) distinguished between operations to reduce ruptured intestinal hernias and castration because of mortification of the testicles (1987, 238–239). Even as surgeons increasingly admitted that removal of the testicles to treat hernias did not always work, castration as a treatment for necrotic or cancerous testicles became standard (La Vauguion 1702, 49–50; Bell 1791, 1: 501, 515; Read 1687, 600, 605; Lowe 1634, 245–246). That surgical excision seems like a reasonable treatment for cancer, especially before the advent of chemotherapy and radiation, can obscure the fact that the therapeutic assessment of castration allowed the practice to persist not despite, but because it feminized and disabled the male body. Castration enabled surgeons to alter men in both body and mind in ways that rendered men more like women. Whatever the motivation, whether for a therapeutic purpose, in order to retain the high voice of youth, or as a form of punishment (see Chapter 2), castration transgendered early modern men in ways that moved them outside the definitions of corporeal masculinity. To be sure, they were not quite women, but castrates were insufficient men – inept at procreation, corporeally compromised, and suspiciously passive. In a culture that valued men and masculinity in terms of procreative virility, physicality, and self-control, castrates lost status. The corporeal, embodied elements castrates shared with women were imbricated with elements that might not be

36

Inceptions

physiological, but were believed to depend on the gendering of the body. Castrates transitioned across crucial gender lines, losing access to physically normative male embodiment and its social advantages.

3. Toward a medical genealogy For all that this chapter has situated castration within humoral medical theory and practice, castrates were not just variations on the humoral body. As one part of the tremendous concern about the how easily the male body can become effeminate – a concern that persists to the present day in a variety of forms – castrates were part of a vast and long lineage. But unlike other early modern preoccupations with such notoriously plastic human forms as hermaphrodites and androgynes, who were rare or fantastic in reality, castrates were common enough to serve as an anticipation and a precedent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the preoccupations with ambiguous bodies turned the impulse to understand into a compulsion to legislate. For hermaphrodites, this meant requiring them to choose a sex and stick with it.40 The castrate had no choice. His medical condition – his medically created condition – made his body too female and too incapable of basic male functioning. He was categorized as gender ambiguous and then legislated as unable. Medical authorities first made the castrate corporeally “deficient” and then justified his disability. The tendency to see trans history in terms of modern perceptions and definitions of the body and the psyche has largely ignored this longer story. Understanding castrates as transsexual, transgender, and disabled demonstrates that misogynous gender bias combined with medical intervention has a long lineage. I am absolutely not arguing that venerability makes such attitudes acceptable. On the contrary, the very porosity of the explanations of what happens to castrated male bodies and the unreliability of the therapeutic regime that was castration to treat such conditions as hernia and testicular cancer need to be understood so that they can be confronted with their own failures of logic and as medicine. Perhaps then we can dismantle the medical scaffolding that has justified the damaging gender politics aimed at transsexuality. In claiming castrates as ancestors of twenty-first-century transsexuals, I am not arguing for transsexual subjectivity of early modern castrates. Although many castrates understood themselves as different and more feminine than their intact contemporaries, for the most part, the fact of difference was created out of medical necessity or, in the case of boys deliberately castrated to preserve their voices, with defective consent (see also Chapter 5). I do want to claim the deep history of pejorative associations of transgender men with disease and effeminacy as a crucial element in understanding modern trans politics. The relentless negative characterization of castrates as the result of their encounters with medical expertise and surgical practice formed an enormous collection of harmful “knowledge” that could be deployed against transgender

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persons. The depth in historical time and the breadth in both geographical and psychological space are astonishing – and not in a good way.

Notes 1 Among the ancient sources attributing castration to Semiramus, see Ammianus Marcellinus 14.6.17 (1950, 1: 46–7): “he would curse the memory of that Queen Samiramis of old, who was the first of all to castrate young males….” [detestetur memoriam Samiramidis reginae illius veteris, quae teneros mares castravit omnium prima]. For analysis, see Tougher “Ammianus,” which argues that Ammianus criticized the Roman emperor Constantius II through his account of castrates in power. 2 One of the long-standing debates among trans activists is the diagnostic criteria applied to those seeking sex reassignment. Diagnoses such as Gender Identity Disorder (GID) stigmatize trans people as mentally ill, but given the structural organization of medical care, a diagnosis can enable access to insurance support. For an overview, see Reicherzer. 3 Officially, most castrati were operated on because of a medical condition or accident, but the excuses often strained credibility. Feldman (2015, 15) provides a concise account of the favorite excuses, which she situates in terms of early modern ideas about the relationship of men and beasts. 4 See De la dame escolliee in NRCF 8:83 for a fictional rendering of this situation. 5 For early modern cases of gender transformation see Long “Jacques Duval” for the French case of Marie/Marin le Marcis. This case is also analyzed in Darmon (1985); Park and Daston (1995). For the Spanish case of Eleno/Elena de Céspedes, see Kagan and Dyer (2004); Burshatin (1999); Vollendorf (2006, 11–31). The notion of women becoming men is a long-standing literary theme as well. Ovid’s story of female-born Iphis becoming male was well-known in early modernity. See Metamorphoses (1968, II: 9.666–797). 6 Cadden (1993) argues that medieval views of bodies were far more complex than Laqueur’s one sex model. See also Harvey (2004); Park and Nye (1991). Simons (2011) has argued for an “unequal two-seed” model. 7 The insistence that castration was a medical necessity because of illness or accident enabled men to circumvent the exclusion of castrates from the priesthood in Catholic countries. See also Chapter 5. 8 See also McRuer (2006) on the notion of “compulsory able-bodiedness.” 9 For the distinction between impairment and disability in historical terms, see Metzler (2006). 10 Garland Thomson (1997, 8–9) uses the term “normate” to emphasize the dependence of “normal” on the disabled body and to highlight how rare the “normal” body actually is. 11 Most of the Hippocratic corpus dates to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, although some of the 60-odd texts may date as late as the second century CE. The gynecology texts seem to be closely related and are among the earliest in the corpus. See Hanson (1991, 75–76). 12 Hippocrates is describing the Scythians, and he blames the problem on excessive horseback riding. See Airs (1923, 21 [125], 22 [131]). 13 On pneuma, see especially Freudenthal (1995). 14 See Leunissen (2010) for an analysis of Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology. 15 He contrasts his view with Aristotle’s at De Semine (1992, I: 12.15). Galen’s influence increased as his works began circulating in the Renaissance. For the chronology of which, see Durling (1961). 16 See Galen (1992, I: 14. 6–10; I. 15.16, 25) for an explanation of the convolutions of the spermatic vessels, in part as a critique of those who say the testicles alone

38

17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

Inceptions produce semen. On the relationship between the genitals and greater male perfection, see De usu partium (1968, 2.14.12; 2:14.6–7). See De usu partium (1968, 1: 14.10) for the development course. Female semen for Galen is distinct from menstrual blood and secreted during intercourse. Although not as powerful as male semen, female semen stimulates female desire, widens the vagina to accept male semen, and contributes matter after conception. See (1968, 2:14.11; 2:14.14). De Semine (1992, I: 15.51–74) scoffs at Aristotle’s notion that removing the testicles lessens the tension to the heart. Marten is borrowing from Bulwer (1653, 360). See also the more skeptical view of Ancillon (1718, 14), which reports that such unfortunates were, “obliged to let their Urine pass through a Pipe of Metal, which they apply to the Place of that which Nature had given them and is since cut off.” The idea was not restricted to medicine: Poet Anton Francesco Grazzini’s Le cene features a teacher tricked into damaging his penis so badly that it has to be amputated and he resorts to a brass tube in order to urinate. See Finucci (2003, 252). For the continuing association of urinary policing with sexuality, see Halberstam (1998, 20–29). The meanings of bodily fluids could be complicated. McClive (2015) argues that perceptions of menstruation as quintessentially female and toxic require revision. The fluid female body was procreative, while the male body was also understood to menstruate. The anatomy of the penis was somewhat confused. Vicary (1651, 86) insisted there were separate passages for urine and semen, but cited Avicenna claiming that men had three “holes” – one for urine, one for semen, and one for “insensible polisons and wind.” On the artistic expression of gender in humoral terms, see Filipczak (1997). Benedetti first appeared in print in 1502, but his work circulated in the 1490s. Early modern painters expected viewers to recognize the signs of castration in portraiture. See Camiz (1988). In 1743, Casanova commented on the breasts of a castrato he called “Bellino”. See Casanova (1993, 1: 233). Serano (2007, 68–69) notes that the sense of smell changes after transition. Walter Curry considered the Pardoner to be a castrate from birth. Robert P. Miller claimed the Pardoner was only spiritually sterile. Beryl Rowland countered that the Pardoner is, “a testicular pseudo-hermaphrodite of the feminine type” (1979, 143). Where Robert Firth Green (1982) has insisted that the Pardoner is conventional in his sexual abilities and desires, Monica McAlpine (1980), John Bowers (2001), and Stephen Kruger (1994) demur, arguing that the Pardoner is homosexual. Jeffrey Rayner Myers (2000) goes rather further, contending that the Pardoner is a female transvestite. In a different vein, Elspeth Whitney (2011) situates the Pardoner within medieval categories of medical knowledge, pointing out that he would be considered phlegmatic in the humoral medical tradition. Whitney is in part answering Dinshaw (1989, 157–158) who commented that the Pardoner was not definitively either man or woman. Burney famously went looking for establishments advertising castration, but found none and encountered denials and redirection whenever he posed the question. See (Burney 1959, 247). For some of the excuses given by or on behalf of famous castrati, see Feldman (2009, 177). For extensive descriptions of testicular operations, see vol. 3, 7.18–24. At times, castration is required, as at 7.22.5. Leprosy and elephantiasis were often considered the same disease. In Calvin’s Geneva, a marriage could be annulled if either partner suffered from leprosy/elephantiasis. See

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35 36 37 38

39 40

39

Witte and Kingdon (2005, 210, 295). Vigo (1586, 263r) noted that gout, “chaunceth not to gelded men.” Wiseman obliged the man by beginning the operation, but the patient changed his mind after the first incision. See Wiseman (1686, 487–560) for venereal disease treatments. Early modern sources listed many types of hernia, categorizing them according to their humoral etiology. Read (1687, 597–606) offered instructions to cure hernia intestinalis (with the peritonaeum intact or ruptured); hernia omentalis (modern inguinal hernia); hernia aquosa (water in the scrotum); hernia ventosa (“windy” obtrusions treated with digestives); sarcocele (a “fleshy” tumor of the testicle); hydrosarcocele (chronic swelling of the testicle, usually a circumscribed collection of fluid in the tunica vaginalis); and hernia varicosa (a rupture or dilation of the testicular veins). The number of different types varied and seems to have expanded over time. Vigo (1586, 117r) described six kinds; Barbette (1676, 33–34) listed 12 varieties. Edwards (1639, 28) provides a chart of tumors and hernias. Avicenna preferred cauterization. See Warren (1884, 99, 417) for a partial list of practitioners who preferred cauterization. Originally from Lanfranks Science of Surgery (c. 1295); translated from Latin into Middle English (c. 1380). Some Middle English updated for clarity. On Chauliac’s understanding of medicine, see Ogden (1973). For the discussion of hernia, see Bell (1791, 1: 242–527). His method of extirpating a cancerous testicle may be found at (ibid., 1: 520–522). On Bell, see Macintyre (2011), who notes that Bell’s work, although popular and widely circulating, was criticized at the time. Bell modeled his treatise on Lorenz Heister’s General System of Surgery, originally published in German in 1743. Bell also published separately testicular diseases. See Bell (1794). Salmon encountered situations in which the penis also had to be removed. See (1698, 1: 1001–1002). The exceptional case of Thomas/Thomasine Hall (1629) in colonial Virginia in a sense proves the rule. Thomas/Thomasine was required by law to wear both male and female clothing, punitively marking him/her as gender non-conforming. See Brown (1995).

2

The castration conundrum Civil law creates sexual disability

According to medical belief, the surgical practice of castration made the male body feminine, if not quite female, a change that subverted the laws of nature. What, then, could human law do about castration? If castration made a man more like a woman, how was a castrate to be treated? As a man or a woman? The choice mattered a great deal, since law was (and often still is) highly gender inflected. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, free men had legal protections and access to resources that women, free or otherwise, did not. If a castrate approximated a woman physiologically, did he lose access to those rights and privileges? Did it matter what kind of castrate he was? The short version of the answers to those two questions is “no” and “yes” respectively. The story is more complicated than that, of course. The logic that prevailed in Roman law established a set of principles that some castrates had rights while others did not. Access to marriage, inheritance rights, and, in the late Roman Empire, admission to the clerical hierarchy, depended on falling within prescribed categories of genital integrity. Because so much hinged on this, Roman emperors repeatedly declared castration illegal. After Roman power waned, castration remained against the law, but it was utilized as a form of punishment under some circumstances. Extra-legal castration remained largely unacceptable, although its appearances in the historical record contribute to our understanding of what castration meant in pre-modern cultural contexts. When Roman law reappeared in the eleventh century, castrates, like much else from antiquity, had to be explained within the terms of the law even when the ancient sources seemed contradictory. Jurists proposed several resolutions of the conflicting elements of the law, largely in order to define the increasingly visible population of deliberately castrated boys that started appearing especially in early modern “Italy.”1 Where ancient law allowed room for most castrates, early modern jurisprudence settled on far narrower readings of their legal status. Regarded as incompletely masculine in body, castrates suffered in legal status as well, with broad legal disadvantages applied to them. Supporting the medical characterization of the castrate’s body as gender transgressive and therefore unreliable, the law enshrined the castrate as legally disabled. Over time, the law solidified the association of castration with humiliation, punishment, and (intentional) feminization,

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fusing disability and transsexual gender expression as mutually supporting pejorative embodied states of being.

1. Roman rights and wrongs The legal remains of the Roman Empire suggest that castrates were fairly common. Laws addressing castration and their implications for castrates pepper the surviving sources. Given its paternalistic and masculinist political and social structure, Rome might seem likely to be hostile to men who lacked or lacked the use of a crucial element of male physiology. Castrates occupied an ambiguous gender locus that put them uncomfortably close to women in many ways. However, Roman law considered castrates within the same logic that prevailed for intact men regarding such matters as inheritance, adoption, marriage, and property. At the same time, questions asked about the castrate’s status indicated concern about his status relative to “normal” men: Was the will of a castrate valid? Could castrates make testamentary bequests? Could they adopt children? Could castrates serve as legal guardians for women or children? What was the castrate’s status relative to laws that required Roman citizens to marry and procreate?2 What rights and responsibilities applied to castrates? In what ways were they disabled civic subjects? How much of their civic disability was predicated on their physiology? Why was the law concerned to clarify the gender implications for men who might be less than convincingly masculine? How much was sexual capacity a condition of male privilege? Over its long history, Roman law answered these questions, although most of the answers appear in late and fragmentary form. The key source is the Corpus iuris civilis, comprised of the Digest, the Codex (or Code, revised in 534), and the Novellae (Justinian’s enactments from 535 to 565).3 Within the Corpus, the Digest is especially significant, both for what it tells us about castrates in antiquity and for how these provisions were interpreted by medieval and early modern jurists. Compiled under Justinian (r. 527–565), the Digest is a collection of short accounts of laws and precedents that were still useful in the sixth century. It is divided into 50 books, and subdivided into topics (“Titles”) within each book. The jurists who supplied the original opinions are noted, of whom Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus, died 228) was a major contributor. Ulpian had served under Papinian, an older jurist and praetorian prefect, and like Papinian, Ulpian commented on existing law, especially in the Libri ad Sabinum (an incomplete text on civil law) and the Libri ad edictum (focusing on praetorian edicts). When Justinian’s compilers, headed by Tribonian (who would later be much reviled for his efforts), set to work on the Digest, Ulpian’s opinions provided a significant proportion of the material (Hotman 1603). Other contributors include Julian (second century AD), Modestinus (early third century), and Paul (Julius Paulus Prudentissima, early third century). Several other sources are important in addition to the Digest. The second century handbook, the Institutes by Gaius, is almost complete and offers information about laws that were no longer valid when the Digest was

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Inceptions

compiled. The Sententiae Pauli and the Rules of Ulpian were influential as well.4 Justinian directed the compilation of the Codex Justinianus, which includes commentaries, rescripts, and imperial enactments from the reign of Hadrian (117–138) until 534, when the Codex was published.5 Jurists assembled the laws of emperors from Constantine to Theodosius II (408–450) in 438 as the Codex Theodosianus, which included material not otherwise collected, rather than extant juristic opinions. Laws after the Codex Theodosianus were compiled as Novellae into the sixth century (Matthews 2000). Within Roman law, the organizing principle that governed castrates in relation to civil society was the familia. A legal construct imagined as a universal category, the familia had specific membership criteria that seem at first glance to exclude castrates. A paterfamilias headed the familia, which in ideal form included his biological children born to his legal wife (or wives in succession), and the male descendants of those children (Frier and McGinn 2004, 3–5; Treggiari 1991; Grubbs 2002). The familia required a male head, and kept other men in a lesser status, although many remained eligible to become a paterfamilias at some point. The central concern in Roman law relative to the familia was the disposition of property, which necessarily intersected with questions of reproductive capacity.6 Strategies to maintain and enhance the familia depended on its members preserving and expanding its resources. Roman familiae used adoption and adrogation (adoption of a person who is sui juris, that is, free and not under another person’s legal power) to further their interests. The right to adopt if a man lacked sexual capacity might seem like an obvious way for the law to encourage the preservation of the familia, but physical capacity had to be specifically recognized as a condition under which adoption could occur. Jurists early on insisted that potency was not the qualification; potestas was. This meant that the man adopting had to be a free Roman citizen and a paterfamilias (Gardner 1998, 148–149; D.50.16.195). As Gaius put it, “It is common of both kinds of adoption [regular and adrogation], that those persons who can not procreate, such as spadones, can adopt.” [Illud vero utriusque adoptionis commune est, quod et hi qui generare non possunt, quales sunt spadones, adoptare possunt] (Ius 1: 103).7 Here, Gaius used “spado” (pl. spadones) to designate a man who could not procreate without specifying the nature of his defect. This lack of specificity seems to indicate that generically defined men with impaired or defective genitals could adopt or adrogate in order to fulfil their obligations to the familia. Not only were spadones not excluded from rights and obligations under Roman law, they were actually explicitly provided for. Hence the Digest notes that spadones can adrogate: “A spado can obtain an heir for himself by adrogation, nor is his physical disability an impediment.” [Spado adrogando suum heredem sibi adscrirere potest nec ei corporale vitium impedimento est] (D.1.7.40.2). In addition to adoption and adrogation, spadones could make wills, as long as they were at least 18 years old (Ius 1:133). Roman law is emphatic that castrates defined as spadones have full rights to manage the familia. It is important that the term “spado” seems to include

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all manner of castrates: “Ulpian in his first book on the Julian and Papian law: spado is the general category: under that term are included those spadones by nature, likewise thlibiae [and/or] thlasiae, but even if there is another kind of spado, they are contained [under the term spado].” [Ulpianus libro primo ad legem Iuliam et Papiam: Spadonum generalis appellatio est: quo nomine tam hi, qui natura spadones sunt, item thlibiae thlasiae, sed et si quod aliud genus spadonum est, continentur] (D. 50.16.128). Thlasiae referred to men whose testicles had suffered from crushing, derived from the Greek thlan (to crush). Additional types were designated as spadones as well: Thlibiae came from the Greek thlibein (to press). The method of castration here was compression of the vas deferens, and like crushing, did not require amputation of the testicles (Kuefler 2001, 33; Stevenson 1995, 496–497).8 If Ulpian suggests that castrates who had genitals and then lost the use of them were the same as men who never had them, the reason was that all castrates could adopt: “Spadones, however, who cannot generate, can adopt, and though they cannot generate children, they can adopt children.” [Spadones autem, qui generare non possunt: et licet filios generare non possint, quos adoptaverint, filios habere possunt: et licet filios generare non possint adoptaverint, filios habere possunt] (Ius 1:198; Epitome 1.5.3). Ulpian’s capacious spado of the second century, however, became a crucially limited term by the sixth century. The distinction at first separated men who had been injured or suffered from illness that damaged the testicles or destroyed their efficacy from men born entirely lacking testicles or all male genitalia. A man born without male genitals was excluded and called a “castrato.” As is clear in the Institutes of Justinian, spadones came to refer to men whose testicles had been damaged or destroyed, while castrati never had functional genitals. The difference had significant legal implications: “This is common to both kinds of adoption: that those who cannot generate, such as spadones, can adopt. Castrati, however, cannot” [Sed et illud utriusque adoptionis commune est, quod et hi, qui generare non possunt, quales sunt spadones, adoptare possunt: castrati autem non possunt] (Institutes 1.11.9). Although this fragment is clear, modern scholars continue to debate the larger frame of castrate adoption rights. Carmela Russo Ruggieri believes that castrati (in this specific sense in Roman law) had been banned before, with this section of the Institutes consolidating earlier practice. Jane Gardner demurs, arguing that the exclusion of castrati was a late development, with castrati only at that point barred from adoption (Ruggieri 1990, 293–305; Gardner 1998, 150–151). Regardless of the historical development in ancient law, the distinction between the spado and the castrato would prove momentous in early modernity. In antiquity, the title known as Si serva § si spadoni indicated that the spado retained his legal rights: Where a woman marries a spado, I think that a distinction must be drawn between a man who has been castrated and one who has not, so that if he has been castrated, you may say that there cannot be a dowry;

44

Inceptions but where a man has not been castrated, there is a dowry and an action for it, because here, a marriage can take place. [Si spadoni mulier nupserit, distinguendum arbitror, castratis fuerit necne, ut in castrato dicas dotem non esse: in eo qui castratus non est, quia est matrimonium, et dos et dotis actio est].9 (D. 23.3.39.1)

A spado could marry and engage in inheritance and property transactions because his disability was the result of accident or illness, rather than the calculated action of castration. Implicitly, intention mattered: deliberate unmanning indicated that a castrate had been forcibly subject to the power of another man. A spado had not, and thus, was still a man, even if he had been damaged in a way that might seem to undermine his claims within the familia structure. The castrato was understood as born sexually incapacitated, which might seem to suggest that he was even less responsible for his condition. Instead, never having had sexual capacity meant that the castrate was barred from male status. But the Digest did not make the distinctions simple for future jurists. At one point, impaired ability is held up as distinct from a chronic condition: “It appears to me that the better view is that a spado is not diseased, but healthy, as long as he has one testicle and is able to generate” [Spadonem morbosum non esse neque vitiosum verius mihi videtur, sed sanum esse, sicuti illum, qui unum testiculum habet, qui etiam generare potest] (D.21.1.6). This reading – that a spado had one functional testicle – would be invoked much later to justify narrowing the intention of Roman law. All that mattered in Roman law was that the spado qualified as a paterfamilias on the assumption that his “normal” state of being included reproductive capacity: “If someone institutes posthumous heirs, who for reasons of age or health is perhaps incapable of having them, his previous will is broken [i.e. he is allowed to make or change his will], because in the matter of fathering children, nature and the usual state of affairs should be regarded, rather than a temporary defect or ill-health on account of which the man is deprived of the faculty of generating” [Si quis postumos, quos per aetatem aut valetudinem habere forte non potest, heredes instituit, superius testatmentum rumpitur, quod natura magis in homine generandi et consuetudo spectanda est, quam temporale vitium aut valetudo, propter quam abducatur homo a generandi facultate] (D.28.2.9). The physical capacity of the spado does not prevent him from adrogating either: “A spado can adrogate to obtain his heir, his bodily defect is not an impediment” [Spado adrogando suum heredem sibi adscrirere potest nec ei corporale vitium impedimento est] (D. 1.7.40.2; Ius, 1:198). On the one hand, the spado in the Roman law sense enshrined a commitment to “normal” sexual function; on the other hand, it remained generous in interpreting the capacity for that function as broadly as possible. The law assumed that the castrate’s impediment, even if permanent, was insignificant in comparison to his fundamental capacity – his presumptive original state of sexual potency – as a fully male legal person.

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The spado, in sum, could be accommodated in Roman law because his defect was not considered foundational to his being. His sexual incapacity came into being after he was already defined as legally capable as a man. Ulpian makes the distinction between the spado and the castrato clear: But the question is raised, whether someone who does not have complete power of reproduction can appoint a posthumous heir. Cassius and Javolenus write that he can, because he can marry and adopt children. Labeo and Cassius write that one who is a spado can also institute a posthumous heir, since to that, neither age nor sterility can be considered as impediments. But if he has been castrated, then Julian agrees with the opinion of Proclus that he cannot institute a posthumous heir, and that is the opinion we follow. A hermaphrodite clearly, if there will be virility prevalent in him, can institute a posthumous heir. [Sed est quaesitum, an is, qui generare facile non possit, postumum heredem facere possit. et scribit Cassius et Javolenus posse: nam et uxorem ducere et adoptare potest: spadonem quoque posse postumum heredem scribere et Labeo et Cassius scribunt: quoniam nec aetas nec sterilitas ei rei impedimento est. Sed si castratus sit, Iulianus Proculi opinionem secutus non putat postumum heredem posse instituere, quo iure utimur. Hermaphroditum plane, si in eo virilia praevalebunt, postumum heredem instituere poterit]. (D. 28.2.6) Ulpian allows that the spado can be understood as having or having had reproductive capacity and that is sufficient. Once a male child is born with his genitals intact, he is presumed to have access to that masculinity, even if his genitals are later damaged or destroyed. But the lingering biology of masculinity does not apply in cases of intentional castration. The castrato could never lay claim to the privileges that “normal” men could never lose even if they were in abeyance. The additional tag regarding hermaphrodites supports the logic that spadones preserved some fundamental aspect of masculinity, but congenitally castrated men did not, and accordingly, did not enjoy familial authority. Just because Roman law protected the rights of certain types of men who had been castrated did not mean that the law approved of all castrates – quite the contrary. While the law secured the rights of some castrates within the familia, legal authorities simultaneously pressed for the prevention of human castration. The law preferred men whose prospects as fathers were on a more secure foundation than (grudgingly) permitted adoption and adrogration. The law privileged family structure and smooth property transfer, and men who did not inhabit the physical ideal of paternal masculinity might experience diminished status in the familia.10 Spadones were legally acceptable, but as the laws against castration indicated, it was far better not to castrate men at all. The surviving point of origin for barring castration is Sulla’s (dictator

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82–81 BCE) lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, which is remaindered in the Digest in five separate fragments: D. 48.8.3.5 (Marcianus); 48.8.4.2 (Ulpian); 48.8.5 (Paul); 48.8.6 (Venuleius Saturninus); and 48.8.11 (Modestinus). If the Digest itself is an indication of continuity – only laws that were considered still relevant were incorporated in it – the specifics of several fragments point toward the expansive use of law over time for barring castration. Ulpian (d. 228) quotes Hadrian (r. 117–138), who invokes a law from the dictatorship of Sulla: The same deified Hadrian wrote in a rescript: “It is laid down, in order to end the practice of making spadones, that those who are found guilty of this crime are to be liable to the penalty of the lex Cornelia, and their goods must deservedly be forfeit to my imperial treasury. Slaves, however, who castrate others, are to be punished with the extreme penalty. If those who are liable on this charge fail to appear in court, the sentence is to be pronounced in their absence as if they were liable under the lex Cornelia. It is certain that if those who have suffered this outrage announce the fact, the provincial governor must give those who have lost their manhood a hearing; for no one should castrate another, freeman or slave, willing or unwilling, nor should anyone voluntarily offer himself for castration. Should anyone act in defiance of my edict, the doctor performing the operation shall suffer a capital penalty, as shall anyone who voluntarily offered himself for surgery.” [Idem divus Hadrianus rescripsit: “Constitutum quidem est, ne spadones fierent, eos autem, qui hoc crimine arguerentur, Corneliae legis poena teneri eorumque bona merito fisco meo vindicari debere, sed et in servos qui spadones fecerint, ultimo supplicio animadvertendum esse: et qui hoc crimine tenentur, si non adfuerint, de absentibus quoque, tamquam lege Cornelia teneantur, pronuntiandum esse. Plane si ipsi, qui hanc iniuriam passi sunt, proclamaverint, audire eos praeses provinciae debet, qui virilitatem amiserunt: nemo enim liberum servumve invitum sinentemve castrare debet, neve quis se sponte castrandum praebere debet. at si quis adversus edictum meum fecerit, medico quidem, qui exciderit, capitale erit, item ipsi qui se sponte excidendum praebuit”]. (D. 48.8.4.2) The only non-culpable person is the unwilling castrate, which points to an ambiguity introduced here: “making spadones” seems to indicate that spadones could be the result of deliberate castration, and thus within the category of castrati. But the rescript emphasizes that the spado has recourse if his castration was maliciously done, again, distinguishing him from the castrato. In addition to Hadrian’s rescript, the Digest included a law fining owners half their property if they had a slave castrated (D. 48.8.6). Reiterating the lex Cornelia, a second title specified that the penalty for castrating a man “for lust or gain” [libidinis vel promercii causa castraverit] depended on the status of the person responsible. If lower on the social scale, the person responsible

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was to be crucified or thrown to the beasts, both of which were shameful punishments. Higher-ranking individuals were to be sentenced to deportation to an island (D. 48.3.4–5; Ius, 1: 175). Just in case someone tried to argue that they had not castrated a man because they merely crushed his testicles, the Digest closed that potential loophole by declaring such action to be the same with respect to the law (D. 48.8.5; D. 50.16.128). According to the law, no man, not even a slave, should be castrated, and the penalties for castrating humans were harsh. The simultaneous hostility to castration and inability to stamp it out is reflected in the repetition of efforts to eliminate the practice. Castration seems to have served two main purposes. Slave-owners castrated boys to keep them looking youthful, often using this a selling point when castrates were employed in brothels. As with later practice in eastern harem settings, castrates could be used as intimate servants to elite women without threatening the family line. The emperor Domitian (r. 81–96) forbade castration and reduced the price that dealers were allowed to charge for their remaining stock of enslaved castrates.11 According to Cassius Dio, Nerva (r. 96–98) also outlawed castration (Cassius Dio 68.2.4). Provincial governors were charged with upholding the law, and in at least one case, did so: When one Felix sought permission to self-castrate with the help of a surgeon, the governor of Alexandria forbade it (Martyr 1857–1866, 6: col. 373). A law under Constantine in the Codex Justinanus reiterated the penalties once again, this time without distinction regarding the form or extent of castration: “If anyone after this sanction should make eunuchs in the Roman Empire, he will be capitally punished” [Si quis post hanc sanctionem in orbe Romano, eunuchos fecerit, capite puniatur] (C 4.42.1).12 The emperor Leo’s (r. 457–465) effort to squelch the traffic in castrates followed in the form of a law that penalized not only the person selling the castrate, but the notary who received payment for the paperwork (C. 4.42.2). But as the law reiterated and extended the punishment for human castration, jurists moved away from the spado/castrato distinction, referring to all castrates as “eunuchs.” The change in language occurred as jurists from Constantine onward refined the treatment of and attitudes toward castrates expressed in law. Although Christian influence did not radically change the legal framework around castration, heightened concern about sexual ethics did produce some alterations in later Roman law. Justinian’s Novel 142 reiterated the draconian fiscal penalties and exile (although capital punishment no longer applied). The initial justification was that, “out of the great number of those upon whom this operation is performed only a very few survive, so that certain of them have stated in Our presence that of ninety who have been castrated, hardly three have escaped with their lives.” Described as murder and an offence “against God and the law,” Justinian’s law included the additional clause freeing all castrates: “We direct that castrated persons who have been made such in Our Empire (no matter in whose house this may have been done) shall be considered as emancipated from the date of the twelfth

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indiction of the present month, shall become free, and shall never again be reduced to servitude” [Ipsos autem castratos tametsi oportebat iam ab antiquioribus temporibus, at utique iubemus a duodecima indictione cycli nunc praeteriti per quemcumque in locis rei publicae nostrae castratos liberos esse, nec ullo modo ullove genere contractus in servitutem retrahi]. To prevent any attempt to get around this by recourse to medical necessity, the law announced that, “If a slave should happen to be castrated on account of some illness, we order that he shall obtain his freedom” [Si tamen propter morbum contingat ut servus castretur, illum quoque iubemus libertate portiri] (Scott 1973, 17: tit. 25, no. 142 p. 162; my translation).13 On the one hand, Justinian barred castrates from their traditional right to adopt and adrogate; on the other hand, the law could be understood as expressing sympathy for the castrate who survived the procedure. Danilo Dalla postulates that Justinian considered castrates ineligible to adopt and adrogate because a man without testicles or hope of biological paternity was not natural, and adoption ought to imitate nature (Dalla 1978, 181). If so, Justinian departed from earlier understandings that adoption by spadones was a “natural” way to form a family (Ius 1:103). Gardner suggests that the explicit barring of castrates from adoption and adrogration may have been prompted by moral concerns. Observers associated castration with male–male sodomy and male prostitution, both of which were heavily penalized in late Roman law. Access to the normalizing practice of family-formation through adoptive parenthood may have become unacceptable because of the assumption that castrates were morally compromised (Gardner 1998, 154).14 Broadly, Christian sexual ethics seems to undergird the increasing hostility toward castrates. Whether as sex objects for male homosexual sodomy or as sterile partners for women seeking to avoid pregnancy, castrates became more problematic over time.15 As Mathew Kuefler has argued, the early Christian construction of celibacy and chastity as voluntary made actual castrates objects of scorn. Christian masculinity required that celibacy represent a struggle for sexual continence, and castrates, even if they retained some sexual function, were presumed to be less subject to desire (Kuefler 2001). Late Roman law supported the Christian preference for celibacy, upholding voluntary celibacy as superior to actual castration, which remained illegal as well as repudiated by the Catholic Church. Where earlier Roman law allowed for most castrates under the term “spado,” later Roman law narrowed and hardened the categories. “Eunuch” replaced spado in the Codex, and the rights and protections that a man had enjoyed if he was castrated after birth receded from view. Even as it continued to pursue castrators, the law no longer protected men from the accidents that cost them the procreative use of their genitals. Where family stability and property could accommodate some castrates, the sexual ethics of Christianity and imperative of voluntary celibacy meant that castrates had to be barred from access to full male personhood. Legal ability had been turned into legal disability.

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2. Exemplary unmanning With the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the fifth century, laws around castration were tailored to new kinds of immediate needs.16 As Trevor Dean has summarized, medieval punishments generally distinguished between “medicinal” and “repressive” penalties. The former aimed at bringing a criminal to repentance and often included compensation for the victims as a means to facilitate social order. The latter utilized permanent physical alteration (such as mutilation) or removal from the community (such as death or banishment) (Dean 2001, 134).17 Castration crosses these categories because testicles were offered, sometimes explicitly, as “payment” for a crime committed, but that payment permanently marked the body of the criminal. At the same time, the punitive structures of medieval law understood castrates – following both medical readings of the castrated body as feminized and the legal tradition that curtailed the rights of castrates – as disabled and, attenuated in their access to normative masculinity. The implicit joining of disability and loss of gender status of late Roman law flourished in its medieval legal descendants. Castration in medieval law variously (sometimes simultaneously) deprived a man of political power, lineage, and access to paternal authority; eliminated future rivals by rendering the castrate incapable of fathering children; marked a man as less than fully a man; and compensated an aggrieved or injured party. Perhaps because of its many and profound implications, punitive castration does not seem to have been regularly or widely practiced.18 The infrequency of its application can be understood to mean that castration was a severe punishment, and accordingly less likely to be inflicted. Given that men were supposed to marry and have children or enter the church and demonstrate their piety through sexual abstinence, castration obviated access to anything like a normal life, assuming the man survived. Most legal codes that prescribe castration as a punishment do it along the lines of “an eye for an eye” logic. The Latin version, the lex talionis (law of talion) is inscribed in the Twelve Tables, but earlier versions may be found in ancient Babylonian (the Code of Hammurabi) and Jewish law.19 Scholars understand these laws to limit compensation and specify the value of losses to prevent eruptions of unrestrained feuding. Rather than endorse actual talion in the form of a testicle for a testicle, laws frequently prescribed payment for genital injuries inflicted on other men. The Lex Frisionum declared, “If one has cut off another’s penis, he must pay his wergild” [Si veretrum quis alium absciderit, weregildum suum componat]. Testicles were rated at half a wergild each (Sec. 57, p. 72). Wergild is necessary because the injured man cannot procreate. This is made explicit in a series of fines noted by Rolf Bremmer: “Whenever a man is wounded…so that he can no longer create offspring: nine marks as a compensation for the nine children he might have begotten.” The fine is reduced if the victim already has children (Bremmer in CC, 125). In her analysis of the body in early medieval law codes, Lisi Oliver observed,

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Inceptions

“The laws generally do not distinguish between castration and amputation of the penis: the crucial disability is the loss of the ability to create offspring.” Hence, the laws of Æthelberht allow for three times the wergild if a man’s genitals have been damaged to the point that he has lost all generative capacity (2011, 128–129, 134). Jay Paul Gates has found the same concern for compensating for the loss of procreative function at work in the laws of King Alfred (in CC, 146–147). The Lex Ribvaria included similar logic (Tit. 6, p. 76). In the Lex Alamannorum, total destruction or removal of the genitals rated double the fine of lesser damage to the testicles or penis (p. 127, 52.58–59; 65.30–31). The same was true in the Pactus leges salica (Salicae Tit. 32, nos. 17, 18).20 Icelandic law considered castration to be among the “major wounds,” for which retribution was allowed (Laws/Iceland 1: 141). In virtually all the extant codes, damage or destruction of the genitals was a serious business. Given the value of male genitalia, they could be used to “pay” for many sorts of crime. Typically, one or both testicles (usually without including the penis) constituted recompense for sexual crimes or theft. Theft may seem less than obvious. According to Patricia Simons, early modern Europeans understood the testicles as analogically akin to purses because of their structure and because they contained “wealth” in the form of semen. The testicles produced seed and enabled men to project it, indicating their potency, and controlling “expenditure” was a crucial element in male claims to self-control. While Simons focuses on a later period, the rich metaphorical world around testicles and their associations with masculinity had (and has) deep cultural roots (Simons 2011).21 The association of testicles with wealth and expenditure indicates why castration was enacted as a penalty for theft. The Pactus legis salicae (c. 507?) punished slaves for theft if they could not pay a substantial fine: “The slave who steals something worth forty denarii shall be castrated or pay two hundred forty denarii (i.e. six solidi)” (Laws/Salian Franks 77). The Lex Salica Karolina, the revision prepared in 802–803 under Charlemagne, includes 12 out of the 65 original laws; among the inclusions is the provision for castrating slaves who have been caught stealing (Laws/Salian Franks 201).22 When six thieves were blinded and castrated in 1124, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle defended the punishment as an appropriate response to theft. The next year, Henry I ordered the castration of “all the mint-men” who were debasing the coinage – another kind of theft (Anglo-Saxon 477–478). As for sexual crime, courts and kings did not always approve, but the historical record is replete with incidents in which adulterers were castrated. One way of reading these cases is in terms of theft as well as sexual misbehavior. A man who cuckolded another man in effect “stole” the sexual intimacy the wife owed her husband.23 A judicial decision in Spain (fazaña) from the thirteenth century opined that a husband who castrated his wife’s lover was liable to be punished by hanging. The logic was that the husband had stolen from the lover, which was apparently worse than killing his wife. The law maintained that the husband did nothing wrong if he killed his wife, presuming he

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24

caught her in the act of committing adultery. In Ireland in 1307, the wine merchant Jon Don castrated his wife’s lover, Stephen O’Regan, after catching the couple together. O’Regan won an action for assault and was awarded £20, although Don won partial restitution (£2) in a counter suit for damage to goods from his house (Cosgrove 1985, 36–37). In 1248, Matthew Paris reported that Godfridus or Godfrey de Millers of Norfolk, a knight, entered the home of John Briton [Johannes Britonis] in order to have sex with John’s daughter. Godfrey was seized, hung upside-down, and castrated by John and his men: “And he was completely exposed to the enemy, who cut off his genital members and shamefully mutilated him…and castrated him and drove out the semi-man” [Et cum hostium penitus arbitrio exponeretur, abscisis membris genitalibus turpiter mutilatur… et sic castratus et vulneratus ejectus est semiviris]. The king rebuked John and forbade genital mutilation of adulterers (Paris 1872–1883, 3:34–35).25 Whatever sympathy for Godfrey there may have been from Matthew Paris, or indeed from the king, Godfrey nonetheless “paid” the price – and permanently. Other sexual “goods” that might require payment included a woman’s virginity, especially if her virginity was lost because of sexual assault. In theory, castration was a punishment for rape, and the principle of retribution in kind features prominently in Bracton’s justification: Among other appeals there is an appeal called the rape of virgins. The rape of virgins is a crime imputed by a woman to the man by whom she says she has been forcibly ravished against the king’s peace. If he is convicted of this crime [this] punishment follows: the loss of members, that there be member for member, for when a virgin is defiled she loses her member and therefore let her defiler be punished in the parts in which he offended. Let him lose his eyes, which gave him sight of the maiden’s beauty for which he coveted her. And let him lose as well the testicles, which excited his hot lust. [Est inter alia appella quoddam appellum quod dicitur de raptu virginum. Et est raptus virginum quoddam crimen quod femina imponit alicui, de quo se dicit esse violenter oppressam contra pacem domini regis, quod quidem crimen si convincatur, sequitur poena, scilicet amissio membrorum, ut sit membro, quia virgo cum corrumpitur membrum amittit. Et ideo corruptor puniatur in eo in quo deliquit. Oculos igitur amittat propter aspectum decoris quo virginem concupivit. Amittat etiam testiculos qui calorem stupri induxerunt]. (Bracton 1968, 2: 414–415) Bracton then specifies the circumstances in which this punishment might be meted out, restricting it to cases of forcible penetration of a respectable woman who made immediate complaint, showed evidence of having resisted the assailant, and only if she repeated her account exactly in each legal setting could the penalty be carried out.26 Despite limited use, castration of rapists

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was on the books in a variety of jurisdictions.27 The Norman Leis Willelme, dated to between 1090 and 1135, included castration for sexual assault: “If someone assaults a woman by force, he forfeits his members…If he assaults her, he forfeits his members” [Cil ki purgist femme a force, forfeit ad les membres…S’il la purgist, forfeit de membres] (Willelme 1: 504, no. 18).28 Bologna in 1288 and Ferrara in 1287 enacted laws allowing castration in place of the death penalty for rape (Brundage 2008, 471). The village of San Gueninello in Tuscany ordered the castration of a man who impregnated his sister in 1414 (Cohn 1996, 101–102). In Normandy, a man who took a woman by force “will be punished by his members” [l’espeneira par les membres] (Coutumiez vol. 1, part 2, p. 37). In Poitou, a man who raped a woman would either be hanged or lose his testicles, depending on the wishes of his victim […il sera pendu, ou perdra le membre que la femme divisera]. If the man was of higher status than the woman, he could marry her instead (Beautemps-Beaupré 1865, 2:15, no. 335).29 In an economy of sexual value, a woman’s sexual reputation and especially her virginity were goods requiring compensation. How often this happened and whether castration was understood along Bracton’s lines as compensatory for the woman’s lost sexual value and/or the assailant “paid” by matching his social disability with hers remain uncertain. What is clear is that the law imagined a more strictly sexual logic of talion in codes that prescribed castration for male-male sodomy or bestiality. The laws of the Visigoths denounced sex between men as “detestable” and “execrable,” and required castration of both the active inserter and his passive partner. The law of Chindasvindus (also Chindasuinth, c. 563–653) did exclude those who were assaulted (“However, if anyone, not voluntarily but against his will has committed this horrible offence…” [Hoc interim orrendum dedecus si inferens quisque vel patiens non voluntarius]), but reiterated the penalties for anyone who engaged in sodomy willingly (Leges Visigothorum 1:163).30 The Livres de Jostice et de Plet (c. 1260) instituted progressive castration for sodomy: “Those who are proven sodomites must lose their testicles. And if he does it a second time, he loses his penis. And if he does it a third time, he must be burned” [Cil qui sont sodomite prové doivent perdre les c[ullions]. Et se il le fet segonde foiz, il doit perdre menbre. Et se il le fet la tierce foiz, il doit estre ars] (Li Livres Bk. 18, Ch. 24, sec. 22, p. 279). The magistrates of Florence occasionally ordered castration for sodomy (Rocke 1996, 7, 132, 225). The Fuero Real of Alfonso X (the Wise), included castration “before the whole people” [ante todo el pueblo] followed by hanging three days later for male–male sodomy (Codigos 1: 409). Brundage notes that Portuguese law followed the Spanish lead (Law 473). Both the Livres de Jostice and the Visigothic code emphasize the need for proof that sodomy had in fact occurred, suggesting some hesitation about applying the penalty. The match between the body and the punishment is much more of a concern. Bestiality appears less often in the law codes, but the framing of castration points to a blending of punitive models. Bremmer notes that Frisian law offered men guilty of sexual abuse of cattle the option of self-castrating – another

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departure from earlier law. Since the other options were to be buried (under the bodies of the sexually abused cattle) or burned to death, castration was the preferable option if one wanted to live (in CC, 114).31 The castrate paid for his crime, but in choosing the option to live, he might be brought to repentance per the medical model of punishment. The man castrated for bestiality might also be shamed and permanently alienated from the community. This seems to be the intention of the Norse law cited by Kari Ellen Gade: “If a man has intercourse with animals and in this way destroys his Christianity, then that man shall be castrated” (1986, 127). Given that castration rendered a man’s “payment” for his misbehavior perpetual and did so in ways that damaged his status in his community, it seems that castration combines medicinal and repressive elements. The idea of punishment in kind – removing the offending sexual member in cases of rape or of paying with seed from the testicles instead of money – loosely covers a multitude of possibilities expressed in medieval law codes. But there were other notions of how castration functioned as an instrument of the law. The Normans were hardly alone in regarding castration as effeminizing, but Norman cases routinely combined rhetoric about effeminacy with the use of castration to eliminate political enemies by preventing them from reproducing (van Eickels 2004).32 Specific instances of castration of rivals or enemies can be found in various places and times. John Boswell notes that the Empress Theodora took advantage of new laws against homosexuality to attack a young man who insulted her. He was forcibly removed from a church where he sought sanctuary and castrated (Boswell 1980, 173). Charlene Eska discovered several castrations resulting from political rivalry in Welsh annals (Eska in CC, 157–158). A case in which castration was avoided reveals how ending the ability to procreate was central to the punitive intent. In 1250 in Ireland, the Lynotts killed the steward of the Barretts, and were given the option of blinding or castration. They chose blinding, “because blind men could propagate their species, whereas emasculated men could not” (O’Donovan 1844, 337). Several French fabliaux merge the punitive function of castration apparent in medieval legal codes with notions of enforcing bodily conformity on clerics who behave in ways that can be understood as effeminate. Rapacious and lecherous priests are subject to or threatened with castration that put them in their transgendered, disabled place. The incipient effeminacy of the priest is indicated by his propensity for adultery: he cannot control his carnal desire and, like his female partner, he is prone to deceit because of his lack of sexual restraint.33 In Du Prestre crucefié, a master carver, named Roger, who specializes in making crucifixes suspects his wife of adultery. Roger pretends to go to market, but returns to find his wife dining with her lover, a priest. With nowhere else to hide, the priest hangs naked from a crucifix in Roger’s shop. Spying the “hiding” priest, Roger says to his wife: Dame, dist-il, vilainement Ai en cest ymage mespris: J’estoie yvres, ce m’est avis,

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Inceptions Quant je ceste chose i lessai Alumez, si l’amenderai. [Lady, he said, I have blundered/badly with this statue. I was drunk, that is my opinion,/ when I left that thing left there./ Give light, so I can fix it.] (MR 1: 18, ll. 64–68)

Roger cuts off the priest’s genitals (“vit et coilles li trencha/ Que onques riens ne li lessa;” he cut off the penis and balls, so that he left not a thing), and the priest tries to flee (MR 1: 18, ll. 71–72). Roger calls out that his crucifix is escaping and two men catch and beat the priest, who is then returned to Roger and forced to pay 15 livres as ransom in order to get away with his life. The stated moral of the story is that clerics should not carry on with married women, or they risk their manhood (which they shouldn’t be using for sex anyway). Beyond the moral, castration here is imagined as complete ablation, which would render violations of the vow of celibacy impossible. In reducing the priest from a man with designs on superior sexual access to one largely incapable of sex, castration is presented as a just punishment for the priest who has broken his vow of celibacy, and more generally, for men inclined to adultery. The fabliau does not stint on making sure that audiences know castration is something men should fear. Nor is Du prestre crucefié the only fabliau in which the cheating cleric is emasculated in order to highlight his effeminacy and punishment. In Gautier le Leu’s De Connebert (also called Li prestre qui perdi les colles), a blacksmith and his apprentice catch a priest with the blacksmith’s wife. No match for the strength of the wronged husband, the priest is nailed to a forge by his scrotum and forced to castrate himself. Castration is both more and less just than the usual legal process. Castration is an appropriate punishment for clerical incontinence, the tale insists, a form of lex talionis with the priest’s castration meted out in a juridical manner. But the blacksmith denies the priest the traditional exemption from trial on account of his clerical status. At the same time, the manner of castration technically honors the privilege of personal inviolability of the clergy (privilegium canonis).34 Less ceremonial is Du Prestre et du Leu, in which a priest is caught in a trap, along with a wolf who has been killing a farmer’s livestock. The farmer kills the wolf and castrates the priest for carrying on an affair with his wife: “le leu tua et esbourssa/Le prestre” (MR 6: 145, ll. 28–29).35 Even in this brief fabliau, the priest is rendered as weak in spirit and body in comparison to the farmer. Castration materializes punishment as permanent effeminacy. As in the fabliaux, castration as compensation for sexual misbehavior makes several appearances in medieval German Schwankmären. In Heinrich Kautringer’s Die Rache des Ehemannes, a priest reveals that the dice he carries are actually teeth pulled from the mouth of his host secured by means of the priest’s affair with the host’s wife. In revenge, the host castrates the priest and gives him his testicles as a purse, completing the parallel commodification of body parts (Coxon 2008, 71).36 Echoing Connebert, a cuckolded husband

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castrates a priest in Die Wolfsgrube. The husband nails one testicle to the wall opposite the marital bed for his wife to see and forces the maid who was complicit in his wife’s adultery to wear the other as a necklace (Rosenplüt n.p.). Punishment focused on castration shames men, and in the medieval literary tradition, did so pointedly to signal castration as appropriate recompense for sexual misbehavior. For having claimed immoral or illegal access, men paid with permanent corporeal disability. The association of castration with effeminacy and weakness seems to have informed the very public emasculations of men deemed traitors.37 Simon de Montfort (d. 1265) was castrated postmortem (his testicles, along with his hands and feet, were cut off) after losing to royal forces at the Battle of Evesham (Maddicott 1994, 342). A popular hero for his resistance to Norman power, Montfort could be depicted as unmanned and weak, even if it had to be done after his death. The gruesome execution of William Wallace (d. 1305) forcefully asserted that opponents of the king were subject to effeminization: Wallace was castrated while he was still alive (Jones 2010, 48). Sometimes symbolic registers could be combined. Jean Froissart claimed that Hugh Despenser, Edward II’s favorite, was castrated for being a “heretic and sodomite” as well as an enemy of the king [Quant il fut ainsi loye on lui coupa tout prennerement le vit & les couillons pour tant quil estoit heretique & sodomite….traytre de cuer et que par traytre conseil & enortement le roy].38 Just outside the royal orbit, William of Eu was found guilty of treason and castrated. Orderic Vitalis noted that, “This sentence was carried out at the instigation of Hugh, Earl of Chester, whose sister he had married; he had not remained faithful to her, but, neglecting her, had had three children by a concubine” [Hoc nimirum Hugone Cestrensium comite pertulit instigante cuius sororem habebat, sed congruam fidem ei non seruauerat, quia secus enim trinam sobolem de pelice genuerat] (Vitalis 1969–1980, 4: 284–285). For his failure to control himself sexually, William was forcibly controlled by a stronger man. Castration indicated who was in charge and who most definitely was not. Sexually disabling a rival in order to humiliate runs through the use of castration as an exemplary punishment, and thanks to the most famous castrate in the Middle Ages, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), we know that castration was an effective way to damage a man’s sense of self. Abelard allowed that his seduction of Heloïse (c. 1101–1164) and his subsequent efforts to protect his position as a teacher by marrying her in secret provoked Heloïse’s uncle, Fulbert, who spread word of the marriage around Paris. Still trying to protect himself, Abelard placed Heloïse in a convent. Regarding this as an attempt by Abelard to evade his responsibilities, Fulbert arranged for Abelard to be castrated. Although the assault on Abelard was extra-legal, he accepted that in some ways it was deserved: “one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.” Abelard referred to his castration as “my

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mutilation,” and admits that it filled him with “shame and humiliation” (Abelard 1974, 75).39 Two of Abelard’s assailants (although not Fulbert) were caught, castrated, and blinded as punishment for their actions. Although his assailants were punished, Abelard nonetheless feared public humiliation and the loss of his position (ibid., 77).40 Castration, then, shamed Abelard, undermined his access to his profession, and marked him as less than fully male. Abelard’s efforts to counter his abjection indicate how effective castration was as a way to destroy a man’s sense of his own masculinity and how it revealed the vulnerability of the castrate to effeminization. As Martin Irvine has noted, in a mode typical of medieval Christian hagiography, Abelard turned abjection into a divine test that he could display masculine fortitude in passing (Irvine in BM).41 Abelard insisted – following one of the standard narrations of castration – that his “mutilation” meant he no longer suffered from lust. As Yves Ferroul points out, Abelard’s castration was almost certainly the removal or disabling of his testicles (not complete ablation), and Abelard likely still had sexual function (Abelard 1974, 135–137). Castration of this kind typically allows castrates to retain the ability to experience arousal and erection, and many can intromit sterile seminal fluid. As Jacqueline Murray argues, Abelard chose to not stay married to Heloïse because of how he understood his own sexual behavior before and after his castration (Murray 1999, 76–77). Abelard had to refuse desire in order to demonstrate appropriate masculine control over it. Abelard’s suffering because of his castration became a mark of holiness. But Heloïse rejected Abelard’s claims for martyrdom in part because she believed he was punished inappropriately. She accepted castration as punishment for adultery, but noted pointedly that Abelard was a married man – not an adulterer – when he was castrated. For her, Abelard’s castration was a secular crime, rather than a source of salvation (Tracy in CC, 15; Abelard 1974, 130). Abelard insisted otherwise, arguing he was saved by his castration, and so was she (Abelard 1974, 154). Abelard’s torturous struggle to turn castration into a support for masculine self-definition did not entirely succeed. Abelard’s detractors accused him of being “a slave to the pleasures of carnal desire” (Abelard 1974, 98, 148–149). Castration did not eliminate sexual impulses in this reading, but instead, made them more dangerous because the effeminate castrate was less able to control himself because he was less of a man. Over time, the evolution of Abelard and Heloïse into paradigmatic ideal lovers combined with increasing revulsion over Abelard’s castration (Irvine in BM, 92; Tracy in CC, 18). In the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun denounced Abelard’s castration for destroying the very thing Abelard claimed it created: his manhood. Castration robs a man of courage and makes him feminine (Meun, ll. 20007–20044). In the end, Abelard “paid” for getting Heloïse pregnant. His claims for masculine self-possession notwithstanding, Abelard could not father any further children, his position as a cleric was at risk, and he could never entirely counter the charges that he was constitutionally deficient. Like others before and after him, Abelard discovered

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that punitive castration deprived a man of future progeny, enabled the denial of political (and social) power, and marked him as an insufficient man. Where Roman law had initially attempted to mitigate the feminizing effects of castration by preserving the accidental castrate’s access to rights, medieval law codes rendered castration as a public disability and actively sought to disable some men. The genitals were typically personal, private, and hidden, but when damaged or destroyed they became a matter of public concern. Under some circumstances, when a man became a public concern, so did his genitals. As a punishment (for theft or rape or sodomy or something else), castration reflected the importance of the crime that brought it on. The castrate paid his debt in such a way that, if he survived castration, he was forever marked and often subject to social exclusion. When Roman law reappeared as a significant influence in Western Europe in the eleventh century, castration as a punishment disappeared almost entirely, to be replaced by capital punishment in many instances (Berman 1983, 55). In some ways, the effect was the same: castrates did not reproduce, so if the idea was to eliminate a man’s lineage, death worked just as well (assuming the castrate didn’t already have children). In other ways, death removed one of the central punitive effects of castration: the castrate had to live in the world as less than a man. Medieval law codes put the genitally disabled man at a significant disadvantage in his community. The Roman distinction that preserved the dignity of the accidently castrated no longer made any sense in a legal context focused more on the control of violence and less on the complexities of property transmission. The castrated malefactor or the man impaired in the genitals might have been better off dead as far as the law was concerned.

3. Evasion and exclusion The various versions of talion that shaped the laws around castration gave way to new understandings prompted by the rediscovery and revival of Roman law and its legacy of distinctions about castrates. The ancient concerns about adoption and adrogation were no longer salient concerns in daily life (although jurists remained interested in them), while the imprint of debility and effeminacy associated with castration as a punishment colored the interpretive frame around the practice. Using Roman legal distinctions, jurists focused on the nature of genital impairment and its implications for civic personhood as they articulated the social status of castrates. At stake was access for castrates to claim social, political, and cultural integration in their communities. Where much ancient jurisprudence allowed for the accidental castrate and excluded only men defined as congenitally castrated, medieval and early modern methodologies opted for a hostile legal logic that interpreted ancient law in highly exclusionary ways. By the sixteenth century, this negative environment became the context in which intentionally castrated, intentionally disabled boys found themselves. In addition to being

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marked as effeminate or womanly, the castrates who became the singers in opera and the Papal choirs were regarded at law as incapable of and ineligible for the legal protections typically accorded to men. Jurists often moved between Roman law and canon law, and many considered castrates in the light of overlapping secular and ecclesiastical imperatives. The discussion that follows separates Roman and canon law, with property and family formation at the forefront in this chapter and the problem of castrate marriage as a religious and canon law issue in the next chapter. The division is admittedly artificial: Pope Honorius III’s ban on teaching civil law at the University of Paris in 1219 notwithstanding, most canonists were well versed in secular law and vice-versa. Nonetheless, because Roman legal issues around castration focused on property and inheritance and the central concern of canonists was the sacramental status of marriage, distinct lines of legal inquiry and historical lineages can be identified. The recovery of Roman law required the development of new ways of thinking and spawned a professional training program that supplied lawyers and jurists across Europe (Brundage 2008). Roman law was never entirely absent, but its remains in Medieval Europe were partial and often corrupt. The Lex Romana Visigothorum included some classical texts in fragmentary form. Although the Theodosian Code survived, by the beginning of the eighth century, scholars separated the last three books (the Tres libri), retaining the first nine books as a unit. Justinian’s Institutes were known, but the Novellae were only available in an abbreviated form. The Digest seems to have been almost unknown after 603 CE, when Gregory the Great cited it in a letter. The reappearance of the Digest in the late eleventh century (c. 1070) marked the beginning of a profound transformation (Berman 1977; Kuttner 1982). The nature of that transformation was both intellectual and practical. Although there is some disagreement about his importance and he was not the first to gloss Roman texts, Irnerius (c. 1050–after 1125) is credited as a key figure in the study of law at Bologna.42 Developing elaborate interlinear and then marginal glosses of the text, Irnerius and his successors attempted to reconcile the apparent discrepancies and contradictions in the fragmentary remains of Roman law. The glossators of the Corpus iuris civilies accumulated an apparatus of references (allegationes), along with conflicting opinions, driven by Justinian’s insistence that his legislative compilation contained no contradictions. As Kuttner explains, the work around the Corpus enabled the development of a method of interpretation, “the basic principles of hermeneutics” for civil and canon law (1982, 310–311). The central precept was that cases could be understood according to abstract authoritative texts, and decisions had to conform to the over-arching notion that the ius commune was enshrined in Justinian’s corpus. In practice, this meant that jurists developed general rules to govern how seemingly contradictory texts could be harmonized. Explanations in the allegationes could often clarify matters, but where sources could not be resolved with existing authorities, jurists resorted to exception (exceptio) and contraries (contraria). Commentary included any

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quaestiones, or problems presented by the text. Jurists subjected each provision to dialectical inquiry aimed at revealing the rationale that undergirded the text in relation to the larger principles of the Corpus (Brugi 1936, 1: 21–31; Chevrier 1966). Once the method was established, the glossing and teaching of the Corpus iuris civilis at Bologna dominated European legal training for generations.43 After Irnerius, among the important glosses were more extensive treatments by Johannes Bassianus (c. 1180), his student, Azo (d. c. 1230?), and his student Accursius (d. 1263), the last of whom compiled an apparatus for the entire Corpus that remained influential well into the history of printed editions of the Digest. 44 The problems for medieval and early modern jurists involved both what the Digest said and how to square Roman law with practice as it had developed. The central texts around castration did not present great difficulties in themselves, but neither were they entirely pellucid. For medieval jurists, the two most important fragments of the Digest on castration were Si serva § si spadoni (D 23.3.39.1) and Sed est quaesitum (D 28.2.6). The gloss on Si serva remarks on the legal implications of different kinds of castration: “For this is alleged, that a natural impediment is greater than an accidental one” [Maius est impedimentum naturale, quàm accidentale, ad hoc allegatur]. A note on the entire passage emphasizes that a castratus is born incapable of procreation, but a spado might be able to procreate, either because his accident left some testicular tissue (however damaged it might be) or if he had one testicle that could be presumed to be functional. Accordingly, a spado could marry (since his problem is the result of an accident and the physical material remains), but a castrato, who has no hope that his condition might change, cannot (Digestum 1: cols. 2138–2139). The exclusion of men born without the organs of generation does not cause any issues; the accidental spado might. The gloss for Sed est quaesitum attempts to resolve the potential issue, likening the marriages of spadones to the marriages of older men, who are presumed to be past the ability to procreate. The issue would seem to be virility, and the solution to the problem of the spado was that, since he was not born that way, he retained enough masculinity, even if he could not procreate. What exactly masculinity entailed is suggested by way of contrast: the castrate from birth, “because of his frigidity, can neither act nor generate” [qui propter sui frigiditatem nec agere, nec generare potest]. Because of his congenital deficiency, the castrate lacked the ability to engage in legal contracts around marriage, inheritance and dowry. The gloss reiterates that a spado whose genitals were “lost by accident” [ex accidenti amittitur] could act, even though he could not procreate. Defined as a man who had damaged testicles or a single functional testicle, the spado was legally acceptable. He could marry, adopt, and form other testamentary contracts. A castrato born without male genitals (almost certainly imagined as lacking testicles) could not (Digestum 2: col. 384). According to the Digest as read by medieval and early modern jurists, Roman law considered the legal status of the spado to follow that of the intact man, and the law in theory allowed latitude for the accidents

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that might happen to men in the course of life. So far, the medieval understanding remained faithful to the intentions of Roman law. In practical terms, this allowed men who had damaged genitalia to marry or stay married. As Edward Berhend-Martinez argues, while the numbers were never huge either absolutely or as a percentage of marital disputes, castration (actual or made as an accusation usually around impotence) figured regularly in marriage litigation. Behrend-Martinez found 19 cases involving complete or partial castration out of about 250 total cases between 1650 and 1750 in the Spanish dioceses of Calahorra and La Calzada (2007, 129). If the total seems low, it is worth emphasizing that men who had been castrated may have never attempted to marry, and thus avoided legal scrutiny. But intentionally made castrates were not part of the positive architecture of Roman law. Intentionally castrated men were specifically in the category of “castrati” and later “eunuchs” who were barred from property rights (Digestum 3: cols. 1482–1484). The later iterations of Roman law that were more hostile to castrates came to the fore, with intentionally created castrates barred from clerical office, marriage, and guild positions such as masterships that required marriage. When this kind of castrate became more common and visible (especially as singers), jurists faced the conundrum of intentional castration and its implications for the rights of the castrated. Broadly, jurists attempted to provide two main alternatives that might accommodate castrates in ways not covered in received Roman law. The first “solution” allowed some castrated men the same legal standing as genitally normal men by means of a selective reading of the Digest. In place of the spado who had been castrated at some point in his life, jurists following this reading privileged the remark in the Digest (21.1.6) identifying a spado as a man with one functional testicle. Among the earliest versions of this reading is one by Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis, d. 1271). In his Summa aurea (c. 1253), Hostiensis averred that, “if a person had at least one testicle, he could contract” [si saltem unum testiculum quis haberet, quia talis contrahere posset]. Hostiensis distinguished the spado from the castrato and the eunuch on these grounds, and those types of castrates could not contract (Lib. 4, n. 7, col. 1214). The canon lawyer Goffredus de Trani (b. 1245), who studied with Azo at Bologna, concurred. After explaining that castrati cannot make contracts, he argued that spadones can, and the reason is that, “This does not apply where a man has one testicle, such marriages hold” [Secus ubi aliquis habet unum testiculum huiusmodi matrimonium tenet] (nn. 5–6, 375). Along the same lines, canonist and chancellor of the University of Bologna Guido de Baisio (d. 1313) understood spadones as men with one testicle, as did the jurist and conciliarist Ludovico Pontano (c. 1409–1439) and the jurist Alessandro Nievo (1417–1484) (Baisio sig. Oiv(r); pt. 2, C. 32, q. 7; Pontano fol. 35v; Nievo fol. 114r, lib. 5, tit. 15, cap. 2, nos. 4–5).45 Although his point was about castrated men who can fulfil the purposes of marriage, Basque canonist Martín de Azpilcueta (Doctor Navarrus, 1491–1586) noted that spadones were presumed to have one functional testicle (Vol. 2, lib. 4, cons. 3, no. 11,

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121). French magistrate Barnabé Brisson (1531–1591) was more circuitous. Having recited the different kinds of castrates (“Spadonum generalis appellatio est, eóque tam hi qui natura Spadones sunt, item thlibiae, thlasiae, castrati”), he suggested that a spado might be able to procreate, but the others were “sterile” (1596, 602r). The trouble with this line of reasoning was that the Digest, apart from 21.1.6, did not make such a distinction about spadones.46 The Franciscan theologian Miguel de Medina (1489–1578) pointed this out: That thing is certain, spadones who used to be admitted to marriage are not those people, as those against whom we are now disputing thought, because they were deprived of only one testicle. Thence, Ulpian declares that those ought not to be called defective on the authority of Trebatius and Pomponius. And he adds that, it seems more likely to him [Ulpian] that a spado is not either diseased or defective, but he is healthy, just as is also a man who has one testicle can also generate; “So I think that it is sensible to believe that one who only has one testicle, who can generate, ought not be called diseased.” And so Ulpian believes that neither spadones nor semispadones ought to be called diseased. [Illud certum est, spadones qui ad coniugia admittebantur non fuisse eos, ut isti in quos nunc disputamus cogitarunt, quia uno tantum testiculo privati essent….Declarat illic Vlpianus qui morbosi non appellandi, ex Trebatii et Pomponii auctoritate, subditque. Spadonem morbosum non esse neque vitiosum, verius sibi videri. Sed sanum esse sicuti & illum qui unum testiculum habet, qui etiam generare potest…Ut sit sensus spadonem puto [,] non esse morbosum appellandum, qui unum tantum testiculum habet, qui etiam generare potest. Itaque neque spadones neque semispadones, morbosos appellandos esse credit Vlpianus].47 (Medina 1569, 495a) Medina gently chastised Guillaume Budé, Franciscus Conanus, and Joannes Brechaeus for their “elegant” but incorrect readings. Other jurists took up the claim that the argument about spadones had been inaccurately interpreted. Gregorio Lopez (1496–1560) highlighted the Roman law that distinguished the spado as created after birth (“ille cui cultello virilia abscisa sunt”) from the castrato who was born “frigid” (Las siete partidas 2: 523). Nonetheless, the notion of the spado as a man with one testicle tended to prevail and jurists increased the confusion by adding various other terms and forms of castration identified in ancient law to their considerations. The gloss on the Digest identified spadones as the general term with respect to Sed est quaesitum, adding eunuchs, castrati, thlibiae and thlasiae later (Digestum II: col. 384 (D.28.6.2); III: col. 1484 (D.48.8.4.2); III: col. 1485 (D.48.8.5); III: col. 1834 (D.50.16.128)). Several jurists added thladiae as an alternative term to refer to men with crushed testicles. Jacques Cujas and others supplemented the list with ectomiae (by excision) (Cujas 1758, 1: col. 1058; Henriquez 1600,

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726). Alciati identified thlasiae, thlibiae, and eunuchi, the last of whom he understood as entirely ablated (“totus coles ipse solebat amputari”), in addition to spadones and castrati (Alciati 1548, col. 271). For Joannes Kahl (Calvinus), the castrato was entirely ablated [exsecta sunt membra virilia] (Kahl 1649, 327). Brunellus used similar language: “the virile members are amputated” [amputata sunt virilia] (Brunellus 1588, 23). The toggling between understanding spadones as encompassing all the possible terms and as referring to men whose testicles and/or penis had been ripped, gashed, or permanently scored per the origins in the Greek spe-n (to tear) contributed not at all to correcting the misconception that the spado had one functional testicle. Instead, all the terms became conflated, and the distinctions about what rights and limitations applied to which physical conditions disappeared. The second “solution” was to argue that the spado could have intercourse, and thus was competent to fulfil his sexual duties even though he was sterile. For some, sexual function sufficed, although what kind of evidence the law might require varied. For Nicolò de’ Tudeschi (Abbas Panormitus, 1386– 1445), erection was sufficient. Using the notion of the spado as defined by having one testicle, Panormitus argued that since a man with one testicle could achieve and maintain an erection, a man without functional testicles who could do so was capable under the law. Panormitus considered such a castrate to be akin to an elderly man, who did not lose his rights because of diminished capacity due to age (Tudeschi 1546, fol. 34r). Bartholomaeus Caepolla (c. 1420–1475) read Si serva § si spadoni this way, adding that a spado could be a man without testicles who was still capable of an erection. This was sufficient evidence of virility (Caepolla 1527, 39). Where Panormitus specified only erection, Bartholomaeus Socinus (1436–1507) maintained that a spado had legal standing as long as he could have intercourse – although how a jurist was to measure success was not entirely clear. Ignoring the practicalities, Socinus referred to Sed est quaesitum, understanding it to mean that a castrated man who could not achieve intercourse could not adopt or nominate heirs (Socinus 1525, fols. 29va, 45rb). Per the anti-castration law of Domitian and the lex Cornelia, Andrea Alciati (1492–1550) distinguished spadones from castrati, emphasizing that the spado could have sex even if he could not procreate (“hi coeunt, licet non generent”). For Alciati, some (unspecified) sexual capacity assured the spado the right to control his lineage (Alciati 1548, cols. 271–272).48 What exactly was required – was erection sufficient? Did the spado have to be able to penetrate? Was penetration enough, or was he required to intromit seminal fluid? – was not clear. In creating a standard that a man capable of at least some aspect of sex could be understood under the terms of Si serva § si spadoni to be a spado with full rights, the nature of the castration was also unspecified. Since complete ablation obviated erection and its sequels, that case was clear, but that was not the typical form of castration. What happened to castrates in the now hopelessly confused categories that retained sexual ability was profoundly muddled.

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In emphasizing sexual function, advocates of a sexual ability standard stayed within a logic based on a humoral measure of functionality. As a practical matter, function might be limited, even non-detectable, on the spectrum of the humors, but lack of certainty had its legal uses. Referring to the Si serva and Sed est quaesitum glosses, Franciscus Marcus noted of the spado, “whether he has one testicle by accident or even lacks [them], he can act, even though he cannot procreate. This does not apply to castrati, because such persons by reason of their frigid nature can not procreate” [quando unum testiculum vel ne habet, vel etiam quando caret utroque ex accidenti: quia licet non possit generare, tamen potest agere. Secus in castrato, qui propter sui frigiditatem generare nec agere potest] (1560–1564, Part 2, p. 415, q. 677, no. 7). Frigidity situated castrates on the feminine end of the humoral spectrum, and implicitly, castrates were akin to women who broadly lacked rights under Roman law. Giovanni Bologneti (1506– 1575) was subtler, allowing that both spadones and castrati were unable to procreate, but insisting that castrati who lacked the necessary heat for intercourse could not enjoy the same rights as spadones, whose heat was sufficient and whose condition might be curable (Bologneti 1571, 49r-50v, nos. 43–52; see also Henriquez 1600, tit. 1, bk. 12, ch. 8, § 1, 726). Implicit in sorting castrates according to their humoral complexion was the possibility that therapeutic attention might change or correct humoral deficiency. In theory, for an optimist, or perhaps for a generous pragmatist, the space allowed for spadones might be a way to allow castrates the same legal standing as intact men. In practice, like the other efforts to resolve fragments of Roman law regarding castrates, the humoral interpretations failed to provide a satisfactory unified understanding of the law. The spado might refer to a man with a single testicle or might mean men who had undergone any of several kinds of castration. What counted for sexual functionality was both disputed and nearly impossible to measure reliably. Nonetheless, jurists continued to ponder the problem of castrates before the law as part of the recovery and integration of Roman law beginning in the eleventh century. Efforts at specification by humoral measures offered little clarity. From the reappearance of the Digest until the mid-sixteenth century, the problem of the castrate came up in practical terms in marital disputes, when accusations of impotence or inability were part of the litigation. In his study of Spanish impotence trials, Behrend-Martinez points out that a man who lost such a case in court was marked thereafter as “a eunuch, un capón.” If the court forbade a man to marry or declared his marriage void, he was often barred from local political power, since many municipalities required men to be married in order to hold office or exercise authority (2007, 13, 128).49 Courts could declare a man to be less than a man because he was castrated. But what could the law say about the intentionally castrated boys who became numerous enough to be publicly conspicuous by the latter half of the sixteenth century? None of the extant possibilities applied, and only rarely did jurists acknowledge the increasing reality of castrati. Alciati did mention prepubertal castration, putting boys who were “completely cut off before

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puberty” [quia ante pubertatem omnino excisit] in the same category as men born without testicles (Alciati 1548, col. 271). More often, the discussion of origins was bare etymology and typology (Digestum 1: col. 2138; 2: col. 384; 3: cols. 1484, 1834; Cujas 1758, 1: col. 1058; Brunellus 1588, 9: 28; Kahl 1649, 327). Retreating into a proliferating discourse that rehearsed fine distinctions about eunuchs and castrati and spadones, thlibiae, thlasiae, and thadliae in Roman law, jurists remained largely silent about the intentional castration of boys for musical purposes. In effect, the jurists sanctioned an awkward compromise. “Castrato” in Roman law designated men who did not have the right to marry, adopt, or institute heirs. But the law was clear that castrati were born that way, and the castrati in early modern Europe most certainly were not born, but rather, made that way. According to Roman law, the man-made castrato could have been in the category of the spado. Instead, deliberately castrated boys and men were legislated into a different configuration of legal incapacity. They could have legal heirs, but not by adoption or as the continuation of their patriline. As in medical discourse, castrates became more like women than men. Legal disability hinged on and reinforced the transsexuality of the early modern castrate.

4. Castrates and legal animosity Ancient Roman jurists expressed little concern about whether or in what ways a castrated man could still perform sexually. The spado was legally capable of holding and transmitting property, instituting heirs, and marrying. What he did, could do, or could not do in bed mattered only incidentally. Of far greater significance was whether a man (broadly construed) had been born with functional genitals. While the law recognized intentional castration, it did not mean that a man lost his capacity as a man at law. In contrast, medieval and early modern commentators considered every iteration of genital function along with every possible mode of castration, but in the end, decided all castrates were legally indistinguishable. All were marked by their incapacity with respect to the patriline. Where ancient Roman law privileged the familia and carved a place in it for genitally impaired men, early modern legal culture regarded physical functionality of the genitals as the key to male legal status. Men outside the reproductive economy (but not invested in celibacy) were of limited use to the future of the body social, and presumptively less invested in it. If a castrate wanted to be part of the normative trajectories afforded intact men, the law made sure they weren’t able to do so by insisting that genital disability removed a man from many of the legal privileges of maleness. Early modern jurists obsessed over what men with irregular or damaged genitals could (not) do. In some ways, the formal recourse to law was a cover story to hide the reality of deliberate disabling of boys in physical and legal terms. The prurient parsing of Roman law categories, then, was not meant to be resolved, which explains why it was not. Rather, early modern jurisprudence instantiated

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division over the meanings and implications of castration. With the exception of those born without functional genitalia whose status was clear, jurists did not agree on whether castrates enjoyed legal rights. The underlying issue is that Roman law allowed for those rights in most cases, but later commentators struggled over whether to accept ancient logic or disavow castrates entirely. Jurists vacillated over whether insisting that a spado could enjoy rights because he had one testicle, or maintaining that sexual performance regardless of sterility was the measure of a castrate’s rights, or elaborating categories of debility by type of castration and its humoral implications was the proper interpretation of Roman law. All this dithering allowed jurists to avoid the increasingly salient issue: castrates deliberately created and made certainly sterile. Jurists and commentators could have chosen to locate the countless boys castrated for their voices in the category of spado – created after birth; unnaturally sterile, but sufficiently masculine that their rights as men could remain in force. Instead, the law (especially canon law, as we shall see in Chapter 3) retained the notion that castrates were created by “accident” but nonetheless, were deprived of most of their rights. In accordance with the Digest and other Roman law sources, castration remained illegal. When castrated singers started to appear in numbers in church choirs in the sixteenth century, their castrations were attributed to disease and/or medical necessity to often highly improbable mishaps. Why did jurists resist the obvious solution of recognizing any post-natal castrate as legally male in the Roman law sense? That is, why not accept that he was a spado – a man in legal terms, if not entirely functional in the genitals? Part of the answer is that medical authority held that castrates were proximate to women, and the law privileged men and disabled women. But another part of the answer was that jurists did not want to resolve the contradictions they encountered. I hypothesize that the legal conundrum was the result of discomfort with knowing that most castrates were intentionally created. To do so would require confronting how male legal privilege, as a matter of sexual capacity, was actually rather artificial. Rethinking sexual capacity as a condition of manliness exposed the dependence of physical embodiment on gender plasticity. This would not do. The male body could not be so vulnerable. Genital loss had to create permanent gender difference. Rather than consider what might be owed to the castrate for his loss, the law as interpreted by, or perhaps more accurately created by, early modern jurists enabled grievous wounding to be followed by further disability at law. In the eyes of the law, castrates could not be men.

Notes 1 Italy did not become a unified country until 1871, but I use the geographical referent to cover predominantly Italian speaking areas from which most castrati were drawn. 2 Strict interpretation of Augustan marital legislation barred any man who did not procreate from legacies, but there were exceptions for well-connected men (Grubbs 2002, 106).

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3 The standard edition is Krüger et al. (1872–1895). It has been reissued in whole or in part several times, including most recently the 1954 version in three volumes (vol. 1 is the Institutes, edited by Krüger; vol. 2 is the Digest, edited by Theodor Mommsen, and vol. 3 is the Novellae edited by Rudolf Schöll). See also Digest of Justinian, Watson (1998). 4 All citations to the Digest (abbreviated “D”) are to the book, title, and number. The Codex Justinianus (abbreviated “CJ”) is divided into 12 books, with the title and rescript number (with date where available). The Sententiae Pauli is attributed to Paul; the Rules of Ulpian postdates Ulpian. These and additional Roman law sources may be found in Scott. Although the translation has been criticized, it remains the only full version in English. 5 According to Grubbs (2002, 3), there are approximately 2500 rescripts in the Codex, almost all dating between 193 CE and 305 CE. Under Constantine, imperial enactments in the form of general laws prevailed. 6 This association was particularly acute after Augustus’ lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus (18–17 BCE), which aimed at encouraging population growth through marriage and rewards for childbearing. See Suetonius vol.1, bk. 1, ch. 34. 7 Scott (1973, 1: 96) translates “spadones” as “eunuchs” but the terminology is important. Classical authors including Livy (1949), Pliny (1959), Tacitus (Annals 4.8.2; 4.10.2), and Quintilian (6.3.64) used “spado;” Martial (1993) and Juvenal (1.6.22-30; 6.10.307; 6.10.376-378) used “spado” and “castrato.” 8 For the etymologies in early modern terms, see Costanus (1588, 53r, nos. 75–77). 9 Fayer (1994, 366–371) argues that D. 28.2.6 bars castrati from adoption. Gardner (1998, 152) says there is no reason to believe that this was the case. 10 Valerius Maximus (2000, 7.7.6; 2:177–179) reported that a self-castrated priest of Cybele (or gallus), Genucius, was not entitled to receive an inheritance because he had chosen castration. The praetor supported his decision on the grounds that Genucius was “neither of men nor of women” [neque virorum neque mulierum]. Tougher “Aesthetics” (in CC, 54–55) emphasizes that “the Roman distaste for such eunuchs is palpable” as part of his argument that the galli were not representative of the general attitude toward castrates in ancient Roman culture. I would add that legally, the decision was sound. Although Genucius could be considered a spado, the law did not require that spadones had to be recognized as rightful heirs; only that they could institute heirs. Moreover, Genucius chose castration, whereas spadones were typically understood as accidental castrates. 11 Suetonius vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 7. 1–2: “he prohibited the castration of men and kept the price of spadones down” [castrari mares vetuit; spadonum, qui residui apud mangones erant, pretia moderatus est]. Biondi (1952–1954, 3: 466) considers this the earliest law forbidding castration. Domitian’s edict is also attested in Philostratus (2014, 6.42, 206–207). 12 Roman law, however, aimed only at Romans. Castrates from outside the empire were permitted, as the persistence of trade in and tax on imported castrates indicates per D. 39.4.16.7. For the foreign origins of castrates in the empire, see Guyot (1980, 181–233). 13 For the Latin, see Corpus 3: 705–706. The Novellae were simultaneously published in Greek and Latin. 14 Ius 5.23.13 denounces castration for lust (libidinis), as does D. 48.8.3. D. 9.2.27.28 may be suggesting the use of castrated boys for sexual purposes: “And if someone castrates your boy [slave] and so increases his value, Vivianus writes that the lex Aquilia ceases, but instead one ought to bring action for injury under the edict of the Aediles for four times [his value]” [Et si puerum quis castraverit et pretiosiorem fecerit, Vivianus scribit cessare Aquiliam, sed iniuriarum erit agendum aut ex edicto aedilium aut in quadruplum]. 15 In addition to enabling women to have sex without consequences, castrates were created as sex partners for men. See Guyot (1980, 59–66) for castrates as “pleasure

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17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28

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boys” (Lustknaben). Roman attitudes toward male homosexuality before Christianity were rather capacious. See Williams (2010). Extra-legal castration happened in ancient Rome. Valerius Maximus (2000, 6.13, p. 11) reported that castration was used in vengeance: “But to run briefly over those who in avenging chastity made their own hurt stand for public law…Carbo Attienus and Pontius were caught and castrated by Vibienus and P. Cerennius respectively” [Sed ut eos quoque qui in vindicanda pudicitia dolore suo lege pro publica usi sunt strictim percurram…Carbo Attienus a Vibieno item Pontius a P. Cerennio deprehensi castrati sunt]. For overviews of punitive castration in the Middle Ages, see Tuchel (1998, 61–89); Browe (1936, 63–82). The question of scale is elusive. Millant (1908, 151) asserts that the numbers were high, but provides no documentation. On the Jewish version, see Exod. 21: 23–25; Lev. 24: 17–21; Deut. 19: 21. For Hammurabi, see Hammurabi 109, #229: “If a builder has built a house for a man and has not made his work strong enough and the house he has made has collapsed and caused the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be killed.” See also #230: “If he has caused the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall kill that builder’s son.” For the Twelve Tables, Table 8, sec. 8.2, p. 477: “Si membrum rupsit, ni cum eo pacit, talio esto” (Warmington 1969). Browe (1936, 69) understands Salic law (as well as Ribuarian law) not as talion, but as a system of mutilation fines. Among the medieval Schwankmären, the poem Die Rache des Ehemannes hinges on a testicle that is turned into an actual purse. A few other instances of castration for crimes that might be read as forms of talion are scattered in the historical record. Brundage (2008, 207, 540) found a law prescribing castration for a Christian man who married a Muslim woman in 1120, and castration for bigamy in Belluno and Perugia. The notion of the “marriage debt” espoused by St. Paul seems pertinent here. See 1 Cor. 7:3. Libro…Castiella 58–59, n. 116: “Esta es fasannia de un cauallero de Çiubdat Rodrigo que fallo yasiendo a otro cauallero con su muger et prisol este cauallero a castrol de pixa et de coiones. Et sus parientes querellaron al rey don Ferrando, e el rey enbio por el cauallero que castro al otro cauallero, et demandol por que lo fisiera. Et dixo que lo fallo yasiendo con su muger. Et jusgaron le en la corte que deuye ser enforcado, pues que ala muger non lo fiso nada; et enforcaron le. Mas quando atal cosa abiniere que fallar a otro yasiendo con su muger quel ponga cuernos, sil quisiere matar o lo matar, deue matar asu muger. Et sy la matar, non sera enemigo nin pechara omesido. Et sy matare a aquel quel pone los cuernos a non matare a ella, deue pechar omesidio e seer enemigo. Et deuel el rey justiciar el cuerpo por este fecho.” Murray (2006, 257) discusses this case in terms of the punishment of the castrator. See also Dean (2001, 138). Dean (2001, 83) has found only one instance of castration for rape, which occurred in 1222. In psychoanalysis, blinding and castration are understood as Oedipal guilt for violating social norms regarding sex. See Freud (1953–1974, 17: 218–253). Freud’s discussion of the sandman in E. T. A. Hoffman’s Nachtstücken hinges on the association between blindness and castration. More historically, castration and blinding were often combined in medieval cases, although blinding seems to have been more common. See Eska (in CC, 163–166). For a medieval depiction of castration as punishment, see BN MS lat. 9187, fol. 32v. The manuscript dates to 1296. Reproduced in L’Engle (2002, 163). Liebermann argues for the dating at Leis Willelme 1: 492, note a. See 1: 488 (no. 10), which prescribes castration rather than capital punishment: “Interdico etiam,

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31 32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43

Inceptions ne quis occidatur aut suspendatur pro aliqua culpa, sed eruantur oculi et testiculi abscidantur; et hoc praeceptum non sit uiolatum super forisfacturam meam plenam” [Also I forbid anyone to be killed or hanged for any fault, but his eyes are to be put out and his testicles castrated, and this precept shall not be violated on full forfeiture to me]. Capital punishment, however, remained in effect. In contrast, in pre-Norman Welsh law, castration is repudiated as a fitting punishment for rape in the Llyfr Blegwryd. See Eska (in CC, 152–154). The original manuscript of this code dates to between 1370 and 1405. See d’Espinay (1899, 9). Flavius Egica Rex (r. 687–c.701) ramped up the language against sodomy as a sin and expanded penalties to include the clergy. See Tuchel (1998, 79–80) for comment. A version of this survives in later Spanish law. See Codigos 1: 130 (Fuero juzgo). Tuchel (1998, 73) observes that castration was a mitigation of the death penalty in Frankish law. On the association of castrates with effeminacy in antiquity, examples are many, but see for instance Claudian (1963, I: 165). For the polemical context, see Long Claudian’s. See also Lucian (1936, 5: 347, sec. 7). See the discussion of Lucian in Stevenson (1995, 502–503). On the perceived effeminacy of castrates in the Eastern Empire, see Tougher (1999). For Eichmann (1990), concerns about priests having disruptive sex were acute in the period in which the fabliaux were flourishing. Following the Lateran decrees of the twelfth century, the Church put pressure on priests to give up their concubines, which increased anxiety that priests might misbehave with respectable women. Pearcy (1990) argues that Connebert is based on Renart (Branch 1) and specifically the Brun-Lanfrois episode, which involves similar self-mutilation to avoid death. Levy (2000, 71) notes that the priest and the wolf are similar in that both steal from the peasant, and both are caught and punished by him. Simons (2011, 169–186) notes that the purse full of coin and testicles full of semen were symbolically equivalent in early modern Europe. The testicle as actual purse was also an empty purse. The public nature of punitive castration is captured in an image in BN MS lat. 2643, fol. xi(r), which depicts a large crowd watching as a naked man bound to a ladder is castrated, presumably before being cast into the fire. Tuchel (1998, 83–84) emphasizes that punitive castration was deliberately public. Jean Froissart Chroniques, BNF Ms fr. 2643, fol. 11r-v, which includes an image of Despenser being disemboweled and castrated. Other versions of this event do not include the castration. The literature on Abelard and Heloïse is vast. For Abelard, see Tuchel (1998, 188– 202) and Clanchy (1997), both of whom discuss the significance of his castration. For Heloise, see McLeod (1993, 64–86); Freeman (1997). For both, see Mews (2005). Abelard invokes the exclusion of castrates from divine service in Deuteronomy 23:1, understanding that it might apply to him. For discussion, see Wheeler (in BM). Irvine (in BM, 94) argues that Abelard’s castration left him vulnerable to charges that he lacked virtus; that he was insufficiently masculine. Abelard attempted to reestablish his masculinity in his theological and autobiographical writings. Wheeler (in BM, 108) understands Abelard’s self-assertion after castration as a reforging of his masculine identity, in which his ability to persevere despite his deprivation is more masculine than the merely mechanical efforts of his castrators. There is evidence of some glosses at Pavia, and Irnerius was preceded at Bologna by Pepo, about whom little is known. See Kantorowicz and Buckland (1969, 33–65). Winroth (2000, 162–168) disputes the importance of Irnerius. This is the mos italicus jura docendi, which understood Roman law as an existing body requiring explanation. The mos docendi gallicus, in contrast, understood

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44 45

46

47 48 49

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Roman law as an historical artefact and attempted to remove the interpolations and accretions of the codifiers and glossators. For the development of the French method, see Kelley. Grendler (2002, 442–443) argues that the differences were not always great in practice because both methods relied on the same legal genres and the mos italicus incorporated the humanistic methodologies of the mos gallicus. This is a very abbreviated account of a very complex story. The classic extended analysis is Savigny. Named archdeacon of Bologna in 1296, Guido de Baisio (or Baysio) is sometimes referred to as Archidiaconus. For Pontano’s biography, see Woelki. Nievo remains known for his antipathy to Jewish moneylenders in Venice. See Nievo Consilia (1489, originally written in the 1460s). Dalla (1978, 124–125) suggests that Institutes 1.11.9 might have contributed to the confusion: “It is a regulation common to both kinds of adoption that those who cannot procreate, such as spadones, can adopt, castrati however cannot” [Sed illud utriusque adoptionis commune est, quod et hi qui generare non possunt, quales sunt spadones, adoptare possunt, castrati autem non possunt] (see similar language in Gaius 1:103 in Scott [1973]). Dalla’s argument is that the text implies that spadones are theoretically curable, which might support the single testicle interpretation. McGrath (1988, 52) discusses Medina and this argument in terms of its implications for the brief Cum frequenter. See Chapter 3 for further discussion. Alciati (1548, 271) added that historical examples such as Narses and Sporus indicated that even a castrate could have significant influence and importance. There is the further problem of how impotence was to be determined by the courts. Perhaps the most infamous version was the “trial by congrès,” in which physicians and midwives judged successful achievement of intercourse. See Darmon (1985). Despite Darmon’s claims, it seems to have been neither common nor widespread. The trial by congrès was officially abolished in France in 1677, although it continued in practice into the eighteenth century.

3

Marrying castrates, or: how to make a disabled social subject

Castrates, usually in this case called eunuchs, are at the heart of two deeply ambivalent sexual issues for Catholic theology: celibacy and the sexual qualification for marriage as a matter of procreation. On the former, theologians and Church fathers interpreted Jesus’ comments as the justification for celibacy. The key text is Matthew 19:11–12, in which Jesus says to the Apostles: All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are eunuchs [Latin: eunuchi], which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. (KJV) Dividing castrates first into categories that are highly recognizable in Roman law (men born genitally impaired and spadones whose genital damage came later in life), Matthew adds a third kind of “eunuch,” understood in Catholic tradition as referring to voluntary celibates.1 As for barring castrates from marriage, this rested not on the Bible, but instead on a belabored conversation among canonists and theologians that resulted in the Papal brief Cum frequenter. Issued on June 27, 1587 by Sixtus V (r. 1585–1590), the brief decreed that castrates without both testicles (presumably both functional) were unable to marry. As interpreted at the time, Cum frequenter rested on the notion that men without functional testicles lacked the ability to emit “true semen” [verum semen emittere non posse] (Bullarum 8: 870). The Catholic Church allowed that marriage was acceptable for procreation and as a remedy for concupiscence, but Cum frequenter indicated that castrates could achieve neither. Unsurprisingly, the celibacy reading of Matthew has attracted a great deal of attention. The dominant interpretation – upon which clerical celibacy as an ideal for men depends – is that Jesus is speaking metaphorically about celibacy. For Ute Ranke-Heinemann, this understanding rests on a misleading failure to account for context. Just before the crucial quotation, Jesus is talking about Jewish law that allows a man to repudiate a wife for an offense as minor as burning his dinner. Jesus says, “And I say unto you, Whosoever

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shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away, doth commit adultery” (Matt. 19:9, KJV). The disciples are shocked and say that perhaps it is better not to marry if this is the case. The discussion is about divorce rather than celibacy (1990, 32–34). Where Ranke-Heinemann considers the conflation to be an intentional appropriation of authority to the clergy, others assess Matthew primarily in terms of the condemnation of divorce. Jacques Dupont argues that 19:12 referred to husbands who had repudiated their wives for porneia, understood in the New Testament to refer to illicit sexual intercourse, including adultery. These men could not re-marry under penalty of being condemned for adultery, and so they accepted becoming “eunuchs” as a matter of religious principle (Dupont 1959, 161– 222; see also Quesnell 1968). Similarly, Francis J. Moloney (1979) argues that the “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” refers to men whose wives had fallen away from Christianity. For Moloney, the crucial historical context is Matthew’s association with a community that radically prohibited divorce. In contrast, R. C. H. Lenski understands 19:11–12 to be about sexual selfcontrol within marriage (1943, 735–740). Among scholars for whom the central issue is the celibacy reading, Dale C. Allison argues that the language in Matthew is “a qualified defence of celibacy,” rather than a general statement (1993, 5). Whether Matthew’s “eunuchs” are primarily about divorce (or the rejection of it) or about celibacy, the interpretive frame does not focus on actual castrates. The barring of castrates from marriage has received far less attention, but discussions of permanent impotence in canon law and theology are abundant. Impotence is an impediment, which under canon law constitutes an obstacle that inhibits or precludes the performance of a sacrament. With respect to marriage, an impediment can be either diriment or prohibitive. Impotence is a diriment impediment: it is held to abrogate marriage. Other diriment impediments include age, previous marriage, disparity of cult, having taken holy orders, consanguinity, and physical incapacity (Örsy 1986, 103–114). Prohibitive impediments produce marriages that are valid but illicit. The question of castration as a diriment impediment is an urgent one for devout twenty-first-century Catholics. Castrates lack physical capacity, and Aidan McGrath (1988) has examined the theology around Cum frequenter in terms of its implications for modern Catholic men who have chosen or are considering vasectomies. McGrath’s purpose points to the possibility within Catholic interpretive positions for reimagining that men who have been castrated could be fully acceptable, rather than excluded and excoriated. Joseph Bajada (1988) has explored early modern discussions of impotence and sexual dysfunction through the work of the legal medicine pioneer, Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659). Here too, Bajada’s presentation of Zacchia’s arguments demonstrates the pliability around positioning the castrate as other and less than the intact man in canon law. While the flexibility that both McGrath and Bajada identify was largely eradicated in early modern discussions, it is

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significant that it can again be claimed, if not for castrates in service of the Church, at least for the faithful who want to remain within the fold. Regardless of whether the focus is celibacy or impotence, the condition of the castrate’s body, even when it is being debated, is taken as a given. What happens to the people who live in those bodies as they move through culture is not particularly an issue. So what does happen when castrates encounter the religious debates about their bodies? Broadly, two effects become apparent. First, constructing the valorization of voluntary celibacy in part by denigrating castration enabled the consolidation of social disability of castrates. Theologians and the commentators who took their cue from Catholic discussions of marital disqualification transformed physical impairment into social disability in ways that enabled imagining and enacting highly restricted access to the institution of marriage. Second, the discomfort evident in secular law is far more extensive and complex on the religious side. Where ancient Roman law allowed space for castrates and in a sense protected them, canon law reduced and then removed protections for the routine rights of castrates. As the priority of Catholic Church on enforcing sacred precincts for men prevailed, the preference for castrated singers encouraged the deliberate creation of them. In justifying castration for the greater glory of God, the Catholic Church disavowed the castrates it effectively caused to be created.

1. The dialectics of the religious castrate Catholic Christianity was not the first religious context in which castrates figured prominently, but under the impetus of the Renaissance Papacy, earlier, more elastic understandings of castrates gave way to a more rigid view of the necessity of fully functional genitals if a man wanted to marry. Situating the early modern response to castrates who sought to marry in the larger historical frame of religious practice reveals not just that the Catholic Church defined castrates outside of marital norms, but how this came about and what it meant for marriage, sexual norms, and the locus of castrated men in society. As historians of Late Antiquity have made clear, Catholic Christianity was both an heir of Ancient Rome and in an antagonistic relation to Roman belief structures; both an heir of Jewish tradition and hostile to some elements of Judaism, especially Jewish sexual ethics (Brown 1988; Gaca 2003; Harler 2013). When it came to castrates, efforts to distinguish Catholic Christianity from pagan and Jewish ideas enabled Christian notions of voluntary celibacy to take the specific shape that they did. The centrality of celibacy as a differentiating mechanism – both from other religious traditions and between laymen and clerics – in turn supported the elaboration of (Catholic) Christian law and theology defining the place of castrates in society and culture. In ancient Rome, castrates could be found in a variety of social and cultural loci. Three of the most prominent types of castrates were favorites and/or prostitutes deliberately emasculated to preserve their youthful beauty, castrates who filled offices at the imperial court, and especially for present

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purposes, the self-castrating followers of Cybele (or Magna Mater) known as the galli. 2 The galli were not original to Rome. After consultation with the Sybilline Books, the Roman Republic made arrangements to transfer the Magna Mater from Asia Minor to Rome. The Romans voted to build a temple on the Palatine to Cybele in 204 BCE, and completed it 13 years later. As Erich Gruen has argued, the decision to make a foreign goddess so central into the Roman pantheon is “arresting and baffling.” The usual story, that an oracle foretold Hannibal’s defeat if the Magna Mater was brought to Rome, sounds plausible, except that the war was already in hand when the decision was made (Gruen 1990, 5).3 Moreover, when the cult arrived, its flamboyant rituals clashed with the staid practices of Roman religion. The cult nevertheless remained prominently placed, with its public rituals from March 15 through March 28 and then again at the celebrations of the Megalesian games (April 4–10). During the culminating period of feasting, the temple on the Palatine was open for individuals to make offerings to the goddess, while the galli begged for alms in the streets of Rome. Among the rituals was the practice of cutting down a pine tree, onto which was affixed an image of Attis (because Attis died under a pine tree after his self-castration). As the tree was carried to the Palatine in a funeral procession, the galli and worshipers in attendance pricked themselves with pine needles and whipped themselves, spreading the blood on the tree and the temple precincts. At a later ritual, the galli sacrificed a bull (taurobolium), and again, splattered the blood (Vermaseren 1977, 96, 113–125; Beard 1994; Small 1983, 119–20; Sawyer 1996, 120–121). Devotees castrated themselves in a frenzy of worship, or at least this was the presumption of contemporary observers. Mark Munn has argued that self-castration among the galli was unlikely, arguing instead that self-castration was a “fiction expounded by those whose fates had been sealed for them.” Munn contends that most of the castrated worshippers of the goddess were emasculated by force (2006, 160–161). The evidence is ambivalent, but Roman tradition maintained that the galli were self-castrators. Whether forced or voluntary, the galli were often condemned by writers intent on upholding Roman gender values. Roman beliefs about the body included the notion that castration produced effeminacy (see Chapter 1 for the medical reasoning). Eschewing ideal masculine behavior, the galli invited fundamentally negative understandings of the cult (Tougher in CC). In his Fasti, Ovid’s hostility toward the galli is palpable in his explanation of their ceremonies, calling the galli “soft” [mollis] and deriding their shrill music (Bk. 4, ll. 179–214). Emasculation was crucial as explanatory of the frenzy associated with the cult. As Lucretius put it: They give her galli, as wishing to indicate that those who have violated the majesty of the Mother, and have been found ungrateful to their parents, should be thought unworthy to bring living offspring into the regions of light.

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Inceptions [Gallos attribuunt, quia, numen qui violarint Matris et ingrati genitoribus inventi sint, significare volunt indignos esse putandos vivam progeniem qui in oras luminis edant] (2: 614–617)4

The practices of the cult, and castration in particular, led Roman officials to forbid citizens from joining it (Dionysius 2.19.4–5).5 Catullus perhaps captured the problem of the self-castrating galli most effectively. Describing Attis’ self-castration, Catullus pointedly moved from the masculine to the feminine: So, realising how the limbs left him were lacking in manhood, still staining the soil of the ground with fresh blood, she swiftly took up the light tambourine in her snowy hands, your tambourine, Cybebe, your initiation, o mother: and making the hollow bull’s-hide to tremble with her delicate fingers, she rose up shaking to sing this song to her companions. [itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro, etiam recente terrae sola sanguine maculans, niveis citata cepit manibus leve typanum, typanum tuum, Cybebe, tua, Mater initia, quatiensque terga tauri teneris cava digitis canere haec suis adortast est tremebunda comitibus] (ll. 6–11)6 The male Attis turned into a “she” in the context of ecstatic celebrations featuring cymbals, drums, flutes, and wild dancing. With resounding hostility, Catullus refers to Attis as a “fake female” [simul…mulier, l. 25], who is deranged in body and mind by the cultic excess that included castration. Mary Beard has argued that the hostile response to the cult did not mean it was irretrievably foreign, but did indicate the unsettled and changeable character of Roman relations with cults. Beard points out that the transfer under the auspices of the state, with the temple on the Palatine, put the cult firmly at the center of Roman public life (1994, 178–182). Cybele and her castrated followers may have been foreign, but they were not marginal. At the same time, the association of the cult with castration and its negative effects on manhood and masculinity were always present. In addition to the feminization of Attis as described by Catullus, the galli favored bright clothing (Roman priests usually wore togas in subdued colors), jewelry, make-up, and elaborate hairstyles (Dionysius 1937, vol. 1, 2.19.4–5; Polybius 2012, 21.37.4–7; Augustine 1908, City 7.26).7 Furthermore, Roman authors routinely impugned the claims to sexual purity posited by the galli. The poet Martial (Marcus Valerius Maritalis) accused the galli of gender and sexual inversion:

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Figure 3.1 Portrait of Attis after his self-castration are marked by feminine characteristics. Here, Attis is beardless and resembles a Roman matron. Credit: Colossal bust of Attis, Phrygian god and companion of Cybele, who, in an orgiastic frenzy, is said to have emasculated himself. Imperial Rome. Ludovisi Collection, Cat. 239. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, Italy. (Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

What concern have you, gallus Baeticus, with the feminine abyss? This tongue of yours should be licking male middles. Why was your cock cut off with a Samian shard if you were so fond of a cunt, Baeticus? Your head should be castrated. You may be a gallus loinwise, but you cheat Cybele’s rites. With your mouth you’re a man.

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Inceptions [Quid cum femineo tibi, Baetice galle, barathro? haec debet medios lambere lingua viros. abscisa est quare Samia tibi mentula testa, si tibi tam gratus, Baetice, cunnus erat? castrandum caput est: nam sis licet inguine gallus, sacra tamen Cybeles decipis: ore vir es] (I: 3.81)8

With their (alleged) propensity for oral sex, the galli were sexually debauched objects of scorn and revulsion, and their castration was central to the negative identity assigned to them. Within the Roman context, early Christians deliberately distinguished their rituals from similar cult practices around Cybele. A. T. Fear (1996) has pointed out that polemics by the likes of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Julius Firmicus Maternus (4th century CE) reflected that Christianity shared a number of characteristics with the worship of Cybele: both promised immortality and resurrection, foregrounded imagery of the tree/cross and the bull/ lamb as the representation of the divine, included the central notion of redemption through blood sacrifice, and featured a powerful, maternal figure in their worship practices (Fear 1996; Firmicus 1907, 27.8–28.1). It is no accident, then, that St. Jerome singled out his enemy Montanus and denounced him as a “eunuch and a half-man” [abscisum et semivirum], terms specifically associated with the galli (Ep. 41.4). Lactantius similarly emphasized that the practices of the galli destroyed their masculinity: “such an amputation makes them neither men nor women” [amputato enim sexu nec uiros se nec feminas faciunt] (1:21.16). Augustine derided the galli as “mutilated,” closing his caustic rejection of their rituals by announcing, “a man’s virility is amputated, and he neither becomes a woman nor remains a man” (1998, 7.24). Tertullian was at least as scathing: “You have also a third genus, although not of a third rite, but of a third sex: it is aptly the union of man and woman man and woman” [Habetis et uos tertium genus, etsi non de tertio ritu, attamen de tertio sexu: illu[d] aptius de uiro et femina uiris et feminis iunctum] (1958, 1.20.4). In the battle of cults, Christianity won, in part because its rituals were easier and cheaper – the taurobolium ritual associated with Cybele put it out of reach for most Romans, whereas the Eucharist was eminently accessible – and in part because of the denunciation of the actually castrated galli as effeminate, decadent, and immoral. Where Romans and early Christians encountered castrates in the context of the Magna Mater cult and recoiled at the effeminacy of the galli, Jewish tradition disqualified castrates from the priesthood per Deuteronomy 23.1: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord” (KJV).9 The logic of barring castrates at least in part was about sexual differentiation and protecting the allmale priesthood. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–40 CE) articulated the negative appraisal of castrates: “It begins with the men who belie their sex and are

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affected with effemination, who debase the currency of nature and violate it by assuming the passions and the outward form of licentious women. For it expels those whose generative organs are fractured or mutilated, who husband the flower of their youthful bloom, lest it should quickly wither, and restamp the masculine cast into a feminine form” (1998, 1: 325). Philo described the castrate as, “gelded of the soul’s generating organs, a vagrant from the men’s quarters, an exile from the women’s, a thing neither male nor female, unable to shed or receive seed, twofold yet neuter, base counterfeit of the human coin, cut off from the immortality which, through the succession of children and children’s children, is kept alive for ever, roped off from the holy assembly and congregation” (2001, 2.184). As Ra’anan Abusch notes, Philo repeatedly equated incapacity for reproduction with insufficient male capacity for higher intellectual attainments, including philosophy. Given the history of the Jewish exile, the emphasis on reproduction remained central, and against the polymorphous sexuality of pagan Rome, Jewish commentators retained an all-male, fully functional priesthood. Where Judaism insisted on the sexual capacity of its priests, early Christians distinguished themselves from their Jewish context in part by their commitment to celibacy. According to Jack Collins, the teachings of Jesus in Matthew – especially 19: 11–12 – represent a rejection of the Jewish emphasis on procreation, which early Christians often combined with an apocalyptic eschatology in which reproduction was not a priority. Only when it became apparent that the end was not coming as soon as expected did Christians modify their thinking. The adjustment to celibacy was not smooth, and the relationship of castration to sexual continence took some time to work out. Notoriously, Origen (d. c. 254) took Matthew literally and castrated himself, seeking higher Christian perfection.10 Origen later admitted his error, but after his death, his heretical ideas about body–soul dualism led to further condemnation (15.3.1–4). In short, one of the most famous castrates was also something of a heretic, allowing the easy association of castration and heresy. If Origen hadn’t existed, Christianity might have had to make him up: castrates were not supposed to be “real.” What was the value of abstaining if one (presumably) had no capacity or desire for lack of functional genitals? And yet, the distinction between castration and voluntary celibacy was not as clear as one might think. Although the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) condemned self-castration, not all castrates were unacceptable: If someone enjoying good health has castrated himself, this matter is to be investigated, and his belonging to the clerical estate is to be at an end, and in the future such persons must never be brought forward. But since it is clear that this applies to those who do such a thing intentionally and who dare to castrate themselves, it follows then, in regard to those who have been made eunuchs by barbarians or by their masters, that the canon admits such men as these, be they found worthy, into the clerical estate. (Faith 1: 282)

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As with the prohibition in Deuteronomy, clerics were to be intact, but more pointedly, self-castration was the problem. Men who had been forcibly castrated were acceptable, although not ideal. The association of castration with ecstatic cultic practices in ancient Rome on the one hand and the pressures toward procreation in the Jewish exilic tradition on the other made for a powerful symbolic structure against which early Christianity posited voluntary celibacy. This position enabled Christians to differentiate themselves from the actually castrated galli. In part, celibacy was a rejoinder to accusations of decadence and excess aimed at Christians, who instead presented themselves as sexually continent and self-controlled.11 The emphasis on celibacy also highlighted Christian departures from Jewish tradition, even as Christians retained elements of that tradition. In particular, Christian doctrine specified that clerics had to be genitally intact (although exceptions could be made for imposed castration, and later, for accident or injury) so that celibacy would actually be an accomplishment. Christian masculine virtue depended on having functional genitals but not using them.

2. The canonists on castration Church councils at least from Nicaea on, collections of canons, and decretals addressed the quality and nature of the clergy with some attention to the relationship between castration and celibacy.12 By the eleventh century, the Catholic Church regarded both issues as settled: the legitimate options for men were celibacy or marriage, but castrates muddled the clarity of these options. Although the Church by far preferred men whose genitals (and presumably desires) were intact, castrates could become clerics. Castrates fit awkwardly with celibacy; they were also at odds with Christian matrimonial imperatives, although potentially less so. They could not aspire to the goal of procreative sex in marriage, although they could meet the expectations of fidelity (fides) and sacrament (sacramentum) – two of the three purposes of marriage outlined by Augustine (1900, 41: 227). If castrates could not fulfil the final obligation – offspring (proles) – there was still seemingly some room within marriage for castrated men. Although they were limited with respect to both celibacy and marriage, castrates were not entirely or necessarily excluded from either possibility. The Church accommodated castrates between the stark options of celibacy or marriage until it turned its attention to sexual mores. Catholic reform efforts starting in the tenth century codified sexual practices among the clergy (who were not supposed to have sex) and the laity (who were only supposed to have one kind – marital and procreative) (Brundage 1987, 176–228). Theologians faced questions about sexual temptation among clerics, nocturnal emissions, chaste marriages, demonic sex, marriage of the elderly and infirm, marriage between persons of different faiths, and especially for these purposes, marriage between couples in which one or both partners suffered from compromised fertility (Elliot 1998; Elliot 1995; Stephens 2003;

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13

Handbook 2000). Working within Galenic and Aristotelian ideas about physiology and reproduction, theologians and canonists posited various criteria for allowing or forbidding genitally impaired men to marry. Over time, theologians and canonists moved toward more elaborate and invasive measures of male sexual function. Gradually, the willingness to accept the possibility that God would grant fertility to any couple, even if the husband lacked the genital capacity for procreation, receded. The parsing of sexual possibilities that began with acceptance of not knowing the relationship between the workings of the body and fertility ended with the insistence that castration was an impairment that barred men from marriage. In contrast with the hardening around marriage of castrates, the Church maintained the tradition that required priests to be intact with a relatively simple set of exceptions. Clerics could not self-castrate, but if they had been forcibly castrated, they could take holy orders. Men who had been castrated after taking vows could remain priests, and cases of this happening often involved priests caught in adulterous situations (Schmugge 2013, 182–184). Priests could petition to retain their position, and, the frequent fact of clerical (sexual) malfeasance notwithstanding, ecclesiastical authorities made much of insisting that the priest had to be innocent of wrong-doing (Lea 1892, 18.5, p. 30). Men who had been castrated because of illness were also acceptable, an exception that permitted the Church to encourage castration for musical purposes (see Chapter 5). Where the clergy was concerned, flexibility around castration prevailed. Several influential voices that emerged in the effort to systematize canon law in the wake of debates over marriage formation and its sacramental status preferred flexibility as well. Theologian Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1164) and canonist Gratian (fl. mid-twelfth century) established the relatively capacious early position.14 Including castration implicitly in a general reflection on impotence, Lombard melded ancient medical knowledge with the possibility that impotence of whatever kind was not a state of being. Rather, it was part of the spectrum of human physiology, and it was not fixed: The fully lawful are those who are not barred by the vow of continence, or a sacred order, or relationship, or disparity of cult, or condition, or frigidity of nature, or whatever else. The fully unlawful are made so through vow, order, relationship, or disparity of cult. The ones in between, namely not fully lawful, nor entirely unlawful, are so by their frigidity or condition. If the latter are joined unknowingly, they can remain together while certain causes occur, and be separated when these causes fail to occur. [Plene legitimae sunt, quibus non obviat votum continentiae, vel ordo sacer, vel cognatio, vel dispar cultus, vel conditio, vel naturae frigiditas, et si quid est aliud. Penitus vero illegitimae sunt per votum, per ordinem, per cognationem, per disparem cultum.

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Inceptions Mediae vero sunt, nec plene legitimae, nec omnino illegitimae, per frigiditatem, [vel] per conditionem. Si enim tales iunguntur ignoranter, commanere possunt quibusdam accedentibus causis, et eisdem deficientibus, dividi.] (Sentences Bk. 4, Dist. 34, ch. 1, 196; Latin: Libri 2: 953–954)

Invoking Aristotelian and Galenic descriptions of castration but not insisting on a specific understanding of procreation, Lombard accepted that men who were castrated became humorally cool and like women because they lost their testicles. Within this frame, Lombard goes on to specify that couples experiencing frigidity should stay together, but if the woman wants children and both the husband and wife swear they have not “joined together carnally,” she can remarry. The formulation indicates that the failure is on his side, and the “frigid” man cannot remarry (Bk. 4, dist. 34, ch. 2, no. 1, 196).15 The fluidity of possibilities is indicated by the allowance that if a couple separates after swearing non-consummation and then the man has intercourse with another woman, the original couple has to return to the first marriage (Bk. 4, dist. 34, ch. 2, no. 3, 197). Lombard allows that there may be reasons impeding a man’s ability to consummate the marriage, and that those reasons can change. Frigidity can be permanent, but it is not necessarily. The terms of consummation are the ability to have intercourse, with the precise meaning of intercourse left unspecified. Lombard set three crucial terms for the discussion, and all of them with latitude: if the problem was with the man, it might be the man in relation to the particular woman and thus could change; what a man could do (intercourse) mattered; and what intercourse meant did not. Although Gratian’s understanding of marriage formation was different from Lombard’s – Lombard subscribed to the notion that consent (made in the present) made any union valid; Gratian insisted on consummation – Gratian preferred some latitude as well (Vaccari 1953, 545–547).16 Gratian, about whom we know almost nothing for certain, codified canon law and established a profoundly influential methodology (Noonan 1979). By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Roman and canon law had fused as the Ius commune (Bellomo 1989). The rediscovery of Roman law in the twelfth century spurred the growth of legal studies and production of university graduates to serve in ecclesiastical and secular roles (Hartmann and Pennington 2008, vii, 1). The development of legal studies hinged on the rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest, and the systematization of Gratian’s Decretum with respect to canon law. The law in question was the Corpus iuris canonici (Corpus or Body of Canon Law), a collection of six law compilations that served as the basis for Roman Catholic ecclesiastical legislation until 1917.17 As did the jurists with the Digest, Gratian aimed to reconcile the contradictions – this time for law that had been accumulating over 11 centuries and continued to grow after the Decretum became a foundational text. As Stephen Kuttner has argued, Gratian’s original title, Condordia disordantium canonum (Harmony of Conflicting Canons), is indicative of his

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project (1982, 305). Gratian organized the material to bring out the discrepancies and then used dialectical reasoning to resolve the problems between competing understandings. With respect to castrates, on the one hand, Gratian affirmed that marriage is procreative in intent, and marriage for the sake of satisfying lustful desire is unacceptable (1959, Part 2, Causa 32, Question 2.1; 2.3, cols. 1119–1120). On the other hand, he acknowledged that many marriages are not procreative. While he did not consider known castrates as a particular category of men incapable of marriage, he did emphasize that conditions of incapacity in marriage can provide grounds for annulment: “If a man and a woman marry and then the woman affirms that the husband is incapable of having sexual relations with her, and she can prove by true judgment what she says, she can marry another” [Vir et mulier si se coniunxerint et postea dixerit mulier de viro quod non possit coire cum illa, si potest probate per uerum iudicium quod uerum sit, accipiat alium] (Part 2, Causa 27, Question 2.29, col. 1071).18 Gratian further notes, “The man of frigid nature must, however, remain without a wife” [Vir autem, qui frigidae naturae est, maneat sine coniuge] (Part 2, Causa 33, Question 1.1.2, col. 1149). The castrate would seem to be foreclosed, but he is not specifically named. Gratian, like Lombard, is silent on what constitutes consummation or intercourse, and the lack of specificity around frigidity left space for it to be or for it to be considered to be a curable medical condition. As always, castration as the source of incapacity after the marriage has been consummated is not grounds for dissolution (Part 2, Causa 32, Question 7.25, cols. 1146–1147). Brundage observes that Gratian reconciles the divergent theories of marriage formation by emphasizing physical consummation after consent. Consummation was supposed to be procreative, and Gratian, like his contemporaries, condemned “unnatural” sexual acts (1987, 241, 254). But the ambiguity remained: a castrate incapable of procreative sex might nonetheless be capable of coitus. This left some room for interpretation. Although sex was supposed to be procreative and thus seemingly obviated castrates, they were not specifically precluded from marriage. Peter Lombard and Gratian allowed that, if a man’s impotence might be regarded as temporary, he could marry. Leaving elasticity in the time frame, the question then became how did one judge what exactly was meant by impotence? At least initially, here too, flexibility remained, but the specifics varied and in searching for definitive markers of impotence, canonists gradually limited the options. The French Dominican Pierre de La Palude (Petrus Paludanus, c. 1280–1342) considered impotence to be “a fault of the mind or body or both whereby someone is prevented from being united carnally with another” [vicium animi vel corporis vel utriusque quo quis impeditur alii carnaliter commisceri]. The category could be quite large: “absolute impotence is when one cannot exercise carnal copulation” [impotentia coeundi absolute est quando quis non potest carnalem copulam exercere] (Dist. 34, q.2, art. 1, 387). But Palude defined sexual capacity in terms of the man being able to

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get an erection and emit something – whether it was procreative or not did not matter. Palude also warned that one had to be certain that the problem was not some sort of “maleficia” that could be addressed by spiritual means. Like Lombard and Gratian, Palude left space for physical change and divine intervention, but Palude inclined toward emission as a tangible measure of male potency. Many canonists similarly favored interpretations that did not stigmatize castrates in terms of marriage, although not always on the same grounds. Franciscan theologian Angelus Carletus a Clavasio (1411–1495) sounded like Palude in opting for allowing men who were able to get an erection and emit something to marry. Carletus also repeated the notion that, while “the generative act” [actum generandi] was important, it did not preclude men known to be sterile (such as the elderly) from marriage and the content of the ejaculate was not the crucial point (Sec. 16, n. 11, fol. 160v). The Spanish canonist Martinus de Azpilcueta (Doctor Navarrus, 1491–1586) allowed for a broad interpretation based on any emission at all. In preferring “spado” instead of “castrato,” Azpilcueta echoed Roman law distinctions that allowed some castrates to retain legal rights: I agree that not only is the spado, who has one testicle, able to enter into marriage, but also if he has none, even if they are thlasiae, whose testicles are broken off, or thlibiae, who have theirs atrophied, can arouse the hill and the rod…if either can seminate in the manner of others, they say that indeed a spado is thus able to get an erection and to have intercourse even if no seed is put in the womb of a woman. […concedo non solum spadonem, qui unum testiculum habet, posse contrahere matrimonium, sed etiam qui nullum habet, etiam si sint thlasiae, quibus testes fracti sunt, sive thlibiae, qui eos habent attritos, modo arrigere collem, et virgam, et coire possint….si uterque de more aliorum seminaret. aiunt enim spadonem sic arrigere & coire potentem, etiam si nihil seminis immittat in vulvam mulieris…] (Vol. 2, lib. 4, tit. De frigidis et malef., cons. 3, no. 11) As applied to marriage, extant testicles (even if damaged) were sufficient. Azpilcueta highlighted the ability of such men to fulfil the secondary purpose of marriage: “by this mode of intercourse, spadones are calmed and the temptation and danger of fornication is either taken away or avoided, as much for the man as for woman” [per huiusmodi spadonum coitum sedari, sive tolli, vel vitari tentationem, & periculum fornicandi tam in viro, quam in foemina] (Cons. 3, no. 11). The humoral understanding of bodies and desire enabled allowing such unions: “Even if no seed is put in the womb of the woman, yet spreading out of the semen dries it out when it is discharged.” […etiam si nihil seminis immittat in vulvam mulieris, exsiccare tamen illum humorem utrinque seminarium, ita ut eo exonerentur] (Cons. 3, no. 11). Azpilcueta goes on to call this a

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“true marriage” [verum matrimonium] because the marriage debt can be paid. The wife can be satisfied even though the man does not emit anything generative (Cons. 3, no. 12). Azpilcueta’s interpretation retained the idea that castrates could marry as long as they have some sexual function. Variations were many. The glossator Johannes Teutonicus Zemeke (d. 1245) maintained that castrates who could sustain an erection sufficient to penetrate and emit could marry (C. 32, q. 7, fols. 524rb-527rb). Like Azpilcueta, Alessandro Nievo allowed that even a man without testicles could marry, as long as he could maintain an erection and emit some sort of fluid (Cons. 8, n. 5, 13v). Juan Gutiérrez (d. 1618) was a shade more conservative in that he required a man to have testicles. He considered the man capable of emitting to be able to marry, even if his testicles were “deficient” (Lib. 1, cap. 16, n. 11, p. 91). Sylvester Mazzolini da Prierio (1456/7–1527) articulated the issue to be whether the castrated man has the ability to fulfil the marriage debt if he cannot seminate. Of course, the man must be able to ejaculate: As for castration, it was the truncation of the genital members, including the testicles and penis: Sometimes, however it is only the separation of the testicles; sometimes only their weakening. It must be understood that if it [castration] precedes marriage, it makes a man entirely unsuited to pay the [marriage] debt. Understand what is then the case, when someone cannot sow: such men cannot contract…because the marriage is null. [Quantum ad castrationem…est truncatio membrorum genitalium, comprehendendo testiculos & virgam: aliquando verò est sola abscissio testiculorum: aliquando verò sola eorum debilitatio. Sciendam est quod si matrimoniam praecedat, & reddat omnino ineptum ad reddendum debitum: quod intellige tunc esse, quando quis seminare non potest: tales contrahere nequeunt, & si contraexerint, sunt dividendi: quia matrimonium nullum est.] (Part 2.8, q. 16, dictum 7, 167r-v) But he went on to insist that the ejaculate must pass through the testicles in order for there to be generation. The man without testicles is ineligible, but in this version, a man cannot contract a valid marriage if he cannot produce the right kind of ejaculate – the kind that can satisfy the wife [quia satisfacit uxori]. Others were less willing to allow that sterile sexual capacity was sufficient. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) considered it a permanent impediment that voided marriage. Such a condition was grounds for couples to be “immediately separated” [statim separari] (vol. 2, bk. 4, dis. 34, q. 1, art. 2, 987–988). The English canon lawyer and theologian William of Pagula (d. c. 1332) stated that castrates could not marry “because they are incapable of paying the marriage debt, they cannot contract” [quia inepti sunt ad reddendum debitum matrimonium contrahere non possunt] (211vb). The Spanish Dominican Raimundo de Peñafort (c. 1175–1275) also considered men incapable of rendering the marriage debt to be excluded from marriage (lib. 4,

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p. 560). More evasively, Bonaventura (1221–1274) insisted that a man of “frigid nature” [frigidiae naturae] could not marry because he could not possibly fulfil the requirement that “the man is the head of the woman” [quia vir est caput mulieris] (4.34.2.1). Whether invoking the Pauline marriage debt or the Augustinian triplex bonum, these theologians expressed skepticism about castrate marriage, even when some function remained. Admittedly, a number of these positions were not entirely clear. Consider the Franciscan theologian Battista Trovamala de Salis (d. c. 1496). He sounded absolute in insisting that men with proven, permanent impotence cannot marry: “the spado lacking both testicles cannot contract marriage” [quod spado utroque testiculo carens non potest contrahere matrimonium] (15.16, 277va). But many castrates retained testicles that had some function, so the blanket prohibition based on complete absence allowed for men with partial function to qualify for marriage. In a different but also ambiguous vein, Professor of theology and Rector of the University of Paris Jacques Almain (d. 1515) distinguished between natural impotence [impotentia naturalis] and accidental impotence [impotentia casualis]. Recalling the Roman law categories underlying the spado/castrato distinction, Almain inverted the Roman law logic. Where the Digest allowed castrates who had been made after birth to marry, adopt, and make wills, Almain stressed that there is some hope that natural impotence may be relieved, but barring a miracle, the castrated man is not going to regain potency. In such cases, “therefore, permanent impotence preceding [marriage] impedes the contract” [Impotentia ergo perpetua precedens impedit contrahendum] (Dist. 34, 112v). In restating an idea of long standing, Almain added a dimension: he downplayed the notion that God might obviate impotence. At the same time, he retained considerable space for interpretation by emphasizing that permanent impotence was difficult to prove with certainty unless the testicles were entirely absent. Almain’s line of thought rested on the external condition – presence or absence – of the testicles. In different ways, Trovamala de Salis and Almain negotiated space for the possibility of castrate marriage between the canon law restrictions based on inability to achieve intercourse [impotentia coeundi] and inability to procreate [impotentia generandi]. Ambiguities about what constituted intercourse gave theologians some flexibility, while downplaying procreation as a marital requirement allowed some more. With so much attention to marriage formation and its sacramental status, variations among the canonists could be multiplied severally, but in the end, all that would reveal is what is already apparent: theologians and canonists did not agree about what constituted sexual accomplishment. Some, perhaps most, allowed that penetration and ejaculation could be considered acceptable for marriage. Without pressing too hard on the corporeal realities of castration, these opinions retained the notion that a married couple could hope for children if the man could perform the basic sexual functions. The odds might be long, but such a marriage could include the hope of fulfilling all three of the main expectations as long as

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the man had some function at some point. The scope of possibility and the lack of precise attention to the basis of impotence left room for castrates to marry. At the same time, the lack of consensus or certainty about what constituted acceptable sexual function meant that the space for toleration of the genitally impaired in marriage was vulnerable to moves toward increasing precision. Formulations that included latitude around whether a man could get and sustain an erection, whether he emitted some substance, and what that substance might be were all susceptible to narrower views that held that marriage, like celibacy, was entirely reserved for those with legible genital function.

3. The triumph of “true semen” All of this debate occurred among and between men who were or claimed to be voluntarily celibate. Whatever any individual’s position, all had some investment in the difference between castrates and celibates. As is frequently the case, those more invested in maintaining distinctions of difference prevailed, enabling the solidification of a hierarchy that situated castrates beneath celibates. Against the often ambivalent but also equivocal interventions that allowed castrate marriage, a more rigid position took shape around the insistence that men had to intromit and ejaculate procreative semen. The Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto (1494–1560) articulated the narrower view. De Soto considered the marriage of a known castrate to be unacceptable, whether or not the castrated man could ejaculate: The idea is intolerable, because where there is not semination, they cannot become one flesh, and thus it is not a marriage…Therefore, eunuchs with either [testicle] empty, although young males can make it erect and induce it into the vessel, in reality there is no marriage contract, because either they do not seminate, or their semen does not have the same nature as the power of germination. [Est tamen opinio intolerabilis, quia ubi non est seminatio, non fiunt coniuges una caro, & sic nec est matrimonium…Igitur, eunuchi utroque vacui, quamvis virili polleant, illudque erigant, & in vas inducant, re vera nullum contrahunt matrimonium: quia vel non seminant, vel eorum semen non est eiusdem rationis cum prolifico.] (Dist. 34, q. 1, art. 2, 2: 235) Regardless of the ability to get an erection and the content of the emission, for De Soto, the castrate cannot marry. It seems likely that the choice of “eunuch” instead of “spado” was deliberate: “eunuch” avoided the ambiguities in Roman law that allowed spadone rights. De Soto reduced the space for interpretation considerably. The politics around marriage and celibacy in the context of the challenges brought by Protestant theology formed the backdrop for the preference for

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more precisionist interpretation. An uptick in interest in the incapacities of castrates was part of the larger discussion created by the decrees of the Council of Trent upholding life-long marriage and clerical celibacy. Treatises such as the Traicté de la dissolution du mariage (Treatise on the Dissolution of Marriage, 1581) indicate anxiety about claims for nullifying marriages on the grounds of sexual insufficiency. Within a context of heightened concern about marriage, the painstaking discussions of impotence (whether because of inadequate semen or the inability to get erect or intromit) drew attention to castrates. The theological problem then merged with the rising visibility of known castrated men when the Bishop of Navarre and Nuncio to Spain, Cesare Spacciani, wrote to Sixtus V complaining of the “infinite number” [numero infinito] of castrates who had married in Spain. The situation was becoming a “scandal.”19 Spacciani requested clarification because the theological opinions on the matter were so various. The time had come for a definitive statement on the question of castrates and marriage, and in most ways, Cum frequenter was just that. Sixtus expressed an exceedingly dim view of castrates marrying. Without fanfare, castrates lacking both testicles [qui utroque teste carent] were forbidden to marry and any marriages by known castrates were to be annulled. The absence of testicles was the simple case. Cum frequenter emphasized that those “of a frigid nature and impotent,” including both “eunuchs and spadones” could not marry [qui frigidae naturae sunt et impotentes; eunuchi aut spadones] (Bullarum 8:870). But Cum frequenter could be understood as leaving a very narrow opening. The combination of frigid and impotent as the disqualification could be understood to allow castrates who were not both to marry. Moreover, the Brief did allow the castrate who was already married to remain so if he could get an erection and intromit seminal fluid. But several elements indicate that Sixtus V wanted to occlude castrates from marrying.20 The language hesitated over whether a castrate’s emission was sufficient. The castrate could, “pour out a certain humor similar to semen perhaps, although it is not apt for generation and the cause of matrimony” [humorem forsan quemdam similem semini, licet ad generationem et ad matrimonii causam minime aptum, effundunt] (8: 870). Furthermore, castrates were not to marry in the future, and marriages that did not meet the conditions were definitively declared null and void (8: 871). Against the preference for requiring couples to remain married, the Brief recurred to Aquinas’s allowance for immediate separation, emphasizing that insufficient men who marry undermine the “utility” [utilitas] of marriage and encourage sexual temptation (8: 870).21 Moreover, Cum frequenter allowed for a narrower interpretation of who might be disqualified from marriage and why. The specific inclusion of spadones as well as eunuchs is not merely a doubling up of language. Two understandings of the terms were generally available. Within theological and medico-theological discourse, eunuchs were men entirely lacking testicles; spadones referred to men who had damage to the testicles that nonetheless remained attached to the body (Costanus 1588, 53r, nos. 75–76). As we have

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seen (Chapter 2), in Roman law, spadones were not natural, but had been made frigid by antenatal castration. Spadones were far more likely to have relatively extensive erectile function of the sort that Cum frequenter might permit. If the Brief seems to rest on the fungible category of frigidity as the standard of measurement, the introit does mention the need for men to be able to emit “true semen” [verum semen]. For those in favor of castrates being able to marry, the Brief only mentions “verum semen” once and in reference to those who clearly lack it. As McGrath and Bajada have noted, the avoidance of settling on a definition of impotence that rested on “true semen” could be understood as putting the Brief in line with opinions that allowed for men who could get erections and ejaculate (McGrath 1988, 47–49; Bajada 1988, 69–70). These opinions held that castrates with the capacity to intromit seminal fluid could release their sexual desire within marriage. McGrath especially considers the focus on “true semen” by later commentators to be a distortion, and the reference to it in Cum frequenter to be insignificant. McGrath’s reading is detailed and his knowledge is extensive, but he is intent on making space for later medical developments and the Catholic Church’s eventual stance allowing marriage by men with vasectomies per the May 13, 1977 Decree of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1988, 119–177; 229–293). In its moment, Cum frequenter allowed the possibility of sexual function for some castrates while simultaneously indicating skepticism about the physiological and practical fitness for marriage of all castrates. Theologians led by the Jesuit Tomás Sánchez (1550–1610) lost little time in eliminating the ambiguities from Cum frequenter, and the relationship between testicles and “verum semen” was the key. Describing the opinions against castrate marriage as certain (“indubitata”) and common (“communis”), Sánchez claimed 37 authorities to back him up. In the first place, the castrate’s seminal emissions were not procreative: The difficulty is eunuchs who lack both testicles…if they can get erect and thereupon have coitus, although they cannot emit semen. They are led to believe that they can satisfy the desires of women and therefore obtain the second end of marriage but not the fundamental one, namely the generation of children. [Difficultas autem est de Eunuchis utroque testiculo carentibus…si virgam erigere valeant, ac subinde coïte, quamvis semen emittere nequeant. Ducuntur, quòd hi satisfacere valeant concupiscentiae mulieris, & ita obtinetur finis matr.secundarius; nec primarius, nimirum generatio prolis]. (7.92.15; reiterated at 7.102.6) Sánchez reduces the complexity of the category of “castrate” by sweeping aside the problematic status of the spado, because therein was the difficulty: he could still have sexual capacity. Sánchez then emphasized that castrates (always called “eunuchs”) with seminal emissions could not qualify for marriage:

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Inceptions If the testicles fail, the soul is not retained, but the evanescent material transmitted and no heat in the body is reflected, how cold they are and inept at emitting true semen…Eunuchs do not satisfy a woman with true intimacy, by their very nature being not apt for generation. [At si testes deficient, spiritus non retinentur, sed evanescunt illuc transmissi: nec calor per totum corpus reflectitur: unde frigidiore fiunt, & inepti ad verum semen emittendum…. Eunuchos non satisfacere foeminae per veram copulam suapte natura aptam ad generationem]. (7.92.17)

In support of his rejection of castrate marriage, Sánchez cited the Galenic notion that seminal fluid is produced in the testicles and asserted that Sixtus V agreed, a view that is neither supported nor denied in the Brief. As McGrath and Ignatius Gordon have pointed out, Sánchez also fudged his authorities. In fact, 31 of the 37 authors Sánchez cites actually support interpretations that allow castrates to marry as long as they get erections and can emit some seminal fluid (McGrath 1988, 106–110; Gordon 1977, 243–244). That Sánchez was not accurate in his claim that the strict interpretation was the most supported mattered not in the least. His speech act made it so in terms of the understanding of the Brief and its implications for castrates who sought to marry.22 Following Sánchez, theologians generally supported the most restrictive interpretation of Cum frequenter. Professor of theology Raphaele Aversa à Sanseverino [Salerno] (1589–1657) asserted that Sixtus neither created new law nor added to existing impediments, but simply confirmed natural law as taught by Church theologians and jurists. Castrates, Aversa noted in line with the Galenic emphasis on the testicles, only issue “aqueous humor rather than true semen,” and therefore, “They are not apt for accomplishing copulation because it is not completed by intromission of true semen, and therefore by the nature of the thing, they are wholly incapable of marriage” [non verum semen emittunt, sed solùm humorem quondam aqueum; Quare non sunt apti ad perficiendam copulam, quae non nisi per immissionem veri seminis perficitur & ideo ex natura rei sunt prorsus inhabiles ad matrimonium] (q. 13, sec. 2, 512). Although castrates who emit such substances might be able to satisfy their own lust and a female partner’s as well, without true seed capable of generation, their emission is insufficient. Aversa rested his case on medical science: “The text of Aristotle, doctors such as Galen and Hippocrates, and also other philosophers, do not hold back, but experience itself constantly teaches that the testicles of men, and also in the case of those animals which are endowed with these [testicles], that they are very necessary to generation, and especially to the elaboration of true semen.” [Ad textum Aristotelis, Medici cum Galeno & Hipocrate, ac etiam alii Philosophi, illum non recipiunt, sed ab experientia ipsa constanter docent, testes in hominibus, ac etiam in illis animalibus quae iis praedita sunt, esse ad generationem necessarios, imò & ad elaborandum verum semen] (q. 13, sec. 2, 513). The recourse to

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nature and textual authority to back up the Papal ban on castrates constituted a formidable front of authority, but just in case, Aversa further distorts the unanimity asserted by Sánchez: Aversa erases the differences behind the ancient authorities to make all of them say that true semen is elaborated in healthy testicles. Whatever the intentions of the Brief or of Sixtus, the lack of true semen disqualified “eunuchs” from the sacrament of marriage. As Sánchez put it: “But although the eunuch’s member rises and emits watery matter, this however is not true semen, and not of the same nature as real semen: there is no disturbance of the principal members” [At Eunuchi quamvis membrum erigant, atque quondam aquosam materiam emittant: ea tamen non est verum semen, nec eiusdem rationis cum vero semine: nec agitatio sit in principalibus membris] (7.92.17).23 The bare fact of “inferior” semen ejaculated by castrates became a crucial distinction that defined them all as irrevocably incapable of marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The intensity of focus on true semen by Sánchez and the theologians who followed him eliminated the slight ambiguities of the Brief. Functional testicles that produced and transmitted fertile male seed became the standard. The theologians who cemented the prevailing reading of its terms made certain that castrates were situated firmly outside social norms. By moving to a combination of external signs of sexual function and claims about (largely unknowable) internal function, the Brief and its interpreters closed the potential loopholes and created the conditions in which castrates were defined as ineligible for marriage as a sacrament. The exclusion of castrates from marriage combined with the triumph of voluntary celibacy to make physical impairment into religiously sanctioned social disability.

4. Marriage, scandal, and disability Theology about marriage is not the same as marriage in practice, of course, but the official condemnation of Cum frequenter and its interpretation affected both public opinion and practice. Actual cases combined with the specter of castrates marrying to broaden the exclusion well beyond the realm of theological debate or even canon law. The Catholic Church set up an impossible situation: lacking access to either mode of acceptable masculine comportment around sex (voluntary renunciation or procreative prowess), castrates moved – or more precisely, were moved – outside the boundaries of access to normative life trajectories. To compound the injustice, the Catholic Church, with its demand for high male singing voices, effectively supported deliberate castration in the name of God (see also Chapter 5). Where secular law tried to prevent intentional castration or protect castrates’ rights if they had been castrated by accident, canon law deprived castrated men of the possibility of marriage. As if to make up for it, the Church allowed castrated men to enter the Church on the pretext that their castrations had been the result of accidents or medical conditions, thus skirting the prohibition in

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Deuteronomy and the Church’s own precepts regarding celibacy. Just in case any castrates did still want to marry, those who tried, and a very few did, found their marriages contested, ridiculed, and derided. As the Sánchez interpretation took hold, new voices reinforced the limitations on castrates. Often using theological arguments as justification, authors condemned castrates as prejudicially as possible. Written in the vernacular and relying on vituperation more than theological argument, this kind of condemnation spread the message that castrates were disabled persons. In 1611, Vincent Tagereau pronounced that castrates were not allowed to marry because they were, “notoriously incapable of engendering, the main purpose of marriage” [estans notoirement incapables d’engendrer (principale fin du mariage)] (1887, 25). Incorrectly claiming that ancient Romans barred castrates, Tagereau warned that they might try to fool women in bed, but even if they did, the marriage was null for prior incapacity (1887, 51–52, 93). In 1619, the opening peroration of a French pamphlet stressed that “the Author of nature” made nothing that lacked utility [l’Autheur de la nature, ne fait aucune chose pour neant]. Castrates, the author stressed, were unnatural and their futility as persons was self-evident: “Is there anything in the World so ridiculous as a Castrated Man?” [Y a il rien au Monde, qui semble plus ridicule que la personne d’un Chatré]. The author goes on to dismiss the excuse of making beautiful voices by castration and sarcastically praises castrates for their skill at disposing of unwanted babies in the Turkish harem (Priviléges, 4, 5–8). Three years later, a second pamphlet was more obviously grounded in religious sentiment, opening with the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” Taking up the familiar defense of castrate marriage, the author acknowledged that not all marriages were fruitful. Instead of allowing that castrates might fit the bill, the author insisted that entering marriage knowing that children were an impossibility was “false merchandise” and criminal “imposture.” Invoking the four causes of Aristotle, the author pronounced that castration impeded the final cause of marriage (Arrest, 5). Moreover, the author drew on anxieties about the gender crossing caused by castration, insisting that castrated men, “are not really men, and can never be husbands, and as a consequence, cannot contract marriage” [ne sont point hommes, & ne furent jamais maris, & par consequent, ne doivent estre recues en contract de mariage]. Echoing Cum frequenter, the conclusion was that castrates could not marry, but if one managed to do so, the law must separate the couple (ibid., 7). The fear that castrates might fool women into marriage because they could often “pass” was palpable.24 If the castrate could fake it – and the theological debates had made it clear that many castrated men could approximate the functions of intercourse in terms of erection, intromission, and ejaculation – how was an observer supposed to know if a man was in fact a fully intact man? Fusing disgust toward castrates as effeminate with prejudice against them as ineligible for marriage, the French Jesuit Théophile Raynaud (1583–1663) rehearsed the long-standing markers of the castrate: they are soft, weak, and avaricious; they are frigid and

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have high voices; and they have a feminine appearance. They are deficient in heat and “suffer impotence that precludes marriage” [laborant impotentia intercludente matrimonium] (1655, 25, 41, 51, 65–67). Raynaud focused on building a case for the spiritual deficiencies of castrates and most of his evidence came from Roman antiquity and the early Church fathers. Although he was reluctant to endorse the practice of castration for the sake of maintaining beautiful voices, he averred that this could be for the greater good in glorifying God – as long as the strictures of Sixtus V were observed and castrates were not allowed to marry (ibid., 163–170). But sometimes they did marry. When Bartolomeo de Sorlisi (1632–1672), a Catholic castrato singing at the court of the Saxon elector Johann Georg II in Dresden, began courting Dorothea Lichtwer in 1661 or 1662 and married her in 1667, the public controversy began immediately and continued long after Sorlisi died.25 Mary E. Frandsen has analyzed the case extensively, and understands Sorlisi’s ultimate success as an indication of the triumph of companionship over procreation in marriage.26 Perhaps, but the theological and canon law arguments reinstantiated the castrate as physically and socially disabled. Sorlisi sought to marry in a Protestant principality, where Cum frequenter was a dead letter, but marriage, sacrament or no, was a matter for religious authorities. Sorlisi apparently was not certain that the fact of his castration would play well, because when he petitioned the Leipzig Consistory, he offered the tale of a Swedish knight called Titius who had been injured in battle. Significantly, “Titius” claimed to have one partially crushed testicle remaining, as well as the ability to maintain an erection (Eunuchi, 1–14). Covering as many of the possibilities as he could, Sorlisi presented himself as a man who had been involuntarily damaged (and thus not a natural castrate per Roman law); was capable of some sexual function (in line with a number of canon law opinions); and might be considered only partially castrated (depending on the medical perception of his injury). In October of 1666, the Consistory endorsed Sorlisi’s petition, confirming that marriage did not require procreation and allowed that the petitioner’s partial sexual ability enabled him to fulfil the sexual purposes of marriage, excepting procreation (ibid., 14–15, misdated as 1663). Once married, the couple had to fend off a barrage of challenges. The local pastor and court preacher, Martin Geier, began a campaign to get the marriage dissolved. The Dresden High Consistory complained that Sorlisi’s petition was misleading, and called on Johann Georg to reverse his decision. On August 28, 1667, the elector refused, but he did emphasize that the marriage was not to serve as a precedent for others (ibid., 16–18). Geier then secured opinions in support of annulling the marriage. The faculty of Giessen dismissed castrates as husbands because they could not procreate or emit true semen (Eunuchi, 18, 20, 22, 24). Strikingly, the Lutheran faculty invoked Cum frequenter and Sánchez and warned that castrate marriage was positively dangerous, both to the woman and to the institution of marriage:

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Inceptions Then in place of a marital union carried out only by God, nothing is practiced except a wanton contract that is scurrilous, lascivious, and the most base abuse of woman. Clearly this is intended to disgrace precious and honored marriage with something that is ignominious and to expose it to extreme vileness. [Tum loco congressus maritialis a DEO instituti exercetur non nisi scurrilis, lascivus & procax contractus ac foeminae abusus turpissimus: Quod est pretiosum & honoratum Conjugium plane deturpare, ignominiosum reddere & extremo dedecori exponere]. (ibid., 23; reiterated on pp. 28, 29, 31)

Strasburg also cited Sixtus V’s declaration, insisting the marriage was scandalous because it endangered Dorothea’s soul, threatened the social order, and insulted God (ibid., 32, 34–36). Jena denied the validity of the marriage entirely on the grounds of prior impediment (ibid., 43–45). The sentiment against allowing castrates to marry crossed confessional lines. Dorothea’s stepfather, Moritz Junghanns, secured more positive interpretations, but even these expressed concerns. The faculty of the University of Königsberg downplayed the procreation argument, highlighting instead the New Testament emphasis on overcoming lust (ibid., 52–53, 74). Protection “against roving lusts” [contra vagas libidines] could be satisfied as long as the man has the ability to get an erection, penetrate, and emit some sort of semen. This was sufficient to satisfy the conjugal debt and enable sexual continence (ibid., 70).27 The endorsement of the marriage notwithstanding, the faculty averred that the castrate capable of some sexual function needed marriage, lest his desire become disruptive (ibid., 72, 74, 84). The faculty of Greiffswald also worried about the abundance of infertile semen and its potential to produce lascivious desire. The faculty considered the lack of procreative ability to be a significant stressor on the marriage, noting that the couple would have to “endure the cross of infertility with all patience” [ihr Creuz der Unfructbarkeit mit aller Geduld ertragen] (ibid., 86). The couple could stay together because they had managed to marry, but they might have other sexual problems (whether because of his insufficient emission or because of excessive desire on one or both of their parts). The best Sorlisi could hope for was grudging acceptance of an accomplished fact. Circumscribed as an anomaly and its participants rendered as foolish, libidinous, and repellent, the marriage managed to stand, despite Geier’s continuing agitation against it (ibid., 148–152). The Leipzig Consistory pronounced that the marriage was to be “charitably tolerated,” and the couple should no longer be bothered – a clear reference to Geier. The basis of Leipzig’s decision was that Johann Georg had decreed it, and unless he wanted to change his mind, the marriage was valid (ibid., 89–90). For the Consistory, the marriage was an accomplished fact but not a good thing. When Sorlisi died in 1672, he left part of his estate to Dorothea (Frandsen 2005, 117–118). Angus Heriot (1975, 57), Patrick Barbier (1996, 142), and

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Ute Ranke-Heinemann (1990, 255–256) report melodramatically that Sorlisi died of despair because of the opposition to his union with Dorothea, but there is little to suggest that this was the case. But given the harassment of Geier and the public airing of their sex life, neither was this marriage exactly of the “happily ever after” sort. In a context of over-investment in procreation, fears about sex just for pleasure, and anxiety that the desire for pleasure would somehow infect society, it was bad enough that castrates such as Sorlisi wanted to marry. It was worse that some women wanted to marry castrates. Charles Ancillon (or d’Ollincan) worried about just such a scenario.28 When importuned on behalf of a friend’s daughter who seemed to be inclined toward a castrato, Ancillon sprang into action. The particular targets of the English edition are Marc’ Antonio Pasqualini (1614–1691) and Nicolò Grimaldi (c. 1673–1732, called Nicolini), implicitly the object of the girl’s desire (Ancillon 1718, title page, 14–15, 29–41, 168). The timing is wrong: the French version appeared in 1707; Nicolino did not arrive in England until 1708; and presumably, matters were long settled by the time the English version appeared nine years later.29 The fact that the notorious Edmund Curll was the publisher further suggests that the English version was primarily meant to be salacious reading material.30 Such marriages will, we are told, fail at their procreative purpose, but the real problem is that, “Eunuchs, who contract Marriage, are Cheats, and as such ought to be punished.” Castrates only appear to be men because they cannot provide what is expected in marriage (1718, 148–151). With the theological discussion of partial function lurking in the background, Ancillon first blames the castrate: “…all the Fraud must be imputed to the Eunuch, who conceals his impotency” (ibid., 153). He later dismisses the idea that some castrates may have sexual function, saying that even if they are very amorous, they can only provide satisfaction of unlawful desires (ibid., 205). Ancillon then insists that the woman who marries a castrate is “cheated and defrauded willingly and by her own Consent.” She might be able to handle such a marriage, but Ancillon is skeptical that she will maintain her “Continence and Chastity” (ibid., 233). These marriages might happen, Ancillon admits, but God prohibits them (ibid., 238). It would be better to be sure that a man is fully capable, although Ancillon allows that visual inspection is not reliable. Fortunately, any marriage involving a castrate who knew about his condition can be dissolved as invalid. Unlike the authorities in Dresden, Ancillon insists that dissolution is better than allowing the marriage to go on. If it is permitted, the woman will languish or alternatively, seek satisfaction outside of marriage, both of which are socially disruptive. For Ancillon, the abundance of civil laws and religious strictures across confessional lines are proof that society must be protected against the dangers of castrate marriage (ibid., 154, 159, 166–167, 176, 181–190, 199, 214–224). Referring again to Sorlisi, Ancillon argues that the one time such a marriage was permitted, the amorous castrate obtained permission by “surreptitious” means, demonstrating Ancillon’s assertion of the perfidious nature of all castrates (ibid., 192–195). Castrates are

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inadequate genitally, and that makes them inadequate persons – deceptive, disruptive, and detrimental to good social order. In forbidding and ridiculing castrate marriage, society encouraged the very social disorder that the banning of castrates was supposed to avoid. Consider the case of the castrato singer Guisto Ferdinando Tenducci, who eloped with Dorothea Maunsell in 1766, which Helen Berry has explored in detail. In the wake of her family’s vociferous opposition to the union, newspapers speculated about Tenducci’s ability to fulfil his sexual obligations as a husband. As the Monthly Review put it: “We always understood Signior Tenducci, the celebrated opera-singer, to be an eunuch” (no. 38, p. 63).31 Dorothea herself tried at first to counter the suggestions of Tenducci’s sexual incompetence. In a published defense of her actions, she described how she and her husband were in bed together when her father and uncle burst in and dragged Tenducci to prison (Tenducci 1768, 20).32 But Dorothea undercut her own purpose by insisting, “my marriage with Tenducci was all my own seeking. I first proposed it, and urged him to it” (ibid., 21). Dorothea did Tenducci no favors in presenting him as the passive partner, an inversion of accepted gender norms, and her description of his sufferings at the hands of her family further suggested his weakness compared to intact men (ibid., 15–30).33 Despite her family’s opposition, Dorothea stuck by Tenducci initially, but the collapse of the marriage reinscribed the notion that castrates were insufficient to the task. Tenducci tried to lead a normal married life. He continued to seek singing work, but his marriage got in the way. Elizabeth Harris commented, “Tenducci is already arriv’d[;] had he come alone we could have made some use of him in having him here to sing, but as he has brought Mrs. Tenducci I can have but little to do with him” (Burrows and Dunhill 2002, 601). In 1769, Dorothea gave birth to a child Tenducci acknowledged as his own. Berry speculates that Tenducci encouraged Dorothea to take a fully able lover and that he tried to protect her by accepting the child as his own (1768, 152– 153).34 Tenducci himself supposedly told Casanova that he had a third testicle, but the story seems improbable: Casanova was in London in 1763–1764, while Tenducci did not even meet Dorothea until 1766. Why Tenducci would volunteer such a claim is unexplained (Casanova 1966–1971, 10: 12). In March of 1771, the couple fled Britain for Italy, trying to outrun Tenducci’s debts. Once in Italy, Tenducci could not claim Dorothea as his wife (because of Cum frequenter). In November, Dorothea received assistance from her father to return home without Tenducci (Berry 2011, 164–192). Dorothea returned to her family’s good graces in part by publicly renouncing her marriage to Tenducci in a manner that marked him – and castrates in general – as socially disabled because of physical impairment. In 1775, having married William Long Kingsman, Dorothea sued Tenducci for libel on the grounds that the marriage was invalid and she was “falsely called Tenducci” (Trials 1985, 3). The suit named Tenducci’s impotence as the basis for her legal action. The trial testimony was directed so as to support

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Tenducci’s knowledge of his condition (constituting grounds for annulment), with discrepancies in the testimony about Tenducci’s genitals covering several possible iterations of castration (ibid., 5). The first witness, Charles Baroe, who lodged with Tenducci in 1765, testified that he had seen Tenducci undressed several times. Baroe twice saw the scar near the scrotum, and Tenducci told Baroe that he kept his severed testicles in a red velvet purse. Baroe’s testimony noted, “there were but very few hairs about the said Tenducci’s private parts, and that his scrotum, or testical bag, at that time, appeared shrivelled, without any thing contained in it to denote a testicle” (ibid., 9). Lorenzo Lombardi also lodged with Tenducci. Lombardi’s description, based on seeing Tenducci bathing in the river, is both similar to Baroe’s and different: “Tenducci’s p[eni]s was like a person’s little finger, and that his scrotum, or testicle-bag, was smooth and flat, without any swelling” (ibid., 19). Perhaps the discrepancies were the work of faulty memory, but Baroe omitted the penis entirely, while Lombardi conveniently described one of the known effects of pre-pubertal castration: the undersized penis. A third witness, Francis Michael Passerini did not offer a physical description, but he reported that he knew Tenducci to be a “eunuch,” and “the deponent believes he was such from his infancy.” Passerini testified that Tenducci said that, “he could very safely sleep with a woman, as he could not get her with child” (ibid., 20–21). The language suggests that Tenducci could accomplish at least some aspects of sex, perhaps up to and including penetration and intromission. Although Passerini corroborated that Tenducci was a castrate and knew he was sterile, Passerini did not know that Tenducci was deliberately castrated as a prepubescent boy. The witnesses covered all the bases: Tenducci lacked testicles, had a small penis, but might be able to get it up. The combination allowed for the rest of the testimony to focus on claiming that Tenducci seduced Dorothea (conveniently overlooking her own account of the beginning of the relationship) and that he had fooled her into marriage. No longer the passive figure, Tenducci was now the conniving, feminized castrate. When Tenducci failed to appear, the very public accusations of his deficiencies went unanswered. Dorothea won the case, and the marriage officially never happened. In addition to the rarified debates of theologians, castrate marriage was the stuff of pamphlets, books, tracts, treatises, and newspapers – in short, the stuff of scandal. Ange Goudar quipped of Tenducci, “He is the same eunuch who had married without having the two witnesses necessary for the marriage” [C’est ce même eunuque que s’est marié sans avoir les deux témoins nécessaires pour le mariage] (1777, 75). The word “témoins” in French meant both testicles and witnesses. The ruminations over castrate marriage were shocking enough in the abstract that someone like Edmund Curll saw the topic as a money spinner. In addition to the sheer volume of complaint and discussion, recurrent themes – over-investment in procreation, fear of excessive sex just for pleasure, the anxious notion that pleasure would not be enough and that castrate insufficiency would somehow infect society – crowded out the fact that castrates were just men with a physical impairment.

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5. Instantiating disability There are several inconsistencies in this story. Castrates were barred from the celibate priesthood because they did not have to struggle to control their desires, but forbidden to marry because they could perform some sexual functions, short of procreation, which indicated the capacity for desire and the ability to express it. Castrates could not marry because, even if they could get erect, penetrate, and intromit sterile seminal fluid, they could not procreate, but procreation was not supposed to be the sole purpose of marriage and consummation was not the marker of indissolubility once the Church settled on consent as the crucial marker of marriage. Consent could have made allowing castrates to marry a non-issue, especially for those capable of some function who could fulfil the physical obligations of the marriage debt. Instead, genital impairment imposed on the body became the basis of excluding a group of men from the basic sociality of marriage. This exclusion held whether castration came about because of disease or accident or intentional surgery in the interests of creating high male voices. Let us consider the last category because most of these men beginning in the sixteenth century were castrated as boys, ostensibly for medical reasons and with their consent or that of their parents, in order to supply the Church, and later the opera house, with castrati. How many prepubescent boys can be trusted to make the decision to live outside of social norms for the rest of their lives? They were castrated and barred from marriage; they were barred from marriage because they were castrated. Historians are not supposed to indulge in hypotheticals, but I am going to in a way: what if the early play in the system had been left in place? What if, as Lombard and Gratian indicated, impotence was something God could be trusted to overcome? What if the explanations remained vague and the requirements for marriage had been that men could marry as long as they could fulfil two parts of Augustine’s triplex bonum, fidelity and sacrament (fides; sacramentum)? What if consent as the constituting act could be accomplished by anyone, regardless of his (lack of) genitals? We will never know how things might have been, but we do know that theologians and canonists did not look too hard at a man’s genitals – until genitals mattered. At that point, Cum frequenter and its more precisionist interpreters made all castrates ineligible for marriage. Intolerance of the genitally impaired turned into social disability in a culture in which marriage was the acceptable locus for sexual desire as well as a fundamental social and economic unit. Genital impairment is not as obvious as a missing limb, blindness, a speech disorders, or many other sorts of physical disability. But as Tobin Siebers (2008) and Robert McRuer (2006) have argued, the lack of any presumed ability encourages marginalization. Whether as effeminate, impotent, or hypersexual, the castrate was dismissed as a social subject.

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Notes 1 Kuefler (2001, 258) notes that Ulpian identified three kinds of castrates in D.50.16.128: “Spadonum generalis appellatio est: quo nomine tam hi, qui natura spadones sunt, item thlibiae thlasiae, sed et si quod aliud genus spadonum est, continentur.” I would emphasize that the third category for Ulpian is a catch-all, whereas the Gospel version is attempting to be something quite specific. 2 Cybele is one of a number of regional variations. She is also identified with Isis (Egypt), Astarte (Syria), Ishtar (Babylon), and Greek goddesses, including Demeter, Rhea, and Hera. See Cybele, 1996 for the range of associations with other deities and mythological emanations. On the galli, see especially Graillot (1912, 287–319); Taylor (1997, 335–336); Sanders (1981). 3 For the main ancient narrative, see Livy (1849, vol. 8, 29.10.4–8). For the Syrian background, see Lightfoot (2002). 4 Rouse translates gallos as “eunuchs.” 5 Roman law forbade castration of Romans of all ranks, although it allowed castration of foreigners. See Chapter 2 above. Sawyer (1996, 120–126) emphasizes that Magna Mater worship reveals the gynephobic elements in Roman religion. Barring citizens was in part because the cult was a threat to Roman (masculine) values. Roller (1999, 229–232, 301) accepts that the galli were castrates and attributes negative attitudes in Greece and Rome toward the cult in part to this fact. 6 Takács and Elder both comment on the gender change. Ferguson 20–21, 33–34 links biographical elements with the movement from fanatical devotion to disillusion. Wiseman 1985, 198–206 argues the poem is a hymn written from the Megalesia, and a condemnation of the excesses of the cult outside of state-sponsored festivals. An extensive bibliography may be found in Holoka 206–209. 7 Hales “Looking,” 94 argues that sculptors deliberately differentiated galli from traditional Roman priests in terms of dress and accompanying symbols. 8 Bailey translates gallus as “eunuch.” The sexual practices of the galli were also satirized in The Golden Ass, in which Lucius is afraid of being sodomized by a band of extortionist eunuchs. See Apuleius (1994, 8: 24–29). 9 On Roman qualifications concerning bodily integrity, see Morgan (1974), who challenges the notion that Roman priests had to be free of bodily defects, although Vestal Virgins did have such a requirement. 10 On Origen’s self-castration, see Eusebius (2005, 6: 8). Taken as true for centuries, some scholars have questioned whether Origen did actually castrate himself. Chadwick (1993, 108–109) speculates that Eusebius was reporting malicious gossip. Brown (1988, 160–177) accepts the self-castration story, situating Origen’s beliefs about sex and the body in their religious context. On the controversy, see Clark (1990). 11 For instance, Pliny (1959, 10.96.8): “I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths” [Nihil aliud inveni quam superstitionem pravam et immodicam]. 12 The canons produced at various councils and compiled into collections amounted to the basic materials for medieval canon law. Among the canons of the early church addressing castration, Book 8, Chapter 47 of the Constitutiones Apostolorum, Canon 21 allowed: “A eunuch, if he be such by the injury of men, or his testicles were taken away in a persecution, or he was born such, and yet is worthy, let him be made a Bishop.” But self-castrators were barred from becoming clerics (Canon 22) and those who were already clerics and discovered to have selfcastrated were to be defrocked (Canon 23). Canon 24 enacted penalties on laymen for self-castrating. See Work Claiming (Chase 1848, 248) for the texts. The collection has a complicated history, with some canons dating to the third century. Like most of the early canon collections, it was not published until the nineteenth century, and debate about the relationship among and between early

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15 16 17

18

19 20

21 22

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24 25 26 27

Inceptions collections continues. Bradshaw (2002, 73–97) assesses the evidence and the state of the problem. Scholars have also examined “mystical castration,” which I will not address. See Murray (1999). Before Gratian, the most significant compilation of canon law was the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (c. 960/65–1020) and his assistants with 1,785 canons organized topically into 20 books. Hoeflich and Grabher consider Burchard’s to be, “the first attempt to organize canon law systematically” (2008, 7). Burchard, Decretum (1548, 9.40–9.44) allowed that in cases of marriage in which consummation was not possible, the healthy spouse could remarry but the incapable one could not. See similarly Ivo (1841–1855, vol. 161, 6.115–16, 118, 120). Under Alexander III (1159–1181), the official position became that consent made marriage indissoluble, but consummation perfected it (Watt 1993, 41). For canon law in the early medieval period, see Kéry (1999). The official collections are the Decretum Gratiani (c. 1130–1150), the Liber Extra or Decretales of Gregory IX (1234), the Liber Sextus (1298, under Boniface VIII), and the Constitutiones Clementinae (1317). Two further collections, the Extravagantes of John XXII (1325) and the Extravagantes communes (c. 1499) complete the Corpus, which remained in effect until replaced by the Codex Iuris Canonici (Code of Canon Law) in 1917. Gregory XIII’s Cum pro munere (1580) established the approved edition and gave the Corpus its name. Part I of the Decretum has 973 canons, made up of 101 Distinctions, each with capitula (citations) and dicta (Gratian’s comments). Part II, with 2,576 chapters, presents 36 causae (cases), with capitula and dicta. Question 2 of Causa 33 is often separately designated the Tractatus de penitentia. At 396 chapters, Part III is the shortest part of the Decretum, and is known as the Tractatus de consecratione. See Brundage Medieval (1995, 190–192). Winroth (2000) has traced the multiple versions of the text. Technically, the Decretum was a private collection never officially promulgated by the Church. See Landau (2008, 22). Like many of his contemporaries, Gratian regarded those who married for sexual pleasure as fornicators. See Part 2, Case 32, Question 2.5. Notably, John Calvin, who rejected much Catholic tradition, retained the idea that sexual incapacity was grounds for annulling a marriage. See Witte (2005, 272–276). Spacciani’s query is quoted at length in McGrath (1988, 14). This is consistent with Sixtus V’s general antipathy to sex. He suspended the traditional allowance for abortion before quickening (restored by his successor), and issued a bull on 3 November 1586 that prescribed the death penalty for adultery, whether committed by a man or a woman. See Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs (1990, 250–251). For this reading of utilitas in terms of procreation, see Antonelli (1903, 132–135). Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659), who served as personal physician to Innocent X and Alexander VII and legal advisor to the Rota Romana disagreed with the emphasis on verum semen. See Quaestionum 3.1.5.28–30. His logic was that generative capacity was not required of the elderly who married, and as long as a castrate could perform sexually, the quality of his emission was incidental. The prevalence of Sánchez’s intervention is indicated by its persistence of his formulation. See for instance Meldula (1731, Disp. 7, q. 15, art. 2, n. 426, p. 449), which observes that “eunuchs” produced a watery substance that “differed substantially from true semen.” Marriages occasionally did happen before Cum frequenter. See Sherr (1980). One index of the notoriety of the case is that a collection of documents was published in nine editions starting in 1685. The edition consulted is Eunuchi (1737). Finucci (2003, 262) notes the case, but refers to Sorlisi as Domenico. The understanding of testicular function relies explicitly on Aristotle, and allows that the existence of vasa seminaria means that a castrated man can produce

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30 31 32 33

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semen, even if he is not capable of procreation. See Eunuchi, 72. The basic requirements for contract are repeated on pp. 77, 64–67. The author of the French version is listed as C. D’Ollincan at the end of the Preface. The treatise later appeared under the name Charles Ancillon. The story that Nicolini’s romance was the source of Ancillon’s treatise is frequently repeated, but seems to have been a later invention. A satirical poem considered women susceptible to seduction by Nicolini’s voice. See Anon., “The Signior in Fashion” (1973, 314–315). This poem also postdates Ancillon’s original treatise. For Nicolini’s movements, see Sartori (1990–1994, 7: 336–337). Nicolini was still topical: his last appearances in England were in 1717. Dean (2001, 17: 878–879) argues that the popularity of opera in England was enhanced tremendously, if not actually created, by Nicolini. On Curll, see Baines and Rogers (2007). See also comments in the Public Advertiser, no. 9942 (September 12, 1766) and St. James’s Chronicle, or the British Evening Post, no. 879 (October 18, 1766). Dorothea’s father, Thomas, confirms much of her story, although he characterizes Tenducci as corrupting and seducing his daughter. See Trials (1985, 23–33). Dorothea’s cousin forcibly detained Tenducci and tried to entrap the castrato into admitting that he had seduced Dorothea. Released and then illegally detained again, Tenducci faced attempts to confuse him by taking advantage of his limited English. Tenducci escaped with Dorothea, but her relatives tracked the couple down and threatened Tenducci at gunpoint. He was then hauled off to jail by armed soldiers, and held without bail (because of the machinations of Dorothea’s father) in the Cork jail where conditions were sufficiently insalubrious that he was soon feverish and spitting blood. Released and in need of funds, Tenducci attempted to perform at a benefit opera, but Dorothea’s relatives once again accused him of seducing her by force, and he fled before her father could detain him yet again. The precedent Berry (2011) cites is the case of Farinelli’s mistress, who slept with Farinelli’s brother. The resulting children became the famous singer’s heirs. See also Feldman (2009).

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Part 2

Negotiations

Where Part I analyzed how medicine, the law, and social structures such as marriage created castrates as disabled and transgendered people within early modern culture, Part II explores how cultural loci confirmed and extended the implications of these perceptions. On stage, castrates as characters, with their strange bodies, irregular abilities and inabilities, and their equivocal social locus, enabled misrecognition and disidentification that further destabilized gender and sexual binaries. With their high but astonishingly powerful and agile voices, castrati on the opera stage wooed, wowed, and worried opera audiences. The melding of gender attributes, along with the inescapable knowledge of how castrati came to have such remarkable voices, prompted discomfort that ranged from derision to violent prejudice – even as the castrato voice was the object of awe and admiration. Travellers encountered castrates as well, especially in the Ottoman Empire. Here too, prejudice shaped how westerners regarded castrates. Black castrates in the harem enjoyed power and access to the sultan, which westerners (deliberately) misunderstood as abjection and feminization. Even when observers voiced concerns about castration, travel narratives exhibited complacent satisfaction relative to eastern castrates. Collectively, these cultural building blocks formed a complex structure of animosity and enmity. Physical disability of the genitals, understood as socially disqualifying, combined with gender contempt to establish a pattern of discrimination.

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4

Playing the eunuch

As popular entertainment, early modern theater relied on and provided knowledge of the larger world. Spectators in, say, London, were not for the most part likely to go to Venice or Tunis or Alexandria, but they had ideas about such places. Plays provided some of those ideas, reinforced many of them, and sometimes challenged them. In the case of castrates, spectators had a fair amount of knowledge that was embedded in the religious, legal, and medical structures in which they lived. Although most probably they did not know about Cum frequenter or the detailed theological arguments about castrates, they likely did know “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Matt. 19.12). If the Gospel wasn’t enough, sermons routinely invoked the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–40) as a figure of conversion, contrasting the infertility of his body with the fertility of accepting Christ (Sonnibank 1617; Roberts 1648, 12–13, 24; Raleigh 1679, 324–25; Purchas 1613, 554–557; La Primaudaye 1618, 910–912).1 Similarly, the subtleties of legal arguments over the implications of Si serva or Sed est quaesitum were not in all likelihood of everyday interest, but whether men with testicular insufficiency could marry and what impotence did to their access to familial authority, local political positions, and access to guild masterships figured in litigation at the full range of social levels. The legal depended on the medical, where knowledge of men who had suffered damage to their testicles and lost at least some testicular function because of injury or disease seems to have been widespread (Darmon 1985; Behrend-Martínez 2007). If audiences knew about castrates, what they did not know mattered at least as much. Based on the physical descriptions and characterizations within plays, spectators knew that castrates lacked beards, sometimes seemed effeminate in their manners, and often sang well. Recognition was presumed, even as plots and characters demonstrated that recognition was unreliable. Indeed, many plays depended on “knowledge” of castrates being inaccurate or incomplete. In Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (1596?), for instance, the ambitious fool, Clem, confuses “gilded” and “gelded” and offers to take Spencer’s place as Mullisheg’s chief eunuch. Clem’s ignorance is the comic relief, and he tries to run away when he finds out what he is expected to give up (5.2.126–127). In a meta moment, Philip Massinger makes fun of

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ignorance about castrates while letting audiences feel knowledgeable. In his 1624 play, The Renegado, the servant Gazet wants to become a castrate when he learns how much time he would get to spend with women from an actual castrate. Like Clem, Gazet hasn’t a clue what he must give up for that access (II: 3.4.40–42, 45–50).2 Castrate characters subverted certainties about how gender performance mapped onto gendered bodies. Beyond playing ignorance for humor, actors playing the part displayed some performative elements of gender as a matter of testicular deprivation: castrates were smooth-faced and presumptively effeminate, elements that actors could impersonate. In England, the actors were likely to be boys, indicating that the link between intact genitals and masculinity was temporal. In other contexts, actors (male or female) playing castrates might undermine the association of male genitals with male embodiment. Then there were characters that impersonated castrates as part of the drama, adding to the uncertainty about sex (biological and in terms of sex acts). Audiences could suspend disbelief, but castrates on stage made it difficult to return to such a basic belief as a man is a man when the curtain came down. The discomforts of subversion and the impossibility of knowing for certain put presumptions about normative gender under pressure. One of the forms of this pressure was that castrates as characters invited disidentification. According to José Esteban Muñoz, “The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (1999, 31). The castrate as a character in a play demonstrated the appropriate behaviors and appearance of a man deprived of his genitals. That an actor might seem effeminate in the way of a castrate for the duration of the performance indicated the contours of masculinity through the articulation of the castrate’s insufficiency. At the same time, that insufficiency was demonstrably performative. Because the actor playing the castrate displayed only some of the physical aspects of castration, his theatrical performance depended heavily on his gender performance. The ability to separate these modes of performance is often at stake when considering castrates in the early modern cultural imaginary. As Judith Butler has articulated it, gender is wholly performative: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance” (2004, 33).3 Butler argues that there is “no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (ibid., 25). Gender identity is a social construction that gains purchase by repetition, and it is a discursive process (ibid., 140). Sex can be a social construction as well, as both Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling demonstrate (Butler 2004, 17–39; Butler 1990, 140; Fausto-Sterling 2000). In Bodies That Matter, Butler retreated from the radical constructivism of gender performativity, allowing that regulatory norms

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consolidate the sexed body. Nonetheless, the reiteration of norms means that materialization through performance is never stable. Early modern theatrical representations of gender and sex around the figure of the castrate offer a materialized body that at once does not conform to appropriate binary gender performance modes and is recognizable (if undependable) for this failure. Usually, the gender/sex question in early modern theater, especially in England, is about boys playing girls and women, but castrates complicate the application of gender norms to actors playing sexed parts. Literary critic Lisa Jardine contends that male effeminacy and crossdressing merely affirmed dominant masculine values. Laura Levine analyzes how concerns about cross-dressing men on stage came to be understood as endangering spectators (1994, 10–25). David Mann has argued that audiences were highly aware of “the artifice of performance,” particularly by crossdressing boy actors (2008, 39).4 Castrates on stage present gender performance as culturally constructed within a set of normative terms that limit the range of performative expression. The castrate as a gender performance does not and cannot hit the right marks, revealing crucial gaps in gender performativity that destabilize gender identity as a certainty and allow spectators to feel affirmed in their sense of (comparative) stability as gendered subjects. Theatrical performance constituted readily available cultural knowledge of castrates as at once embedded within social and sexual norms and apart from them. Few plays mentioned what actually happened to make a man into a castrate, and when they did, the references were generally brief and allusive. With relatively little attention paid to castration, the imaginative possibilities loomed large. What exactly was a castrate missing? What did a “real one” actually look like? How could an observer be sure a castrate was really a castrate? Why might it matter that someone was a castrate? On stage, playwrights presented castrates as a tangle of superior skills (as singers, for instance) and physical incapacity; as either especially safe (when guarding feminine sexual virtue) or particularly dangerous (when impersonating the castrate’s sexual incapacity). This chapter is a case study of the representation of castrates on the early modern European stage in terms of how castrates were understood as gendered persons with peculiar – both visible and elusive – disabilities relative to social norms. Three thematic loci (castrates as singers, castrates as malevolent figures, and castrates facilitating marriage plots) provide an abundance of evidence of castrates simultaneously fitting within and disturbing gender binaries. In fact, the abundance is so great that the focus will be primarily on the English stage, from the late sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century with brief forays to other places and times. The English practice of barring women from the stage in the Renaissance heightened the gender stakes around castrates. Furthermore, England had little actual knowledge of castrates at the beginning of the period, but with the rising popularity of opera and musical performances featuring castrati beginning in the seventeenth century, that knowledge expanded considerably. Theatrical representations of

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castrates shifted accordingly. Where plays frequently mentioned castrates early on, these references tended to be limited in dimension and depth.5 After the theaters reopened in the Restoration, some plays foregrounded the moral and social ambiguity of castrate characters. These changes coincided with and reinforced concerns about gender non-conformity because castrate characters had long been and remained ambiguous on stage. Castrato singers were also becoming fashionable, and with their popularity, the castrate on stage became at once more familiar and more unsettling. Over time, the genitally disabled transgendered person represented on stage accumulated a performative history saturated with uncertainty that served as the (unreliable) foundation for understanding the castrate.

1. Someone wanting something, singing something By the late sixteenth century if not before, castrates were renowned for singing. If spectators did not know this, plays told them so. In Two Noble Kinsmen, the jailer’s daughter, mad with unrequited love says: And all these must be boys, He has the trick on’t; and at ten years old They must be all gelt for musicians. And sing the wars of Theseus.6 (4.1.131–133) Despite her madness, she knew that boys were castrated to create beautiful voices. As exceptional as his voice might be, the castrated singer was proverbial. References in passing assume the musical association even as they assert it. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus reads aloud: “The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung, /By an Athenian eunuch to the harp” (5.1.44–45). Edward Knowell in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour says that if his father learns of his gallant ways, “My father reade this with patience? Then will I be made an Eunuch, and learne to sing Ballads” (1.2.58–59).7 Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1623) invokes the castrato singer: “Command the Eunuch/To sing the Dittie that I last compos’d” (I:1.3.79–80). In Henry Glapthorne’s The Hollander, Lady Yellow observes, “Turne Eunuch and reserve thy voyce, perhaps twill purchase thee/A petty Cannons place in some blinde chantry” (1.1 at sig B3v). For Viola in Twelfth Night, pretending to be a castrate is plausible because she has the requisite musical ability: “Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him,/ It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing/And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.56–58). In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Valentinian, the corrupt emperor noticed Lycias the “sweet-fac’d Eunuch” because he was singing (2.1, p. 19). Whatever they heard in terms of actual singing, theater audiences were trained to associate eunuchs with excellence in music and especially in singing.

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References to the genital impairment of a singer might be brief, but allusions coupled with performances provided theater audiences with an idea of what a castrate does because of what he is. Although we cannot know how accomplished as singers the actors were, the claims for their efficacy and the beauty of their voices accompanied their appearances in drama and comedy alike. Plays routinely presented castrated men – not the castrati of Italian chapels or opera, but rather boys and men singing as if “gelt” – as having special, superior musical skill. The association of castrates with singing served as a primary point of entry for the disruptive effects of the genitally altered man. Plays told audiences that the castrate exchanged his genitals for a beautiful voice, but doing so indicated his gender liminality. Gina Bloom has argued that the voice on stage was understood as a prosthetic and as an instrument that could be utilized temporarily by a particular actor. Boy actors whose voices cracked, she suggests, did not threaten the mobility of the voice, which changed because of underlying humoral development. But the male drop in register did indicate the maleablility of the body (2007, 16, 27). Castrate characters who sang on stage were also operating within the scheme of early modern theories of sound and hearing. When Cloten pursues the unresponsive Imogen in Cymbeline, his comments provide a condensed scheme of the physiological presumptions: So, get you gone. If this penetrate, I will consider your music the better: if it do not, it is a [vice/voice] in her ears, which horse-hairs and calves’-guts, nor the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend.8 (2.3.27–31) Coming on the heels of Cloten saying, “I am advis’d/to give her music in the mornings; they say it will penetrate./Come on, tune. If you can penetrate her with your /fingering, so: we’ll try with the tongue too” (2.3.11–15) the relationship between musical and sexual penetration is much on his mind (Wong 2013, 104–109). In early modern understanding of sound, voices penetrated the ear and from there, moved body, soul, and emotions. The physiological mechanism of musical sound created effects on the listener that ranged from affecting the soul to healing the body to seduction. In his elaboration of Neoplatonic philosophy, Marsilio Ficino emphasized the positive: “…spirit, which is the airy vapour of our blood and the link between body and soul, is tempered and nourished by airy smells, by sounds, and by song” (1956, 1:40, no. 5). Hearing was crucial for Ficino because musical harmony reflected the divine order of the universe, and a person who did not respond to harmony with pleasure was necessarily out of sorts spiritually and emotionally (ibid., 5: 37–38, no. 21).9 The proof of music’s relationship to the

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divine was in the way ratios and intervals resonated as sounds that pleased the ear (ibid., 7: 82–87, no. 76).10 The octave reflected divine perfection and hearing it returned the listener to the path toward God: “By the ears…the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony which it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to its rightful home, so that it may enjoy true music again” (ibid., 1: 45, no. 7). This was generally a good thing, in that music had soothing effects on the soul. Paradoxically, music could be a source of “divine frenzy” that enabled the soul to reach upward toward God. The physiology of hearing followed the elemental description of the universe within musical ratios: “one measure of earth; also one of water, but with a third more; one and half measures of fire; and lastly, two of air” (ibid., 7: 86, no. 76).11 Hearing music could move souls because it mediated between the matter of bodies and the form of spirit. As the theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600) commented, “Touching musical harmony whether by instrument or by voice, it being but of high and low in sounds a due proportionable disposition, such notwithstanding is the force thereof, and so pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the soul itself by nature is or hath in it harmony” (1841, 2: 141–142). If music could move the soul, it risked moving it in negative ways. The notion that the perception of sound worked not only to penetrate, but to corrupt stretched back at least to Plato. Although Ficino and his followers generally glossed over Plato’s negative reaction to music, the wariness about music is palpable in The Republic. Plato’s Socrates allowed that the Dorian and Phrygian modes were acceptable because they encouraged martial fortitude, but he was skeptical about the Ionian and Lydian modes, fearing that they would promote luxury and laziness. Other modes ought to be banned altogether, “After all, they are no use even to women – if we want them to be good women – let alone to men” (2000, 398c–399c). The corrupting effects of music were especially troubling: “So if you give music the chance to play upon your soul, and pour into the funnel of your ears the sweet, soft, lamenting modes…then the first effect on a nature with any spirit in it is to soften it.” If the listener does not resist, “complete dissolution of the spirit” will result, and even warrior spirits will be rendered “feeble” (ibid., 411b–411c). Whatever their understanding of the Classical inheritance with respect to music and sound, English commentators picked up on the gendered effects music could have. In a gender-laden descriptor, the anti-theatrical writer William Prynne warned that the effect of music in plays, “is fit for none but Strumpets, and lewde lascivious effeminate persons” (1633, 272). Prynne updated the ancient concerns with special reference to music accompanying plays as, “Diabolicall, unchristian lust-exciting, vice-fomenting, soule-impoysoning pleasures, which all Christians should eternally abominate, as the very snares of Hell.” For Thomas Wright, the response to music depended on both the kind of music and the kind of person. A good man would lift his heart to heaven; a bad man,

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hearing the same music “will convert it to lust.” A propensity to lust was a feminine attribute, while control of the voice, head, and heart was a sign of masculine strength. Although some types of music “may be more apt to one passion than another,” experts stressed that the combination was the key: “So that in this, mens affections and dispositions, by meanes of musicke, may stir up divers passions” (1604, 171). That the fungible body could be affected by music concerned Lodowick Lloyd (fl. 1573–1610) as well. He worried that gentle music could disarm masculine warrior spirits. Despite many examples of ancients praising music, Lloyd brought out the more negative views: “The most part of the worlde dyd learne musicke save in Egypt…musicke was forbidden, least the tender and soft mindes of their youth shoulde bée intised to too much pleasure” (1573, 114r). Lloyd agreed with the ancient faith in music for martial purposes, but if the music of Mars was good, the music of Venus most certainly was not: “the Egyptians forbad the youth to bée taught therein, lest from men they woulde become againe women” (ibid., 115r). Lloyd, like Prynne, worried about effeminacy because of music. Given the gendered associations and the presumptions about the efficacy of music, both the positive and negative views of music were mapped onto castrate characters. The sexual deprivation that produced the singing castrate was part of the issue. In John Marston’s The Insatiate Countess, a guard of the watch tells his captain: “May I never be counted a cock of the game, if I feare Spurres: but be gelded like a Capon for the preserving of my voyce” (3.1, sig. E1v). In addition to the association with music, the watchman contrasts the aggressive, sexually endowed fighting cock with the castrated, feminized capon. Deprivation altered the castrate’s gender status. Here, and routinely, lacking balls was effeminate. As Patricia Simons argues, the issue with respect to testicles and masculinity in early modern culture was not the penis as penetrating object, but the power of the testicles to make semen. The penis had the lesser role of facilitating ejaculation of semen or sperm. Where modern explanations of masculinity grounded in psychoanalysis understand the male body in terms of the primacy of the penis, early modern accounts focused on the ability to produce and project both urine and semen. The semen had to have potency, and lack of projection undermined a man’s claims to potency – and masculine privilege (2011, 125–157). The actor who played a castrate presented an insufficient man, with the performance of genital disability rendered as effeminacy. Because the genital element could not be actually displayed, the gender performance of the castrate invoked it through behavioral cues and stereotypically feminine expressions and modes of deportment. As a theatrical performance, the iterative display of gender signaled not “gender/female,” but instead “gender/feminine” – attached to a body that was understood as not entirely male. Singing was a key performative indicator of a castrate, and his ability as a singer complicated the presumptive inferiority of the castrate along gender and sexual lines. The castrated singer could penetrate the body through the ear, and could in essence penetrate it “better” in that singing moved the soul,

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rather than the spiritually inferior body. The castrate’s singing ability was thus both distinct from and mimetic of sexual capacity. How this might play out on stage is apparent in John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599).12 Although only named explicitly once, the castrate informs both the struggles for sexual ability and the expression of emotion and passion by means of music throughout the play. The intertwining of music, sexual innuendo (around disability and potency), and prosthetic selves is initiated in the induction, with the actor preparing to play Galeatzo asking the other actors if they are ready for their entrance, which will be signaled by music (ibid., 1–2). Set in exotic Venice, the plot revolves around the presumed-dead returning to life, disguises, and that convenient device, the important letter that falls into the wrong hands. Antonio dresses as a woman; Mellida dresses as a page; men are women and women are men, and of course, boys play girls. Gestures toward the castrate shape both the tragic main plot and the comic relief through singing. The play juxtaposes serious emotional investment articulated to (or because of) music with the false music of courtly pretension. In its serious guise, singing enabled profound emotional release. In accordance with beliefs about the emotional power of music, Lucio’s song causes Anducio to grieve and Lucio himself to weep for the lost Antonio. Later, Antonio enjoins his page to sing to that he can weep for his lost love, Mellida, who is standing by in disguise (3.1.109–16; 4.1.129–48).13 Marston also features music for far lower purposes. Entering so as to suggest absurd courtly affectation, Castilio sings in such a way that the page, Dildo (about whom more below), winces, “What a squeaking cart-wheel have we here, eh?” (2.1.64). Castilio again “squeaks,” and is described as a “treble minikin,” to which he replies, “I will warble to the delicious concave/of my mistress’ ear, and strike her thoughts with/the pleasing touch of my voice” (3.2.31, 33– 35).14 The multiple meanings of minikin – it can be a lute-string; a dainty or prim person or thing; or a darling (woman) – all merge in the direction of the feminine. Castilio, it seems is a castrato, or at least behaves like one. The lack of certainty about the castrate’s status required the emphatic rejection of the castrate as sexually disabled. Listening to Castilio and the other boy singers, Rossaline tells Duke Piero, “By this gold, I had rather have a servant with a short nose and a thin hair than have such a high-stretched minikin voice.” When asked why, she replies, “By the sweets of love, I should fear extremely that he were an eunuch” (5.2. 9–14). However effectively he might penetrate the ear, the castrate, Rossaline believes, would not suffice for sexual penetration. Sexual disability applied to the castrate marked the contours of his masculine insufficiency. This move was fairly common. Playwrights frequently told audiences that castrates were incapable of sex. In Abraham Cowley’s The Guardian, the poetaster Dogrel, who has narrowly avoided a great deal of trouble, promises: “If ever I have to do with women again, but i’the way of all flesh, may I dye an Eunuch” (3.1, sig. C2r). At the end of the play when all the couples have been sorted, Dogrel is without a wife and seems resigned to existence as a

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sexless (figurative) castrate. In Sir George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub, Palmer asks Wheadle, “How commendable is chastity in an Eunuch?” (1.3, p. 10).15 In the theater, the cultural truism (which, as seen above, was rather more complicated medically and perhaps even more complicated in legal contexts) attempted to delineate sexual incapacity and vocal superiority as stable categories. But the categories do not quite hold in Antonio and Mellida. Balurdo, described in the introit as “the Fool,” attempts to impress with music, but only succeeds in confusing sexual capacity and castrate musical superiority. Having failed to get a painter to paint him a song (a conflation that is obviously absurd to everyone but Balurdo), Balurdo tells Flavia, “Truly, I have strained a note above E/la for a device; look you, ‘tis a fair-ruled singing/ book: the word, Perfect if it were pricked” (5.1.1–50; 5.2.134–6).16 Rossaline for her part confirms the desire for a man who can (or who has a) prick: “… maybe I’ll take a survey of the check-roll of my servants; and he that hath the best parts of – I’ll prick him down for my husband.” Balurdo replies. “As I am a true knight, I grow stiff” (5.2.293–295, 299). Prick songs referred to music that was written down, but Marston’s punning on “prick” is a common one.17 Enabled by the association of music and the castrate, capacity and incapacity then further circulate throughout the play. Early on, Catzo (loosely meaning “prick”) enters eating a capon – that is, a gelded cock and a kind of meat that was considered an aphrodisiac. Dildo, having called Catzo “diminutive,” is initially denied a piece of the meat, but Dildo gets angry and Catzo shares. Dildo allows, “My rage is stopped, and I will eat to the/health of the fool thy master Castilio.” Catzo replies, “And I will suck the juice of the capon/to the health of the idiot thy master Balurdo” (2.1.1–29). Catzo (the prick) and Dildo (the artificial prick) are fortified by the capon, and claim more masculine efficacy than their foolish masters. In contrast, where Catzo and Dildo are strengthened, Balurdo sees himself as unmanned. Later in the play, when he observes Antonio in the coffin, Balurdo stresses the equivalency of effeminization with emotionalism: “I could weep like a stoned horse [meaning gelding]” (5.2.238). Created by the association with singing, the sexually disabled castrate and his feminine emotional vulnerability serve to delineate normative sexual potential as well as inadequacy. Because he could sing, the castrate was differently abled even as he was genitally disabled. The associations of the castrate with effeminacy, weakness, and sexual incapacity are balanced by reassertions of his musical efficacy as the play closes. When Piero, seemingly reformed after his attempts to kill Antonio come to naught, calls for music, he says, “Sound Lydian wires, once make a pleasing note, /On nectar streams of your sweet airs to float” (5.2.302–303). Whether Marston’s audience knew that some ancient philosophers considered the Lydian mode to be effeminate and weak does not matter. The castrate’s musical skill gave him a different, sometimes superior claim despite and because of his testicular lack. At the same time, Marston and

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other playwrights exploited the relative ignorance about castrates among theater-going audiences. Performances by singing castrates were rare in England before the Restoration, but performances of them were not.18 Played by liminal men with an insistence on the singing voice as a marker of the maleable body, castrates on stage simultaneously affirmed and undermined the normative gender hierarchy.

2. Menacing eunuchs Even more than by singing, the sexual identity of the castrate enabled mapping of deviance onto castrate characters. As transgendered and disabled persons, castrates embodied insufficiency that offered a point of access that could serve as comedy, but frequently accumulated into something more ominous. Over time, the assumption that a character, whether playing a castrate or impersonating one within the fiction of the play, was dangerous – often very dangerous – to society and to himself. Two elements facilitated the development of the castrate as a menacing figure: the scorn and fear associated with male genital disability and the pejorative penumbra applied to the transgendered body of the castrate. The chain of associations begins with castrates as markers of sexual deviance. For Shakespeare, Chiron in Titus Andronicus implicates the castrate in an economy of sex and violence: “And if she do, I would I were an eunuch./ Drag hence her husband to some secret hole,/ And make his dead trunk pillow to our lust” (2.3.128–130). Voiced after killing Bassianus, Chiron’s comment fuses the non-reproductive sexuality of the castrate with a bleakly repulsive image of sex and death. The association could be less violent but no less unsettling when audiences were treated to castrates expressing desire in ways that denied the need for testicles to be sexual. Consider how Shakespeare’s Cleopatra interacts with Mardian. Cleopatra invokes the castrate’s singing ability, but immediately diminishes it by attaching it to Mardian’s anatomical lack: Cleopatra: Thou, eunuch Mardian! Mardian: What’s your Highness’ pleasure? Cleopatra: Not now to hear thee sing. I take no pleasure In aught an eunuch has. ’Tis well for thee, That being unseminared, thy freer thoughts May not fly forth of Egypt. Hast thou affections? Mardian: Yes, gracious madam. Cleopatra: Indeed? Mardian: Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing But what indeed is honest to be done: Yet have I fierce affections, and think What Venus did with Mars. (1.5.8-17)

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The conversation opens on Mardian’s side with a come on. As Ellis Hanson (2011) notes, Mardian sounds a bit like bartender.19 Mardian has “aught” because he is castrated (“unseminared”). He has desires, and Cleopatra knows it. He still imagines passion and sex. Mardian’s assertion that he retains desire, despite lacking some abilities, completes the displacement of his voice as his salient characteristic in favor of privileging the deformity of his body. Even, or perhaps especially, when they did not sing, castrates established settings as sexually fluid. Associating the sexualized castrate with the “foreign” enabled playwrights to construct another layer of estrangement. At a minimum, castrates served as exhibits of “foreign” practice and savage custom. This is one purpose of the Muslim castrates who populate the stage in William d’Avenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1964, 280). A castrate functions similarly in Markham and Sampson’s Herod and Antipater. Reflecting Byzantine practice, Philip Massinger’s The Emperor of the East has the castrates Timantus, Chrysapius, and Gratianus serve in the emperor’s chamber (III: 1.2.287). In An Excellent Tragedy of Mulleasses the Turke, playwright John Mason uses a servant named Eunuchus to help create a sense of foreign ambiance. In Thomas May’s version of Cleopatra, the castrate’s unmanned sexuality is applied overtly to Antony. Candidus remarks, “I did not thinke Antonius was an Eunuch./ Nor could I have beleev’d hee had beene worthy/ To bee a successour in Caesar’s power/ Unlesse hee had succeeded him in her” (1.1.39–42). The physical, sexual succession by Antony in place of Caesar would seem to mean Antony could not be a castrate, and yet, his sexual subjection to Cleopatra amounts to the same thing.20 In early modern theatrical representations, the castrate’s mobile sexuality supported gender crossings, rendered the circulation of gender and desire apparent, and routinely put non-normative sex and gender roles on display. The castrate as foreign and exotic is not news, but association of them with both eroticism and sexual disability usually understood as imposed by men on other men made it easy to construct castrates as more broadly deviant.21 Early on, plays often presented foreign, sexually ambiguous castrates as the products of their own criminality. In All’s Well That Ends Well, following on the heels of several nobles rejecting Helena when she goes to choose her reward for curing the king, the old lord Lafew comments: Do they all deny her? And they were the sons of mine, I’d have them whipt, or I would send them to th’Turk to make eunuchs of. (2.3.86-88) A man behaving badly is reduced to implicit savagery: he deserves to be unmanned as punishment for his ignoble behavior.22 As Giuseppe Gerbino

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observes, “Over the centuries, this search [for the origins of castration] chronicled a rather common mechanism of cultural self-defense. The French blamed castration on the Italians; the Italians on the Spanish; the Spanish, in turn, on the Italians; and everybody eventually blamed it on the Moors, the Turks, or the Byzantine Empire” (2004, 306). Gerbino emphasizes that no country wanted to be seen as responsible for the introduction of castration, and blaming “foreigners” for the practice distracted early modern Europeans from recognizing that castration, widespread in ancient Rome, never entirely disappeared in western Europe.23 Over time, playwrights depicted castrates not only as foreign others, but as dangerous for their sexual (in)abilities. On the English stage, playwrights especially associated castrates with Venice.24 With its links to the Byzantine east, its pivotal location in Mediterranean trade, and its public courtesan culture, Venice made for a vivid, exotic, and sexualized setting. English visitors, including Fynes Moryson and Thomas Coryat, reported on the public sexual culture and curious gender practices they observed. Scholars have demonstrated that Lewes Lewknor’s English translation of Gasparo Contarini’s De magistratibus et republica venetorum (1543) served as a source for English playwrights. David McPherson has traced Lewkenor’s additional materials with which he supplemented Contarini. Lewkenor’s primary interest was politics, but he also provided information about geography, history, and sites and customs of interest to tourists, including public prostitution and women’s fashions. Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), drawing on Lewkenor, takes advantage of the association of Venice with sexual corruption. The play includes a castrate as an accessory to the general social deviance in an imagined Italy populated by the exotic and abnormal. Castrone is one of the titular character’s indulgences along with Nano the dwarf and Androgyno the hermaphrodite. Nano has the most to do in the play, while Castrone and Androgyno mostly serve as window dressing in their few appearances. But Volpone’s feigned impotence before the Scrutineo, combined with his failed attempt on Celia, indicates the sexual corruption of which Castrone is a part (Complete, 3: 4.6.20–24; 3.7.220–224). The three “deformed” attendants mix and match their irregularities with Castrone as the articulating term: Nano and Castrone are less than fully men; Castrone and Androgyno are sexual misfits. Both Thomas Middleton and Philip Massinger wrote plays in which castrates were dislocated from conventional sociality. Neither the White Bishop’s Pawn in Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) nor Carazie in Massinger’s The Renegado (1624) are evil, but both are castrates who represent serious disruptions of social order because of their castration. Middleton’s antiSpanish political allegory features characters as chess pieces, and the (English/Protestant) White Bishop’s Pawn has been castrated by the (Spanish/ Catholic) Black Knight’s Pawn. The sexual rivalry that drives much of the action is for possession of the White Queen’s Pawn, who has rejected her castrated beloved and is now being pursued by the Blacks for nefarious sexual

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purposes. When the remorseful Black Knight’s Pawn is told that castration is an unforgivable sin but he can receive pardon for murder, he vows to kill the White Bishop’s Pawn (4.2.81–133). The White Queen’s Pawn foils the Black Knight’s Pawn murder attempt, and sends him to “the bag” (Hell) (5.2.112–119). The Whites prevail, and the castrated pawn helps them overcome the Blacks, but he loses the girl, spawns a murderous rivalry, and inadvertently inspires a plethora of sins and crimes when the Blacks try to win over the White Queen’s Pawn. Middleton conflated castration, criminality, and Catholicism using the White Bishop’s Pawn as the pivot point. Massinger’s play appeared four months before Middleton’s, and as Jane Hwang Degenhardt has argued, it presents a diametrically opposite view of Catholicism (64).25 The castrate in The Renegado is Carazie, an Englishman who had been captured by pirates and emasculated. He serves Donusa, a wellborn Muslim woman, who asks about the customs of England and comments, “Come be free and merry,/ I am no severe Mistres, nor hast thou met with/ A heavie bondage.” Carazie plays his status for laughs: “Heavie? I was made lighter/ By two stone waight at least to be fit to serve you” (1.2.23–26).26 The main plot of the play centers on Vitelli, a Venetian searching for his sister, Paulina, who is being held captive by Asambeg, Viceroy of Tunis. While searching, Vitelli encounters Donusa, and the two fall in love. They are discovered, imprisoned, and threatened with death unless Donusa can convert Vitelli to Islam. He instead converts her to Christianity, and it looks like they will suffer a grizzly fate until the Renegado of the title, in a fit of remorse over his lapsed faith, rescues Vitelli, Donusa, and Paulina, and accompanies them to Italy. The Renegado frees Carazie along with the others, but his inclusion in the group is ambiguous. Asked by Paulina if he wishes to go, Carazie answers, “I’ll be gelded twice first;/ Hang him that stayes behind!” (5.5.42–43). He cannot be gelded again, but he could be killed. With his ambiguous body and his mix of gender attributes (he is a companion to women and presented as more passive than a man) and sexual disability (although not necessarily accompanied by a lack of sexual desire), he returns to Europe in order to avoid dying; not because he particularly belongs there. Neither the White Bishop’s Pawn nor Carazie is nefarious, but both are impotent to stop sexual disruption of the social order. Playwrights often made far more of the association of the castrate with sexual disorder. By 1632, Richard Brome depicted an elaborately depraved Venice, in which a castrate had a large part to play. In The Novella, the sexual corruption that drives the plot pivots on a castrate bed-trick.27 The action opens with Fabritio, who loves Victoria, being pressured to marry Flavia, who in turn loves Francisco. Fabritio’s father, Pantoloni, is pushing the marriage against his son’s wishes. Pantoloni’s sexual corruption is not just aimed at his son: Pantoloni has recently tried to bed the latest hot courtesan, Novella (so named because she is the new kid on the block). Novella is a virgin, and her price is steep. Pantaloni’s servant, Nicolo, tells the audience that his master bargained with Novella, but when he got into bed believing he

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had successfully low-balled her, he discovered Novella had substituted her African maid, Jacconetta, in her place. As is often the case, the bed-trick protects Novella’s chastity, but it also angers Pantoloni, who vows revenge. For critic Marliss Desens, the bed-trick enables younger men to gain sexual access and to defeat the aims of the older men (1994, 100–102).28 Here, swapping Jacconetta allows time for Fabritio to learn that Novella is actually Victoria, who has come to Venice to find him. The intergenerational conflict over a courtesan is emblematic of the sexual decadence of Venice, but the big reveal adds (unconsummated?) sodomy and cross-racial sex to the mix. Victoria explains that Pantoloni actually slept with, or at least attempted penetration of, Jacomo, Fabritio’s castrate slave who was serving Victoria as Jacconetta (2.1; 5.2). Desens understands Jacomo as “sexless,” and reads Nicolo’s recounting of the encounter between Jacomo and Pantoloni as a denial of any sexual activity. Virginia Mason Vaughan counters that at least some members of the theater audience could have imagined anal penetration as a possibility (2005, 82–83). Given that other plays indicated that castrates were capable of sexual desire, and that controversies about the sexual abilities of castrates circulated in medical and legal discourse, audiences might have perceived Jacomo to be highly sexual, rather than sexless. In the course of the appropriate couples sorting themselves out – in addition to Fabritio finding Victoria, Flavia unites with Francisco – the ways that “normal” heterosexual, marital coupling and deviance are mutually creating is laid bare. Without the substitution of Jacconetta/Jacomo in bed with Pantaloni, Novella/Victoria would have been “spoiled.” Jacomo is already spoiled, but his sexual disfigurement is blamed on foreign cruelty, protecting the purity of the intact heterosexuals who get happy endings. Jacomo is also a slave. Whether he derived pleasure from duping Pantaloni or cross-dressing as Jacconetta, his actions were directed by others. Jacomo’s capacity for sexual deviance is a function of his altered anatomy, which allows for dubious means in the service of normative ends. Plays led audiences to believe that castrates were man-made abnormals—the dehumanization, I am suggesting, was deliberate—capable of not only sexual deviance, but of all manner of evil. William Hemmings takes advantage of the negative presumptions in The Eunuch. A Tragedy, which may have been performed as early as 1644.29 The titular character is both the instrument and the victim of the machinations that drive the action. At the court of Clotaire, the queen mother, Fredegonde, plots to eliminate both Clotaire and her other son, Clovis, so that she can install her lover, Landrey, on the French throne. The Eunuch – referred to as such and without name – assists her, setting the brothers to fight against each other over the chaste Aphelia. The Eunuch seems to be a faithful servant. As Fredegonde says, “We find the Eunuch fit for our Employments,/ Therefore I will unclaspe my Soul to thee;/ I’ve always found thee Trusty, and I Love thee” (1.2, p. 5).30 But the Eunuch also sets up Fredegonde, revealing her love hideaway and enabling her capture. In a particularly

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disturbing scene, the Eunuch tortures Fredegonde and Landrey by depriving them of water and food respectively. After eating and drinking in front of them, the Eunuch gives them each what they have lacked before revealing they have been poisoned; the Eunuch has taken an antidote (5. 2, pp. 44–46). Hemmings’ plot refracts layers of otherness through the body of the castrate. The Eunuch describes himself and is described by others as black, dark, and African: “And as his face is black, he’l have his Soul”; “My dull Aethope/I will instruct thy blackness”; “A settled resolution my black Saint” (2.2, p. 13; 3.3, p. 29; 4.2, p. 35).31 As in the case of Brome’s Jacconetta/ Jacomo, the play emphasizes racialized associations with sexual deformity (see also Chapter 6). Inhabiting presumptions about the effects of castration on gender, the Eunuch becomes the voice of normative gender performance, castigating Clotaire for crying: Expressions of a weak and silly nature, Passions of fools and women; are you a man And bear so take a soul, such smock-spirit? The Distaff owns more spleen, more noble anger. (5.2, p. 47) Voicing typical misogynous tropes, the Eunuch calls the woman’s tongue a “venom’d potion” and denounces feminine dissimulation (2.2, p. 18). Despite being manifestly clever, the Eunuch comments on his own defective intelligence (“From the dull Mixture of these leaden Brains”) (2.2, p. 13).32 Bizarre, creepy, and malevolent, the Eunuch presents the disabled body as facilitating the complete obliteration of humanity. The irony is that the Eunuch is actually a woman, creating a crisis of recognition in both the play and the audience. Within the play, the Eunuch is the long lost sister of Dumaine, who Fredegonde attempted to lure into a trap at the beginning of the story. In the end, the (erstwhile) Eunuch announces, “A Woman’s weakness conquer’d my revenge” when she cannot kill Clotaire in cold blood (5.2, p. 53). The twist feels superfluous. The Eunuch works up to the moment of exposure in ways that confirmed the assumption that castrated men might seek vengeance for what had been done to them – especially if they could overcome their propensity to feminine weakness. Moreover, misrecognition of the character points to the larger performative problem: How does the spectator “know” the castrate? One answer was to make the castrate more visibly at odds with social norms because of his physical disability. The increasing emphasis on the castrate as estranged from social norms can be illustrated by two versions of the same character. The first version appears in Fletcher and Beaumont’s The Tragedie of Valentinian, which dates originally to between 1610 and 1614. The play is based in part on Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée, and includes the castrate Lycias, whose sexual disability allows him to be deployed in gendered contexts.33 Lycias is ordered by the depraved

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emperor Valentinian to bring Lucina to him, and as a castrate, he can approach her alone as intact men cannot. The virtuous, beautiful wife of Maximus, Lucina is wary when Lycias appears. Utilizing his guise as a protector of female chastity, Lycias stresses that he serves the emperor “In faire and just commands,” and reassures her: “Madam, I am no Broker… Nor base procurer of mens lusts” (2.3.48, 54, 56). It is not clear whether Lycias believes what he is saying, or is just doing whatever it takes to convince Lucina to come with him. He is either a scheming liar or an ineffectual guardian of feminine chastity or both. But Lucina allows herself to be reassured by his unthreatening person and his disavowals of sexual malfeasance. After Valentinian assaults Lucina, she kills herself out of shame, prompting Maximus to seek revenge. In many ways, the plot is a typical example of men fighting over a (disposable) woman, but the mediation of Lycias is crucial to the dismantling of Lucina’s defenses. Understood to be male but not masculine and feminine but not female, the castrate’s liminality enabled his movement across gendered social and physical boundaries. In 1684, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester updated Valentinian with Lycias far more inflected by bitterness. When summoned by Valentinian, Lycias makes his corruption clear: “I am the humble Slave of Caesar’s Will, /By my Ambition bound to his Commands” (Valentinian [1685], 3.1, p. 27). This Lysias is malevolent and deceitful. He lures Lucina to come with him by rehearsing Valentinian’s failings and lying that Maximus has been acclaimed emperor. He then plays on her love for her husband: Piercing the busie Crowd to me he past— Tears in his Eyes; his Orders in his Hand, He scarce had Breath to give this short Command. With thy best speed to my Lucina fly, If I must part unseen by her I dy. (3.3, p. 34) To insure that his lies are convincing, he gives Lucina a ring Maximus lost at dice to Valentinian. Lucina heads off for her encounter with Valentinian, and Lycias comments, “Thanks to the Devil, my Friend, now all’s our own,/ How easily this mighty work was done!” (3.3, p. 35). After Valentinan rapes Lucina and she kills herself, Lycias is lying on a couch, while Valentinian, next to him, says: “Oh let me press these balmy Lips all day, /And bathe my Love-scorch’d Soul in thy moist Kisses. /Now by my Joys thou art all sweet and soft, /And thou shalt be the Altar of my Love” (5.5, p. 74). Only later does Valentinian suggest he is referring to Lucina, rather than Lycias. Eventually, the loyal general Aecius has had too much, and kills Lycias despite Valentinian’s pleading to “spare the gentle boy” (5.5, p. 76). Rochester’s changes foreground Lucina, and render Lysias as

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malicious (as well as cowardly when threatened). Not at all appropriately masculine, Lysias uses his sexual disability to manipulate Lucina. His feminized body then (ambiguously) replaces her in Valentinian’s bed. Like other stage castrates, Lysias sings, but the audience “knows” he is a castrate because he embodies elements that mark the castrate as a corrupt and distorted species of not-quite-man. By the end of the seventeenth century, the castrate had accumulated associations around his disabled, transgendered body. Not just a singer, he became an emblem of sexual depravity and social subversion. Created by the society that made him grotesque in his lack, the castrate seemed, and sometimes was, capable of outrageous revenge. That castrates also often behaved like women enabled audiences to map misogynous assumptions about women onto the bodies of men who had been unmanned.34 Physiologically deprived – usually by the agency of men – castrates were depicted as fundamentally corrupt. Written on his body, the castrate’s deviance allowed intact spectators to recognize themselves in difference even as the layering of recognition suggested tremendous uncertainty about the castrate’s body and mind.

3. Castrates, couples, and cons Because misrecognition was such a problem, castrates endangered communal values and norms even when they are deployed in support of the dominant social and cultural formations of gender. As John Rainolds (1549–1607) put it, “Chaerea could not have defiled Pamphila, no not in Thais house, without his Eunuches raiment” (1599, 87). The referent is Terence’s (Publius Terentius Afer, 184? BCE–159? BCE) play, Eunuchus, in which a young man, Chaerea, pretends to be a castrate to gain access to Pamphila. Chaerea “succeeds” in that he rapes Pamphila while she sleeps and then, after discovering she is an Athenian citizen, marries her. Chaerea’s access to Pamphila is predicated on his presumed lack of ability to consummate the sexual act because he is believed to be a castrate. The comedy is that the fake castrate is really a man with fully functional testicles to go along with his fully predatory desires. For Rainolds, a play featuring lying, sexual violence, non-marital sex, and explicit references to human castration was bad enough, but Terence’s plot also inspired a variety of early modern theatrical offspring.35 An actor pretending to be a castrate and illustrating how to gain access to women was a terrible example, and all the more so for being often imitated. Rainolds’ objection invites consideration of how castrates as characters could facilitate normative marital happy endings but nevertheless undermine gender norms. Renaissance playwrights had access to Terence,36 who continued a tradition begun with Eunouchos by Menander (c. 324–292 BCE), the now lost play Terence adapted.37 In the Menander/Terence tradition, the complications of disguise and desire, with the absent/allegedly absent genitals enabling erotic transactions, drive the plot. The variants in early modern

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theater included women (as in Hemmings’ The Eunuch, although usually for more benign ends) as well as intact men impersonating castrates. As we have already seen, these fake castrates departed from the classical original in that they were only sometimes after sex. When a play did feature a fake castrate on the sexual prowl, it caused so much scandal that it was repressed and bowdlerized. Much more common were plays that took advantage of the presumptions about the special access of castrates and the associations of them with deceit and dishonesty to create elaborate marriage plots, but distorted the usual trajectory of appropriate marital coupling in unsettling ways. The notion of the fake castrate serving the plot so as to enable appropriate couple formation moved into early modern theater via Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’s La Calandria. As Keir Elam has argued, Bibbiena’s play served as the model for English adaptations of Terence. La Calandria exploits several of the elements of the ancient comedic tradition and fuses them with early modern favorites, including demonizing the foreign other and the bed-trick. Probably performed in 1513, La Calandria features Santilla protecting herself by taking the identity of a castrate.38 Separated from her opposite sex identical twin, Lidio, as a child, Santilla cross-dresses and disguises herself as Lidio. Santilla (sometimes called “Lidio femina”) and Lidio hail from the Greek city of Modon, which had been attacked by the Turks. Displaced from Modon, the twins are in Rome looking for each other. With a nod to Plautus’ Menaechmi, Bibbiena alters that play’s device of separated twins to allow an expansive range of gender substitutions.39 Making her way through Rome, Santilla is mistaken for Lidio, who has fallen in love with Fulvia, the wife of Calandro. Lidio gains entry to Calandro’s house by cross-dressing as a woman, and Calandro falls in love with him. Meanwhile, Fulvia mistakes Santilla for Lidio, takes Santilla to bed, and becomes distraught upon discovering that Santilla lacks the expected male equipment: Whether heaven or my sin or the malignancy of the spirit which is in you, I don’t know, but once you have, alas! my Lidio you changed from male to female. Everything I have handled and touched; but cannot find any of the usual things except the external appearance of him. [O il cielo o il peccato mio o la malignità dello spirito che stato si sia, non so; ma una volta voi avete, oimè!, di maschio in femina converso Lidio mio. Tutto l’ho maneggiato e tocco: né altro del solito ritrovo che la presenzia in lui.] (Bibbiena 1977, 67) Lidio’s “lost” sexual organs reappear when he takes Santilla’s place in Fulvia’s bed, and are “lost” again when Santilla replaces Lidio once more to save him when Calandrio discovers Fulvia and Lidio in bed together. The magic disappearing/reappearing genitals allow Bibbiena to play on the access permitted to castrates. When a woman gains entrance, it is to protect the intact man from ending up actually castrated. The protective function of the disappearing male

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member saves both Lidio and Santilla several times over before the pair is reunited and each is appropriately married off to resolve the sexual confusion. Bibbiena’s rewrite of Terence eliminates the non-consensual sex, but multiplies the non-marital encounters through the mobility of the false castrate. Possibly borrowing from Bibbiena, Shakespeare’s opposite-sex twins also use the castrate disguise and the mobility it offers for the female twin in Twelfth Night to move across social and sexual boundaries. Although Viola makes little use of the castrate element of her disguise, the plot depends on it, and for English audiences, part of the comedy was a boy actor playing a woman playing a man who has been unmanned – but not really.40 This sort of comic titillation disguises the ways that Viola chooses to adopt the persona of a castrate to protect herself. She moves into Orsino’s court as desexualized and, like Santilla, safe. Viola similarly inverts the classical antecedent that proposes the fake castrate is in search of illicit sexual access, and ends up negotiating the complexities of Olivia’s desire, as well as Orsino’s.41 Viola’s access, and the action that ensues, is dependent on “her” occupying a plausible position as a castrate. The disguise disrupts the social order because the castrate’s peculiar access and anodyne sexuality are at odds with the desire structures appropriate to the social situation. Marriage resolves matters, but as Casey Charles points out, stray bits such as Orsino’s attraction to Viola as a castrate remain (1997, 140). The heteronormative ending displaces the sodomitical implications, but not entirely. As in Twelfth Night, the castrate disguise combined with non-recognition of the impersonation threatens the marriages that it enables in Peter Hausted’s The Rival Friends (1632). The main plot (of several – the play as originally performed was seven hours long) involves Neander and Lucius, who love Constantina and Isabella respectively.42 Both men fall in love with Pandora, who is unable to choose, so the boys try to outdo each other in sacrificing themselves for the happiness of the other. Each separately asks the village parson, Lively, to marry the other to Pandora. Lively gets Neander to agree to a fake marriage to a boy disguised as a woman so that Lucius will marry Pandora. Lively then disguises the now cross-dressed Constantina to be the “boy” Neander marries. Lucius overhears part of the plan, and refuses to believe Neander has married a woman, prompting Lucius to announce: “I am no husband,/ No husband, mark you, for Pandora, nor/ For any woman living; for kind nature/ Has stamped eunuch on me from my cradle” (4.3 at sig. H4r. See also 4.5 at sig. I2v). Pandora, in despair over all the dithering, tries to arouse some jealousy by favoring the page, Endymion. She decides she really loves Endymion, and no longer cares for Neander and Lucius. They too lose interest, and now Neander discovers he is actually married to his beloved, Constantina. Lucius ends up begging Isabella’s pardon and then marrying her. The question of his adopted status as a castrate (which under religious and legal norms would preclude marriage if it was true) is forgotten in the shuffle. The castrate disguise is frankly instrumental, adopted for “noble” purposes of male friendship and heterosexual love. Marriage may triumph in the end, but it depends

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on misrecognition of the castrate within the plot and acceptance of the disguise by the audience for the conceit to satisfy. Accepting the disguise points to the morally murkier aspects of fake castrates, a theme taken up in John Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1638). The Fancies of the title are female wards of Octavio, marquis of Siena. Rumored to be Octavio’s paramours, they are actually chaste young women who preserve their virtue with the help of their guardian, Morosa. Also in the mix is Spadone, who convinces Secco the barber that his beloved Morosa has cheated on him with Nitido (2.2.191–3; 3.3; 4.1). Ford suggests that Spadone’s motive for the prank is the grief he gets for being a castrate. Early on, Secco tells Spadone, “I will make thee a man, dost heare? I say a man.” Spadone bristles, calling himself a “gelding,” and evoking the process of castration (2.2.36–37, 42, 55–59).43 Secco’s excitement about his upcoming marriage seems to set Spadone off, while Nitido’s derogatory comments about Spadone’s lack of balls land him on Spadone’s bad side (2.2.115–116, 119– 126).44 Morosa is baffled by Secco’s sudden aggression and anger, which Spadone eggs on. Secco captures Nitido to punish him, again with Spadone’s encouragement (3.3.96–97, 123–124, 134–145). When challenged by the Fancies for his violence, Secco calls on Spadone as his witness, but the castrate without testicles/testiculi cannot be a witness: “Who I speak? Alas I cannot speake I.” Entreated again, Spadone maintains his position: “Why? you know I am an ignorant unable trifle in such businesse; an Oafe, a simple Alcatote; an Innocent” (4.1.187–188; 194–196).45 Spadone plays on the presumption that feminized castrates lack mental capacity. Ford has Spadone pull the audience in the direction of seeing Spadone as a castrate, only to reverse course abruptly. Spadone’s lie about Nitido initially has minor repercussions: Nitido is wary of Spadone, but Secco and Morosa patch things up (4.1.249–250). Then Spadone comes to Secco for a shave. Pinned to Secco’s chair, covered in lather, Spadone feels the razor at his throat and blurts out: Confound thee, thy leaps and thy cuts, I am no Eunuch, you finicall asse! I am no Eunuch, but at all points as well provided, as any he in Italy, and that thy Wife could have told thee. This your conspiracie, to thrust my head into a brazen tub of Kitchen-lee, hud-winke mine eyes in mudsoape, and then offer to cut my throat in the dark like a Coward? I may live to be reveng’d on both of yee! (5.2.169–176) His assertion of masculine aggression backed by actual, intact balls causes Secco and Nitido to back down. Spadone’s manhood is the basis for reconciliation: “Now we know thou art a man; we forget what hath past, and are fellowes and friends againe” (5.2.190–192). Spadone seems erratic in his efforts at revenge, perhaps in order to underscore the feminized elements of his persona, but this defies the logic within the

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play that Spadone uses his wits to protect himself. The moment of exposure highlights the incoherence: Spadone makes himself vulnerable to a man with a razor – a man Spadone has recently humiliated. According to the character as written, Spadone should be too smart for such an error. And why is a castrate going for a shave anyway? The fake castrate is not seeking sexual access, but instead using the ambiguity about his status in the service of sexually respectability. At the same time, the disruption Spadone causes within the plot and the incoherence of his actions undermine Ford’s ethical claims.46 Misrecognition of the castrate causes ructions that are barely contained by the social order. William Wycherley’s Restoration play The Country Wife (1675) exposes the fragility of that order, again through the agency of a fake castrate. Satirizing marital mores, the plot features an intact man, Mr. Horner, gaining access to married women by pretending to be a castrate. Originally played by an actor renowned for his heroic parts,47 Horner enlists a quack (called Quack) to spread the rumor: “I have undone you forever with the women, and reported you throughout the whole town as bad as a eunuch, with as much trouble as if I had made you one in earnest” (1.1, p. 4).48 Horner backs up the rumor by playing up his disinterest: “I will kiss no man’s wife, sir, for him; I have taken my eternal leave, sir, of the sex already, sir” (1.1, p. 6). Horner’s ruse enables him to bed a passel of respectable women, who happily have sex with him because they assume he is “impotent.” Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish express their satisfaction, indicating that Horner’s impotence is not a failure to get it up, but a presumption on the part of his partners that he is shooting blanks. The women learn that Horner has lied about being a castrate, but because they wish to protect their own reputations, his secret is safe with them (5.4, p. 69). The conspiracy to protect reputation covers up sexual corruption. The fake castrate has modeled all the damage Rainolds feared and more. Throw in a rake playing a castrate and see what happens to marital “values.” In the sexual game that links wit and virility, Horner games the game by faking sexual incapacity. In effect, we have come back around to Terence via women impersonating castrates to protect themselves and men doing so without sexual predation as a goal. Wycherley, however, does not allow the normative marital resolution that Terence engineered and that most fake castrates facilitated in their labyrinthine entanglements. Instead, he invokes Juvenal by depicting the women Horner seduces as enthusiastic for his charms. Pat Gill argues that patriarchy is fully in force at the end of the play, but the class satire merges with gender subversion to undermine patriarchal certainty. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees The Country Wife as an example of men competing with other men by means of female bodies. Absolutely, but Wycherley’s women play a crucial part as well: they understand that they are supposed to remain faithful so as to not disrupt the gene pool, but they are quite willing to seek out a man who is presumed to not be a threat.49 Because Horner gets away with it, the play as originally performed and

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published was considered so racy that it was suppressed from 1753 to 1924, save for an expurgated version that appeared as The Country Girl (Wycherley and Garrick 1766).50 Even by the louche standards of the Restoration, The Country Wife was too scandalous, and the false castrate made it so.

4. Conclusion, or conflating castrates From the stage, audiences “knew” castrates could sing; that they were deceitful, conniving and often effeminate cowards; and that it was virtually impossible to tell who really was a castrate and who was merely imitating one – even within the fictional frame of the theater. Castrate characters made a nonsense of the rules that mapped gender and sexuality onto bodies in legible ways. The performance that signified “castrate” borrowed elements of the feminine while inhabiting a male body. The proximity to the familiar modern transsexual script (“a woman trapped in a man’s body”/ “a man trapped in a woman’s body”) is not coincidence. The disruptions caused by castrate characters invited rejection and differentiation. While often allowing the superiority of the castrate’s voice, plays modeled the pejorative assessment of castrates as defective, genitally disabled men. At the same time, differentiation was almost impossible to secure. The conceits of disguise, deceit, and dishonesty deliberately enhanced the discomfort of spectators about and around castrates. The absolute imbrication of recognition and misrecognition, of identification and disidentification played out in the performance of the castrate on stage. I have highlighted the convergence of interest in castrates and performative practices on the English stage because the sheer density of instances of castrates reveals the theatrical construction of disidentification. The word “eunuch” appears at least 240 times in at least 78 English plays written between 1580 and 1642 (the closing of the theaters). “Castrate” (as a verb usually) appears more than 150 times, and other terms, particularly “geld” in reference to people, also appear frequently. At least 25 plays between 1600 and 1640 feature a castrate in a speaking part (Taylor 2000, 30). These numbers are astonishing in comparison with contemporary European theatrical traditions. Although Golden Age Spanish plays routinely featured settings in which castrates might appear, they rarely do. Lope de Vega (1562–1635) wrote plays in which categories often associated with castrates appear but castrate characters are only by inference. El Cerco de Santa Fe e ilustre hazaña (1596–1598), for instance, includes Muslims (often associated with the harem or seraglio and eunuch guards), Christian captives (who were occasionally castrated – a practice that appears in English plays), and musicians (see above and Chapter 5).51 Cervantes does include castrates in such a setting in his play, La gran sultana doña Catalina de Oviedo (published 1615). The castrate Mamí, who is the loyal servant of the sultan, discovers that his fellow castrate, Rustan, has been sheltering a captive Christian, Catalina de Oviedo, for years. When the sultan sees Catalina, he

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falls in love with her and they marry after he agrees that she can retain her Christian faith. The castrates are instrumental to the central plot, but also part of a setting in which cross-dressing, cross-cultural competition, and sexual misrecognition collide on multiple levels. But generally, castrates and castration figure tangentially, if at all. Pedro in Vega’s El mesón de la corte (1588–1595?) announces that he is a capon, and is greeted that way several times during the play, but little is made of it (2.22). Similarly, the crossdressed doña Juana in Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de la calzas verdes (1615) is thought to be a bit off, and one character wonders if “don Gil” is a castrate (l. 743). Another disguised woman, Jerónima in Tirso’s El amor médico (1619–1626) is regarded as a castrate indirectly at first: “the beardless doctor” [el dotor desbarbado], and more explicitly later: “Hippocrates the Capon” [El Hípocrates capón] (I: 1.12, l. 2119; 2.8, l.2811). In the Spanish theater, castrates or presumed castrates may facilitate the plot, but they appear comparatively rarely. Paradoxically, perhaps this was a matter of familiarity: Spanish contact with the Muslim world was extensive and longstanding. Castrates may not have seemed particularly important as emblems of the exotic, religiously threatening Other or (and?) especially distressing because of their proximity. On the French stage, castrates are similarly scarce, and the tenor of their treatment when they do appear is different. The emphasis in French theater on stories from Antiquity and the Bible provided contexts in which castrates could be expected to appear, as in Tristan l’Hermite’s La Mariane (1636). King Herod, in a rage, summons a castrate who he believes has betrayed him. Herod condemns the eunuch with special reference to his physical difference: “He was part of the plot, this infamous animal/ Who can not pass as either a man or a woman!” [Il était du complot, cet animal infâme,/ Qui ne saurait passer pour homme, ni pour femme] (3.2, ll.1067–1068). When the castrate appears, Herod links physical difference and treachery: “Horror of nature, scorn of the heavens,/ Monster without judgement! Pernicious dragon!” [Horreur de la Nature & le mépris des Cieux!/ Monstre sans jugement! Dragon pernicieux!] (3.3, ll.1069–1070). The castrate functions to highlight Herod’s irrationality and contributes to an atmosphere of otherness, but his physical difference, presented as worthy of contempt, establishes him as dispensable not just within the plot, but as a man. French treatments of classical sources with castrate characters included La Fontaine’s verse adaptation of Terence’s The Eunuch (1654), but the mistaken castrate plot device did not inspire an abundance of French imitators, and castrates rarely functioned as motivating characters. Perhaps most tellingly, Racine deliberately excised a castrate from his classical source in his play, Mithridate (1673). The second edition of Racine’s preface to the play explained that Plutarch had a castrate tell the queen that she must die, and when her own effort failed, the castrate slit her throat. Racine replaced the castrate with a lady-in-waiting who stalls the queen instead of assisting her suicide (5.1.1453–1510).52 Distaste at the least; disgust at the most toward castrates on

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the part of the author and/or his audience seems likely, if the evidence that French audiences never warmed particularly to castrati is taken into account. Whatever the meaning of the comparative absence, the French, like the Spanish, portrayed castrates on stage relatively infrequently and with significantly less complexity compared to English theatrical emanations. For English audiences, castrates became dense cultural markers. Plays taught theater-goers and those who read plays (or read about them) what castrates are and what they do. Examples of castrates as socially disruptive were thick on the ground. The ways that castrates undermined gendered expectations of bodies and the presumptions about sexual desire that most attached to male and female or masculine and feminine provided plots both comic and tragic, but also reminded spectators about what could happen when “defective” and gender anomalous individuals participated in the complexities of social negotiation.

Notes 1 Modern scholarship includes debates over whether the Ethiopian eunuch was a castrate or an “official.” See Burke (2013). 2 Burton (2002) argues that castration was often depicted as humorous to dampen anxiety about the threat posed by Christian conversions to Islam. See esp. (ibid., 53–58). 3 With apologies to critics who have rightly expressed concerns about theory losing touch with material reality, I believe that, in the case of castrates on stage, materiality is performative. For a critique of the discursive approach, see Seidman (1993). 4 Mann has taken great and hostile exception to gender and queer interpretations of cross-dressing, but he may have a point on this matter. See Shapiro (1994, 51), who speculates that a boy playing a woman cross-dressed as a man “would have been extremely difficult” and likely to produce a “farcical effect.” For an account emphasizing cross-dressing by boys as positively transgressive, see Rackin (1987). Others (Howard 1988; Greenblatt 1988, 93–99) see the subversive aspects of crossing as restrained or contained by patriarchal structures. 5 McLuskie (1987) argues that the sex of the actor was irrelevant, with actors playing parts according to convention. I am suggesting that castrates were known, but not conventional enough to make performance of them uncomplicated. 6 The play was first published in 1634 and dates probably from 1613–1614. The authorship roles are much debated. For a recent discussion of authority and authorship questions around this play, see Teramura (2012). 7 In the 1616 revision, the language is different: “Well, if I read this with patience I’ll be gelt, and troll ballads for Master John Trundle, yonder, the rest of my mortality” (Jonson 1982, 1.3.48–50). 8 The First Folio has “voyce” instead of “vice.” 9 Neoplatonic musical theory was refuted by empirical investigation by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, but the ideas remained influential for at least another century. See Fubini (1990, 159–200). 10 For Ficino’s understanding of musical ratios in his larger corpus, see Bowen (1986). 11 The larger referent is the notion of the music of the spheres, on which see Davies (1596, v. 59); Ornithoparcus (1609, 1, 37).

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12 The play is usually dated to 1599. It entered the Stationer’s Register on October 24, 1601 and was published in 1602. See Marston (1986, 95). 13 Later, mournful flute music also marks the arrival of Andrugio with Antonio’s body in a coffin. See 5.2.208–10 (and stage direction). On music and emotion, see for instance Meres (1598, 287v–288r). 14 For Marston’s musical context generally, see O’Neill (1972). 15 The first play by Etherege, the plot revolves around two couples (Bruce and Aurelia; Beaufort and Graciana) and their misunderstood feelings for each other. Etherege used different language styles for different levels of the plot. Palmer and Weadle are part of the “low” plot, in which they try to cheat Sir Nicholas Cully. 16 “E/la” is E on the fourth space of the treble stave. 17 See for instance Shakespeare Romeo, 2.4.21; Middleton and Decker (1976, 4.1.189); Middleton Phoenix (Thomas 2007, 1.2.106; Middleton (1975, 3.3.122); Middleton Your Five Gallants (Thomas 2007, 2.1.45); Middleton Witch (1993, 3.2.7). See also the Caroline masque by Townshend in which the dramatis personae include “An Asse like a Pedante, teaching them Prick-song” (1631, 8). I thank Kathryn Schwarz for this reference. 18 Rosselli (1988, 147, n. 16) notes that there were reports that a French castrato served the Spencer family as early as the 1590s, and Sir Richard Champernown wrote to Sir Robert Cecil in 1595 denying rumors that he had arranged for boys to be castrated in order to preserve their voices. Samuel Pepys heard castrati in London in 1667 (8: 154) and 1668 (9: 326–327). 19 Bosman traces the pairing of “a eunuch and a blackamoor” as a cultural trope from Terence to Gerbrand Bredero’s Moortjie (1615). For Mardian, see especially (2006, 137–141). 20 Castrates as referents of Egyptian sexual corruption around Cleopatra abound in Fletcher and Beaumont’s The False One. See for instance 1. 1. 139: “…all the Gallants of the Court are Eunuchs.” See also 5.4.100–102. 21 Metzler (2013) argues that legal structures that entailed physical punishment routinely created disabled persons in Medieval Europe. These structures were still largely in place throughout early modernity. 22 Foucault suggests why: “The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power…that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations” (1979, 57). 23 In a provocative moment, Ringrose (2003, 9) points out that castrates were not common in western Europe, which is odd, she notes, given how practical they are as intimate servants of dynastic monarchs. 24 Italy was generally considered the locus of male/male homosexual sodomy, although Florence was especially known for it. Puff (2003, 13) notes that sodomy was referred to early modern Germany as “to Florence.” 25 For the political context of The Renegado, see Robinson (2006). For an extended analysis of A Game at Chess, see Taylor (2000). 26 In case the audience was not sure, Carazie refers to himself as “gelded” at 5.5.42. 27 The title page indicates it was performed at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1632. 28 Desans sees the bed-trick here as a male fantasy about female chastity. 29 Consult Dodsley (1756, 47). 30 According to Slade (1992), The Eunuch was originally called The Fatal Contract and published in 1653. Slade maintains that Hemmings did not mean for the play to be performed, but rather read. An earlier version may have been performed. See pp. 27, 29.

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31 After the revelation: “No Sun-burnt vagabond of Aethiope” at 5.2, p. 52. 32 In contrast, Fredegonde expresses admiration for the Eunuch’s cleverness: “Thy body should be steril, sith thy mind/ Is of so pregnant and a fruitfull kind” (3.3, p. 29). 33 The Astrée source material was from part 2 published in 1610. Because of the original cast included William Ostler, it had to have been completed by December of 1614, when Ostler died. The play was first published in 1647. 34 Serano argues that misogyny is the central pejorative attitude directed at transsexuals and often unrecognized for its very ubiquity. 35 Among them is Thomas Cooke, The Eunuch, or, The Darby Captain, which “updates” the plot to England with the Pamphila character now from Jamaica. 36 The editio princeps of Terence was published in Strasburg in 1470. 37 Terence’s extant plays are in the New Comedy tradition, which flourished in Greece from approximately 320 to the mid-third century BC. Often mildly satiric, New Comedy featured average citizens, and avoided the supernatural and heroic elements of Old Comedy. The chorus also markedly diminished in importance. Menander was a central New Comedy playwright. Terence was also influenced by Roman traditions, including the work of Plautus and the Roman practice of performing plays in association with state-sponsored religious festivals. Eunuchus was first performed at the temple of the Magna Mater on the Palatine Hill in 161 BCE for the Megalesian festival. As we have seen (Chapter 3), Magna Mater, or Cybele, was associated with self-castration. On Terence, see A Companion (2013). For Roman theater generally, see Beacham (1992); Marshall (2006). On Eunuchus specifically, see Barsky (1999); Lowe (1983). 38 Though the play does not emphasize it, per Stroccia, moving about the streets of any early modern city or town as an unaccompanied woman was dangerous. As a castrate, Santilla had fewer worries. 39 Menaechmi is about twins separated at birth, whose rediscovery of each other involves repeated episodes of mistaken identity. Shakespeare used it as a source for The Comedy of Errors. See also Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin in Big Business (dir. Jim Abrahams, 1988). 40 Whether audiences accepted the presence of boy actors as women remains a debate. See Kathman (2005); Stallybrass (1992); McKluskie (1987). 41 Grief (1981) maintains that Viola’s appeal to Orsino is in part because she is identical with her male self. 42 For an account of the events around the first performance, see Adams (1912). Presented before the king and queen at Queen’s College, Cambridge, the first and only performance was so scandalous that the vice-chancellor committed suicide. 43 See also 3.3.85–86: “I am a man and no man.” Morosa also calls him a gelding at 2.2.147. 44 In addition to the Roman law meaning, “Spadone” was Italian slang for castrato, according to Finucci (2003, 269). The proximity to “spay” is evident. 45 For early modern references to testicles as “witnesses,” see Murphy 55–56 (2002). 46 Stavig (1968) notes that Platonism was featured at the royal court, and that it was often misunderstood. See also Sensabaugh (1939). Ford’s attachment to Neoplatonism was complicated, and he recognized the potential for confusing idealism about love with carnality elsewhere in his work. For an analysis, see Crawford (2004). 47 Dixon (1996, 430) notes that Wycherley wrote with actors in mind, and he wrote Mr. Horner with the idea that Charles Hart would originate the part. Hart played quintessentially masculine heroic roles in both tragedy and comedy. 48 Quack implies that Horner’s ruse was of the radical variety when he later comments: “I will henceforth believe it not impossible for you to cuckold the Grand Signior amidst his guard of eunuchs, that I say” (4.3, p. 57).

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49 Consult Gill (1994, 54–75) on the patriarchal ending. See Brown (1981, 49) for a reading of the class satire. For an analysis of the play that focuses on compensating of ideological fissures (social and sexual), see Cohen (1995). 50 On the implications of the lack of comeuppance for Horner, see Canfield (1997, 129). 51 See also El Grao de Valencia; Jorge Toledano; La Santa Liga; Los Esclavos libros; and El Tirano Castigado, which include at least two of the three elements likely to result in castrate characters. 52 See p. 654 for the rewritten version.

5

The spectacular crossings of castrati

On the theatrical stage, castrates as characters allowed spaces of denial even as the (negative) ideas and prejudices attached to them were instantiated in representations of them. Denial was not so possible when actual castrates – routinely called by the derogatory term “castrato”; “musico” was more polite – appeared on the opera stage and in other musical contexts. The visibility of castrati, and the astonishing success of some as singers, brought their physical and social disability into prolonged tension with normative values about bodies and gender. Known for their lack of reproductive capacity and in many contexts seen as effeminate, castrati became targets for critics who saw them as a threat to a healthy, vigorous society. It took some time for this negative view to develop fully. When early modern Europeans started encountering actual castrated singers in numbers in the late sixteenth century, the castrate was largely defined by his voice; by the late eighteenth century, he was increasingly unacceptable because of his physical impairment and what that meant with respect to understandings of his gender. Over time, concerns about the nature of the castrate’s disability, its effects on his appearance and on his character, and the gender instability he seemed to exemplify expanded and combined. By the early nineteenth century, castrati were largely rejected in the sense that their period as the preeminent stars of the operatic stage had begun to pass.1 Critics, commentators, and legislators renounced deliberate castration for musical purposes. But the waning of castrati on the opera stage did not halt the fusion of concerns around castrates as disabled and transgendered. Instead, critics created a noxious compound of vilification in which each element supported and enhanced the other. The mutually reinforcing elements provided a script for the denigration of deviance that could, and would, be more widely applied. This framing is a departure from the main lines of historical inquiry regarding castrati. Whether collective or devoted to individual singers, histories have provided a variety of perspectives about the recruitment, training, and careers of castrati (Rosselli 1988). Although scholars have paid some attention to castration, their interest has been confined by and large to its implications for a singing career. Consideration of the social and physical effects of living as a castrato tends to be restricted to colorful episodes and

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incidents (Haböck 1927; Heriot 1975; Barbier 1996). Hubert Ortkemper, for instance, treats the history of opera through brief accounts of individual castrati. His discussion relies on anecdotes, many of which he considers at once overstated and valuable sources (1995). None of the collective biographies consider the larger patterns of disadvantage and displacement from gender norms that all castrati had to endure.2 Biographies of individual singers have situated them relative to developments in opera and music, and these accounts often allow important elements to be extrapolated about castrati as a group. Biographers of Farinelli (Carlo Broschi, 1705–1782) have emphasized his unusual success, and in doing so, have established a sense of how castrati could (or more often, could not) circumvent the ways that they could not fit the usual life patterns of early modern men (Sacchi 1994; Bouvier 1943; Barbier 1994; Cappelletto 1995; Desler 2014). Patricia Howard (2014) points out that Gaetano Guadagni’s (1728–1792) collaboration with Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714–1795) and Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) to reform opera worked against the interests of castrati because Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) privileged vocal simplicity instead of the pyrotechnics previously expected of castrati. Guadagni’s association with the role of Orpheus cemented his reputation and fortune, but the success of the new style contributed to the move away from castrati. Roger Freitas’s (2003, 2009) studies of Atto Melani (1626–1714) indicate how a castrato negotiated familial, patronage, and personal (including sexual) interests. As a castrato, Melani’s career began in music, which enabled him to pursue ambitions beyond music, particularly at the French court, where he served as a diplomat and a spy. Biographies of Giovanni Carestini (1700–1760) and Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano, 1710–1783) have examined how castrati negotiated their musical lives, albeit without sustained analytical attention to the effects of their physicality except when singing (Korsmeier 2000; Ortkemper 2000; Roach 1976).3 But the physicality of castrati matters. Recent interventions have taken up one aspect of it, which is the complicated gender and sexual logics of castrati. Freitas brilliantly develops his argument that castrati such as Melani figured in contemporary sexual culture as perpetual youths, available for pederastic desire or as (safe) heterosexual objects (Freitas 2009; 2003). For Sam Abel, opera must be understood as postmodern in its protean displays of desire. His effort to situate opera as “a public celebratory space for queer desire” would seem to allow a space for castrati, whose blending of masculine and feminine elements of voice and body appears to fit Abel’s understanding of opera as polymorphous, rather than committed to realistic narrative. Like cross-dressed female singers, castrati disrupt gender norms, and to some degree, they can be understood on a spectrum with other operatic gender transgressions (1996, 66, 138).4 Important as these kinds of recognition of the consonance and dissonance around castrato sexuality and gender are, the relationship between and among physicality, sexuality, and gender set castrati apart and need to be situated into a larger historical frame.

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Figure 5.1 Like many castrati, Pasquale Potenza retains a youthful appearance with soft features. Credit: Portrait of Italian castrato Pasquale Potenza C.1730-?, by unknown artist. Oil on canvas, 18th century. Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna, Italy. (Photo: Universal Images Group / Art Resource, NY)

This chapter argues that castrati mattered both in their own historical moment and long after they had been discarded as relics of an earlier (and according to some, more barbaric age) because of what they meant as disabled, transgendered persons. The chronological account begins with how castrati were perceived when they first emerged as a new type of voice in ecclesiastical and court contexts. As castrati moved into the more public context of commercial opera,

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criticisms and concerns emerged, but were overbalanced by enthusiasm for the pyrotechnics, litheness, and beauty of the castrato voice. Gradually, with the expansion of opera star culture, both the quantity and the quality of criticism changed. Critics blamed castrati for their deficiencies as men and sometimes for having been physically altered. While those who created them (families and surgeons) or encouraged their creation (families again, the Catholic Church, and opera fans) did not entirely escape opprobrium, ambivalence about the disabled, gender-crossing castrato eventually overwhelmed the commitment to his spectacular voice, but also instantiated perceptions of genitally disabled men as unnatural, socially disruptive, and culturally suspect.

1. Foundations Music – often monophonic and sung by the celebrant regardless of his musical ability – was part of the liturgy long before the turn to castrati. Liturgical hymns date at least back to St. Ambrose (c. 340–397), for example, and rich traditions of all kinds of chanted items from the monophonic liturgy were notated as early as the ninth century and polyphonic ones as early as the eleventh century. With the musical elaboration of liturgy, the Catholic Church established the conditions for large-scale castration for musical purposes.5 Ostensibly because of St. Paul’s injunction against women speaking (“Let your women keep silence in the churches,” 1 Cor. 14:34, KJV), women were banned from singing in church. Boy sopranos sang the high parts, which was all well and good, except when their voices changed, ending their ability to perform. If boys had short careers, men with high adult voices had controversial ones. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and the Cistercians rejected high male singing: “It befits men to sing with a virile voice, and not in a womanish ringing manner.” [Viros decet virilli voce cantare, et non more femineo tinnulis] (Statuta 1:30).6 When the development of polyphony made music complex and difficult to master, the limitations on boy sopranos became even more apparent: just when they attained the necessary skill level, their voices changed. One solution, turning to falsettists, proved unsatisfactory for many by the early seventeenth century, with complaints about the nature of the sound they produced providing the impetus for finding a “better” solution to the need for high male voices. Why castrating boys seemed like a better solution than falsettists is shrouded in secrecy. But as Italian princes came to favor more elaborate music, musical training in conservatories and with private masters developed castrati as highly trained singers. The Church ban on women singing combined with the need for a wider range of voices and more power sparked the impetus toward castration for musical purposes as something of a cultural norm (Feldman 2015, 5–10). If this general description sounds vague, all that musicologists will affirm with certainty is that castrati started appearing regularly in the latter half of the sixteenth century, first in princely courts and then in the Papal choir

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(Rosselli 1988, 146). Much of the enthusiasm for castrati came from an intellectual climate that valued recovering the knowledge of Antiquity. At the Florentine home of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi de Vernio (1534–1612), humanists, musicians, and aristocrats discussed contemporary music in relation to the ancient past. Bardi’s camerata included Vincenzo Galilei, Jacopo Corsi, and Emilio de’ Cavalieri, all of whom built on the interest in ancient Greek culture of Piero Vettori (1499–1585). Vettori’s interest in Aristotle brought his student, Girolamo Mei (1519–1594), into contact with the Poetics, including its account of ancient Greek musical aesthetics. Mei’s extensive research into Greek music resulted in his De modis musicus antiquorum (1575). Mei also corresponded with Galilei, explicating the Greek monodic style that facilitated emotional expression of poetry in a single melodic line. Galilei developed Mei’s insights into his polemical Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581), which denounced counterpoint in favor of clarity of expression, natural declamation along the lines of spoken speech, and correspondence between the emotional content of the words sung and the music (Palisca 2006). Songs in the new style seem to have been written in the 1590s, with the first opera generally recognized as such performed in 1598.7 Dafne, with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music primarily by Jacopo Peri, included a preface explaining that the work was to be entirely sung, distinguishing it from pastorals and brief intermedi dramas that combined vocal music, instrumental accompaniment, and dance. Dafne has not survived, but in 1600, at the proxy wedding in Florence of Marie de’ Medici to Henri IV, Guilio Caccini’s Il rapimento de Cefalo and Peri’s Euridice were performed.8 Although popular in the moment, the former was something of a failure, criticized for its inappropriate theme; the latter, downplayed at the time, came to be regarded as a success. Seven years later, Claudio Monteverdi set the Orpheus story to music, and it remains in the musical canon. For our purposes, Monteverdi’s composition was notable for another reason: correspondence between Francesco and Ferdinando Gonzaga to secure the use of a soprano castrato in the service of the Medici reveals that the castrato voice was crucial to this Orfeo (Sherr 1980; Fenlon 1994). The emergence of opera at Italian princely courts was made possible by the interest in skilled singers – especially castrati – about whom the central concern was securing their services. Documents from Mantua in the sixteenth century demonstrate efforts to recruit singers far and wide. In 1563, the Cardinal d’Este wrote to the duke of Mantua about two castrati. “Il Fordosio,” identified as “a French castrato” [un castrato francese] moved from one cardinal to another when the former’s chapel was dissolved. In 1583, agents were searching in France and Spain; in February of 1586, an agent in Verona was on the trail of two castrati. Two months later, the Patriarch of Jerusalem in Rome wrote that the duke of Mantua might secure the services of a castrato named Jacomo Antonio Pales despite an offer from the duke of Bavaria (Bertolotti 1969, 37, 40, 64–68). The tendency to dehumanize individual

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singers was already apparent: no one referred to castration as problematic and the only questions that mattered were how good was “the voice” and whether “the voice” was available? The privileging of “the voice” happened to all singers. The German Fach system of identifying prospective singers by range and quality of their voices indicates as much (Kloiber 2016, 925–940). The difference was that castrates were identified as castrates when “the voice” was at issue. In 1594, for instance, a castrato from St. Peter’s was described as, “a young Sienese castrato with a very beautiful voice” [un giovane castrato, senese, con bellissima voce] (Bertolotti 1969, 68). In 1608, Thomas Coryat (c. 1577–1617) heard several singers who were excellent, and “I alwaies thought that he was an Eunuch, which if he had beene, it had taken away some part of my admiration, because they do most commonly sing passing wel; but he was not [a eunuch]. Therefore it was much the more admirable” (1:391). Like many early commentators from England, Coryat liked the falsettist best, but his expectations about castrates are clear. John Evelyn (1620–1706) visited Venice in 1645, taking in a performance of Ercole in Lidia (composer: Giovanni Rovetta). He found the entire experience overwhelming in its opulence, commenting on the singers: “The famous voices, Anna Rencia [Renzi], a Roman, and reputed the best treble of women; but there was an eunuch who, in my opinion, surpassed her; also a Genoese that sung an incomparable bass” (1:202). The matter-of-fact sensibility about vocal qualities was common, but it was applied to castrates in ways that highlighted their physical and gender differences. Seeing the voice as originating in castration encouraged concerns about the gender status or social position of castrati. The layers of knowledge of castrates as physically and socially disabled – as we have seen, they were “made” by surgeons, understood in medical terms, and deprived of normative life trajectories by legal fiat – were readily available. Remarks within those discourses about the effects of castration on what we recognize as gender were also very visible. Classical prejudice included a vast array of condemnations of castrates as effeminate, insufficient men, who might be frighteningly out of control (like women) in their guise as galli or distressingly attractive (like women) to powerful men (Tougher in CC). Whether fretting about ancient prejudices or not, some, perhaps many, were skeptical about castrati as singers. Juan Huarte’s Examen de Iugenios, first published in 1575, asserted that castration, although done to create beautiful voices, actually harmed the castrate’s musical abilities. Huarte emphasized that castration made men like women – cold, moist, and stupid: But the matter most worth noting is, that if a man before his gelding had much wit and habilitie, so soone as his stones be cut away, he groweth to lesse the same, so far foorth as if he had received some notable dammage to his very braine. And this is a manifest token, that the cods give & reave the temperature from all the other parts of the body, and he will not yeeld credit hereunto, let him consider…that of 1000 such capons who addict

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Negotiations themselves to their bookes, none attaineth to any perfection, and even in musicke (which is their ordinarie profession) we manifestly see how blockish they are, which springeth because musick is a worke of the imagination, & this power requireth much heat, whereas they are cold and moist. (1575, 279–280)9

Huarte allowed that the castrato voice was “clear & sweet,” but the trade off – not only did castration make a man stupid, it also gave him pale skin, no facial hair, and made him sterile – was a poor one (ibid., 282). Huarte’s treatise was translated into French, Italian, Latin, German, and Dutch, and reprinted in at least sixty editions, and yet, Huarte was fighting a losing battle. Leading by example in keeping women out of church choirs, the Papacy laid the groundwork for castrati in its chapel (referred to as the Cappella Pontificia until Michaelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel, when it became the Cappella Sistina) (Kahn 2010, 41–42).10 Perhaps as early as 1562, Spanish castrati may have been in the Cappella Sistina, although they may have been falsettists. References to singers as “eunuchs” begin in the 1580s, but some singers described as falsettists may have been castrati (Gerbino 2004, 301–310). The genital status of individual singers may not be certain, but the move toward castrati was: in 1589, Sixtus V issued a papal bull, Cum pro nostro pastorali munere, calling for twelve singers in the Sistine Choir (four bass, four tenor, four contraltos) and “four eunuchs,” if they could be found, to sing soprano. If not, the choir was to use six boys (Collectionis 3:172; Miller 1973, 250). Despite concerns about encouraging castration, Clement VIII (r. 1592–1605) acknowledged the membership of castrati in the Cappella Guilia in 1599, and by 1625, the last falsettist retired from the choir. The same year, Urban VIII (r. 1623–1644) specified that the choir was to have thirty-four working singers (all clerics in at least minor orders), with nine sopranos and nine altos along with eight tenors and eight basses. The numbers actually varied, with retired singers and supernumaries on the payroll (Hammond 1994, 66–76; Pagano 1982). Membership was supposed to be by competition and appointment, but in fact was often the result of patronage. The duties of the choir members included singing the mass and psalms of the Divine Office [Officium Divinum], although only half the singers were required most days. Singers had substantial time off, and could accept other employment. Except for Holy Week, when the choir rehearsed in advance, singers typically sightread. Much of the music was polyphony with one singer per part and changing singers for each movement (Lionnet 1987; Sherr 1987). The level of musical skill was high, but virtuosity was not required. In the Papal States, ecclesiastical and princely musical patronage was often indistinguishable, and princely patronage of castrati kept pace with the move away from falsettists toward castrati.11 Frederick Hammond has described the Cappella Pontificia as an extension of the Barberini musical establishment during the pontificate of Urban VIII, which included the households of his

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brother and two nephews, all three of whom Urban created as cardinals (1994, 165–176). In addition to serving the Barberini, Giulio Rospigliosi was a composer of sacred operas before his election as Clement IX (r. 1667–1669). His Sant’Alessio (1632) featured the Barberini castrati Marc-Antonio Pasqualini, Angelo Ferrotti, and Girolamo Zampetti (Murata 1981, 21–22). The Christian themes notwithstanding, the ban on female singers meant that Rospigliosi utilized cross-dressed castrati to sing female parts. Loreto Vittori sang Angelica in Il Palazzo d’Atlante (1642), for instance (Antolini 1978, 159–160). When the first public opera house opened in Rome in 1732, the pattern of castrati replacing women was set and until the French invasion in 1798, female singers did not appear on the Roman stage. With Papal patronage firmly in place, castrati circulated among the princely establishments in Rome, held church appointments, and performed at the courts of Italy and abroad. Pasqualini went to Paris in 1647, along with the Medici castrato, Atto Melani, and Micinello Panfilo from the Seminario Romano to perform Orfeo (composer: Luigi Rossi) at Cardinal Mazarin’s behest (Murata 1981, 47; Freitas 2009, 50; Prunières 91, 98–99). Siface (Giovanni Francesco Grossi, 1653–1697) worked for a time in the Papal choir, moved to the court of the duke of Modena, sang opera all over Italy, and, because his patron’s sister was married to James II of England, joined the king’s chapel in 1687 (Somerset-Ward 2004, 67–68). Singers often maintained patronage ties with either princely courts or the church or both well into the eighteenth century. Gaetano Guadagni (1728–1792) started out in the choir of Sant’Antonio in Padua in 1746, was dismissed for excessive absences to sing opera, but returned to the choir in 1768 and remained an active member until his death (Howard 2014). Filippo Balatri (1676?–1756), whose primary patron was Cosimo III de’ Medici, sang for Peter the Great and the Grand Khan Astrakhan, toured the courts of Europe, and became a Cistercian monk in 1739 (Schlafly 1997; Di Salvo 1999). The examples could be multiplied – the travels of castrati have been widely documented – but the frequent changes of venue, of patron, and of role lent an air of volatility and a reputation for flightiness to castrati as a group. The recurrent characterizations of individuals as mercurial and capricious had much to do with their peripatetic lifestyles, but some criticisms took on an incipient gender element. John Evelyn admired Siface’s voice but, “I found him a mere wanton, effeminate child, very coy and proudly conceited to my apprehension…. [T]he Signor much disdaining to show his talent to any but princes” (2:263). Part of what made castrati seem effeminate was their constant changing. Women were considered unstable (physically and otherwise), vain, and unreliable; men were (or were supposed to be) steadfast and unwavering (Reeser 2006; Breitenberg 1996; Long 2002; McClive 2009). How they lived and worked made castrati vulnerable to charges of feminine inconstancy. The demands of commercial opera helped establish the sense that castrati were pliable by (altered) nature. In 1637, the first public opera house, the San Cassiano, opened in Venice with female stars as well as castrati. Opera was no

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longer just for court elites, but became commercially viable, especially when it featured star singers (Rosand 1991; Glixon and Glixon 2006).12 In addition to Venice and Rome, Naples, Florence, and Milan built public opera houses. Smaller cities did as well, and not just in Italy: Hamburg’s public opera house opened in 1678, Leipzig’s in 1693, although the Viennese had to wait until 1728. Singers circulated if not freely, at least widely and frequently. Opera rapidly became a big and geographically extensive business. According to Antonio Groppo, Venetian theatres produced more than 350 operas by 1700 and 811 by 1745.13 In the scramble to put on operas often at speed, the priority was on novelty, while a lack of commitment to consistency and authenticity enabled critiques of castrati as singers that, again, exposed castrati to gendered comments. Critics complained about preposterous plots and the formulaic construction of musical elements to accommodate the hierarchical demands of the cast that required such practices as the leading man getting more and better arias than the second man, the female lead having more arias than the second female, and so forth (Feldman 2007, 9–11). The association of demands about precedence and the rivalries over the length and difficulty of roles might not necessarily seem gendered, but masculinity was about moderation and self-control (Reeser 2006, 11–76). The propensity toward intemperate behavior in the business of opera as well as in its performance solidified the association of effeminacy with castrati. Stendhal’s (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842) anecdotes about capricious singers are later, but reflect the kinds of stories that circulated: Marchesi (the famous Milanese male-soprano) [Luigi Marchesi, 1754– 1829], during the latter part of his stage career, refused point-blank to sing at all unless his first entry in the opening scene of the opera were made either on horseback or else on top of a hill. Furthermore, whichever alternative was eventually agreed upon, the cascade of plumes which surmounted his helmet was required to be at least six feet high. (Stendhal 2008, 117) That association was all but cemented by practices that disrupted continuity and logic within the performance of opera. Audiences frequently insisted that singers break the dramatic frame and repeat the best bits. The propensity of some singers to import their best-known arias (literally “baggage arias”: arie di baule, also called “suitcase arias”) regardless of applicability to the particular dramatic situation also contributed to the sense that opera was undisciplined (Freeman 1992). Castrati, as the most extreme of all opera elements, were associated with excess – a female fault in a society that considered moderation and self-control to be marks of masculinity. Gender issues in the early decades of opera were present, but only incipiently problematic. Matters that would become increasingly uncomfortable merited little concern early on. Castrati were singing female parts from the very outset – Giovanni Gualberto Magli sang two female roles in Orfeo in

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1607 – without so much as a shrug from commentators on the spectacle as performed at the court of Mantua (Fenlon 1986). Benedetto Ferrari’s La maga fulminata (1638) featured the castrato Francesco Angeletti as Rodamira (a princess disguised as a knight) and an old woman (Schneider 2012, 259). In Rome, young castrati, including Farinelli, routinely began their careers singing female parts. Some continued or returned to the practice later in their careers. Vittori was forty-two and nearing retirement from the stage when he sang Angelica in Il Palazzo incantato di Atlante. Even where women were allowed on stage, castrati often sang the female parts. Among the initial public offerings in Venice, for instance, Francesco Angelelli sang the part of Juno, Girolamo Medici sang Astrea, and Anselmo Marconi sang Venus in Francesco Manelli’s Andromeda (Mamy 1998, 28–29). Historians and musicologists have noted that audiences offered few opinions about the sex of the singer, but they expressed a marked preference for high voices in the soprano and alto registers, whether female or castrato, over tenor or especially bass voices (Keyser 1987/88, 47; Dame 1994). Sesto in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto was created in 1724 by the soprano Margherita Durastanti and later played by castrati. Vocal quality often mattered more than the body that carried it around. Moreover, castrati had active defenders despite the areas of incipient gender unease. The Jesuit theologian Tommaso Tamburini (1591–1675) compared castration to losing a tooth or a little finger [uno dente vel summitate minimi digiti], considering the trade-off worth such a minor cost (Bk. 6, sec. 3, c. 4). Tamburini insisted that boys had to provide affirmative consent, but this did not seem to present a problem for him.14 Other apologists, such as the Spanish humanist Francisco de Cascales (1564–1642), downplayed effeminacy and emphasized the positive. In 1634, Cascales endorsed castration for musical purposes as an acceptable sacrifice for the purpose of creating beautiful voices to glorify God. Against the claims that castrati are “imperfect and vicious” [imperfecto y vicioso], Cascales maintained that they were better than other men. With their beardless faces and high, ethereal voices, castrati should be regarded as angelic, and like the angels, not subject to sexual desire.15 Cascales saw this as a distinct advantage and source of superiority. To be sure, Cascales did not present an entirely logical argument. Just because he is missing something, Cascales maintained, does not mean the castrato is imperfect. But it is difficult to overcome the notion that human males typically have functional testicles, and thus, being without them is a significant form of imperfection. The double edge of Cascales’s apology is apparent when he has to remind his readers that, “none of this is the fault of the capon” [nada de esto le falta al capón] (118). Charles de Saint-Évremond (1613–1703) was not interested in divine service, focusing instead on the personal benefits of castration. Writing to “the young Dery” around 1685, Saint-Évremond argued against several nay-sayers and encouraged the boy to accept castration: “I shall try to obtain what is best for you in a manner least disagreeable, and I shall say to you with all terms of insinuation, that you must be softened by a small operation, which

Figure 5.2 Pier Leone Ghezzi’s satirical image of Farinelli emphasizes both the castrato’s out-sized features and the fact that castrati often played female roles in opera. Credit: Pier Leone Ghezzi, The Famous Castrato: Il Farinelli. Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk, on paper. 12 x 8 1/8 inches (305 x 207 mm.). Gift of Mr. Janos Scholz. 1985.87. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY, USA (Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum / Art Resource, NY)

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will assure the delicacy of your complexion and the beauty of your voice for your entire life” [je tâchererai de procurer vôtre bien avec des manieres moins desagréables, et je vous dirai avec tous termes d’insinuation, qu’il faut vous faire adoucir par un operation legere, qui assûrera la délicatesse de vôtre teint pour long-tems, et la beauté de vôtre voix pour toute la vie]. The boy’s voice would remain his ticket to social access and patronage: These riches, these rich clothes, these ponies that come your way are not given to the son of Mr. Dery for his nobility; your face and your voice attract them. In three or four years, alas! – you will lose the advantage of the one and the other, if you do not have the wisdom to provide for them; and the source of all these charms will dry up. Today you can speak familiarly with kings, you are cherished by duchesses, praised by all people of condition; when the charm of your voice has passed, you will be merely the comrade of Pompey, and perhaps the scorn of Mr. Stourton. [Ces guinées, ces habits rouges, ces petits chevaux qui vous viennent, ne sont pas donnez au fils de Monsieur Dery pour sa noblesse; vôtre visage et vôtre voix les attirent. Dans trois ou quatre ans, helas! vous perdrez le mérite de l’un et de l’autre, si vous n’avez la sagesse d’y pourvoir; et la source de tous ces agrémens sera tarie. Aujourd’hui vous parlez aux Rois avec familiarité, vous étes caressé des Duchesses, loüé par toutes les Personnes de condition; quand le charme de vôtre voix sera passé, vous ne serez que la camrade de Pompée, et peut-être le mépris de Monsieur Stourton.] Without his voice, Dery would be lucky to be in the company of the servants of the great nobles with whom he associated now, but lest he fear that castration might impede his love life, Dery was assured: “But you fear, you say, being less loved by the ladies. Forget your apprehension: we are no longer in the time of imbeciles. The advantage that follows the operation is well recognized today, and for each mistress that Mr. Dery has in his natural state, Mr. Dery softened will have a hundred” [Mais vous craignez, dites-vous, d’étre moins aimé des Dames. Perdez vôtre appréhension: nous ne sommes plus au tems des imbeciles; le mérite qui suit l’operation est aujourd’hui assez reconnu, et pour une Maîtresse qu’auroit Monsieur Dery dans son naturel, Monsieur Dery adouci en aura cent]. Even better, Saint-Evremond continues, is that as a castrate, Dery would not have to worry about a wife or children or being a cuckold. All that was required was a quick operation and, “you will remain devoted purely to yourself, proud that such a small advantage that will make your fortune, and give you the love of everyone” [vous demeurerez attaché purement à vous-même, glorieux d’un si petit mérite qui fera vôtre fortune, et vous donnera l’amitié de tout le monde] (2: 49–50). The blithe cynicism of Saint-Evremond notwithstanding, he cut through to the heart of the matter: castration would preserve the beauty, the high voice, and the allure of young Dery.

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The apologies for castration made the trade-off the centerpiece: Loss of testicles in exchange for (the prospect of) a spectacular voice. Other benefits – a good complexion, avoiding going bald, not having to worry about a wife and children – might well accrue. The castrate also lost gender status in so far as he was not physically or socially like intact men, but his difference was the source of his access and in the early decades of the castrati phenomenon, the gender issues were subordinate to the opportunities that a superior voice afforded. The castrato could sing for popes, princes, and kings. He could travel far and wide and sing in courts and opera houses from Moscow to Dublin. Virtuosity by means of castration was a positive good – mostly.

2. Rising discord Even in positive versions of the exchange that was castration to make a beautiful voice, there were edges. The changes to the body wrought by castration rendered the voice high, but the gender liminal. Over time, the voice and the gender ambiguities of the castrato interfered with expectations about the relationship between the singer as an embodied individual and the kinds of roles he could or should plausibly play. Unease about gender verisimilitude was not the only issue about the artificiality of opera, but when concentrated on castrati, the peculiarities of the singers encouraged discussion about their locus as gender-altered, physically non-normative men. Of all the ways that castrato bodies deviated from male norms, the voice was both the least visible (literally) and the most significant for castrati. Although we have recordings of Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), the last castrato in the Sistine Chapel choir, some scholars consider them unsatisfactory representations of the sounds castrati could produce, and even if the sound quality is taken into account, we have no comparison recordings of other castrati. Moreschi was not trained at anything like the level of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera stars and he was past his prime when the recordings were made. Furthermore, the sound engineers may have manipulated the results in ways that make the reliability of extant examples dubious (Law).16 Early modern descriptions give a sense of the castrato voice, albeit one necessarily limited by the problems of personal experience of sound and of expressing that experience in words. Nonetheless, ear-witness accounts provide a sense of what was so impressive. Sir John Hawkins explained of Farinelli’s exceptional voice: “…few hesitated to pronounce him the greatest singer in the world; this opinion was grounded on the amazing compass of his voice, exceeding that of women, or any of his own class; his shake was just, and sweet beyond expression; and in the management of his voice, and the clear articulation of divisions and quick passages, he passed all description. Such perfections as these are rare enough for one singer to possess” (2: 876). Farinelli’s voice joined range and power with agility and clarity of tone. These general expectations seem to have been the standard. Charles Burney assessed a promising boy in Brescia along the same lines: “He has a compass of two octaves complete, from the middle C

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in the scale, to the highest. His voice is full, when he has time to throw it out; and he executes swift passages with such facility, that he is apt to be lavish and run riot, and now and then is not exactly in tune” (1959, 1: 89). For Pietro Francesco Tosi, the best castrati moved between head and chest registers smoothly, and sang across the entire range of the voice without strain or altering pronunciation (1968, 24, 102–103). Although the sound remains difficult to imagine, these accounts provide a sense of the technical abilities. We do know that the effects of castration specifically on the voice were extensive. Castration before puberty meant that the larynx did not move down, as it did for intact men when their voices broke. With his higher larynx, the castrato’s vocal cords remained more proximate to the resonating cavities, resulting in clarity of tone. In the absence of castration, androgen hormones produced in the testes caused the vocal cords to enlarge. Castrati retained shorter vocal cords so that their pitch resembled that of women (Ravens 2014; Peschel and Peschel 1987, 579–580; Feldman 2015, 79–132). Extensive training often produced large rib cages to accommodate expanded lung capacity, giving them a barrel-shaped torso. Their voices, with the alterations in the direction of developing it, melded the pitch of a woman, the power of a man, and the purity of a boy. The amalgamation that marked the castrato’s body for singing in some ways fit neatly with prevalent notions of social order. In the hierarchical world of early modern Europe, higher was better; in vocal terms, heroes were often soprano castrati. The convention of the high voice as the lead harkened back to Neoplatonic ideas about the soul moving upward toward perfection and salvation. In addition to his theories about music and sound, Marsilio Ficino outlined the notion that ascent of the soul toward God involves a process of abstraction from love for souls, laws and customs, all branches of knowledge, the science of beauty, and absolute beauty itself (Ficino 1956, 230–239; Plato 1999, 210a–212a). Male sopranos (the highest and most powerful voices) tended to play aristocratic or romantic heroes, while female sopranos played heroines or princesses. Until the nineteenth century, tenors were more often kings or fathers, and basses were rarely featured at all (Reynolds 1995; Mamy 1994, 41). That young castrati often started out in female parts and contraltos (male or female) sang supporting female parts such as queens and mothers complicated this scheme. Pier Leone Ghezzi’s caricature of Farinelli on stage in full female dress from 1724 reflects that the singer, like many castrati, began his career playing female roles (Rostirolla 2004, #84, p. 117). Daniel Heartz notes that Farinelli sang both Berenice in Leonardo Vinci’s Farnace and Salonice in Luca Antonio Predieri’s Scipione in 1724 in Rome. Farinelli also premiered Predieri’s Sofonisba in 1722 in the title role and played Cleopatra in Antonio e Cleopatra (1725) (2003, 35; Cappelletto 1995, 193). The frankly transgendered castrate on stage prompted some concerns. In 1661, Pierre Perrin described castrati as “the horror of the ladies and the laughing-stock of the men.” Male singers playing women was one issue, but really their changeable

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characterizations were unacceptable: “singers who are made to play now Love, now a Lady, and to express amorous passions, a thing which completely offends our sense of verisimilitude and good taste and defies all the rule of theatre” (1986, 1:107). Implicitly, changing gender roles disrupted the presumptive stability of the male/female binary. To be sure, Perrin was in line with others in France who did not like the castrato sound, but he also specifically rejected singers effectively changing gender. French sensibilities led to the development of the haute-contre instead of the castrato. Composers including Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) and Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) considered intact male singers to be just as skillful as castrati without the troubling conflation of their feminized bodies with female roles. Even in Italy, where castrati were more welcomed, anxious gender commentary gradually proliferated. Early concerns were muted, as when Giovanni Battisa Doni (1564–1647) worried that habits such as emphasizing vibrato were suitable to female singers or effeminate castrati (1763, 2: 71–72). By the mideighteenth century, some regarded castrati as incapable of appropriate gender performance. Lauriso Tragiense considered castrati to be failures when singing male parts: What would the Greeks and Romans say if they represented an Agamemnon, a Pyrrhus, a Hector, a Seleucius, a Cyrus, an Alexander the Great, an Attilius Regulus, a Papirius Cursor, a Caesar, a Nero, or a Hadrian played by a musico with the face and voice of a woman, with soft, effeminate gestures, languid from habit, who becomes seductive if he is angry, pleasing when he wants to appear frightening, and amusing when he attempts to express grief ? [Che direbbono i Greci, e i Latini se vedessero rappresentarsi un Agamennone, un Pirro, un Ettore, un Seleuco, un Ciro, un Alessandro Magno, un Attillio Regolo, un Papirio Cursore, un Cesare, un Nerone, un Adriano da muscio sbarbato, che con volto, e con voce di donna, con molli effeminati gesti languente per vezzo alletta mentre si sdegna, fa piacere quando vuol mostrarsi terribile, cagiona diletto quando vuol esprimer dolore?] (1753, 124) For Tragiense, castrati having so much of the feminine made it impossible for them to fully inhabit masculine, heroic roles. The voice might not have helped, as its feminine elements could interfere with a convincing portrayal of a male character. Even the comparatively objective Prussian, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz (1741–1812), had concerns about castrati gender crossing: It is well known that they adopt here [Rome] the foolish custom of letting men in disguise act all the parts that should be acted by women; in the operas, the task is performed by castratoes [sic]. One should believe, that this disguise would destroy every illusion; but quite to the contrary,

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because these ambiguous beings have brought it so far by imitation, that the spectator who knows nothing of the matter would never guess them to be what they are, while he only sees them from a great distance. As the voice raises the greatest obstacle, they take pains to imitate, with the most minute perfection, every thing relative to gait, posture, gests, and manners, so that the performance is not at all inferior on that score. (1791, 2: 172) Notwithstanding his defense of castrati, Archenholz was sensitive to the performative aspect of gender that castrati put forth, and admitted that the illusion worked better from afar. Castration made the gender illusion difficult in other ways as well – ones that had to do with the effects of castration on the body that consequently grew and developed in unusual, often fantastic ways.17 The removal of testicular androgens meant that the large bones of the body, especially in the arms and legs, did not receive the hormonal signal to stop growing and many castrati were inordinately tall with comparatively small heads. Others were noted for being quite rotund. Prints depicted Farinelli’s unusual height and Senesino’s (Franceso Bernardi, 1686–1758) pear-shaped corpulence. As with Farinelli, artists emphasized Pacchiarotti’s extreme height and thinness. As they did with Senesino, artists depicted Nicolini (Nicola Francesco Leonardo Grimaldi, 1673–1732) as round and fat. The Venetian art critic and engraver Antonio Maria Zanetti (1678–1767) similarly depicted Antonio Maria Bernacchi (1685–1756) with his belly being held up by a man less than half his height. As Gail Kern Paster (1993) has pointed out, the body out of control was a female one in early modernity. The need for (male) assistance to keep his body under control further feminized Bernacchi. Satirical images of castrati melded effeminacy and physical defects. A drawing by Pier Leone Ghezzi depicted the contralto Domenico Annibali in “eastern” costume and posed so as to mix the feminine (hands gesturing delicately; feet offset; an elaborate and bejeweled skirt and hat) and masculine (a sword hanging just where it should to suggest a penis). His depiction is in profile, bringing out his lack of facial hair and mix of female and male facial characteristics (Rostirolla 2001, #151, p. 149). Ghezzi routinely depicted castrati with exaggerated feminine characteristics such as an image of Raffaello Raffaelli with a rather significant bosom, while the over-sized mouth of Antonio Girolamo Bigelli situates the singer within a lineage of misogyny about women with big mouths (Rostirolla 2001, #22, p. 88; #35, p. 93). Physical appearances often added to the difficulties spectators experienced when they had to match bodies to roles. Charles de Brosses commented on seeing “Marianini” (probably Mariano Nicolini, fl. 1731–1758), “at six feet tall, he plays the role of a woman at the Teatro Argentino; that’s the tallest princess I have ever seen in all my life” [avec six pieds de haut, joue un rolle de femme sur le théâtre d’Argentine; c’est la plus grande princesse que je

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Figure 5.3 William Hogarth’s satirical depiction of Gaetano Berenstadt and Francesco Bernardi (Senesino) highlights the physical irregularities of the castrato body. Here, the castrati are absurdly tall with small heads and unconvincing attempts at masculine postures. Credit: William Hogarth, Berenstat, Cuzzoni and Senesino c. 1725. Illustration from Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century …With over two hundred illustrations by George Paston [pseudonym of Emily Morse Symonds], (London, 1905). (Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY)

verray de mes jours] (Brosses 1991, 2: 996).18 Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) despaired that modern Italian music was infected with effeminacy, although he was not sure if the problem was the music or the singers: “Whether this effeminacy is caused by an excessive use of eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and the smallest rhythmic values, which break the solemnity of the melody, or is produced by the voices of the singers, who are all either naturally or artificially womanlike…it is a fact that modern theater music is exceedingly harmful for public mores” (1706, 41). For Muratori, this was a chicken and egg problem, but for others, the gender-bending of castrati on stage was central issue. Unlike many other French commentators, François Raguenet (c. 1660–1722) admired the castrato voice. Nonetheless, he fretted that the castrati who played women became more like women: The Italians anyway have another great advantage over us by means of their castrati, in that they can be any character they want, a women as well as a man, as they need; for these castrati are so accustomed to

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playing the role of the woman, that the best actresses in the world can not do better than they. [D’ailleurs les Italiens ont encore un grand avantage sur nous par le moyen de leurs Castrati, en ce qu’ils en font le personnage qu’ils veulent, une femme aussi-bien qu’un homme, selon qu’ils en ont besoin; car ces Castrati sont tellement accoûtumez à faire des rôles de femme, que les meilleures Actrices du monde ne les font point mieux qu’eux.] (Raguenet 1702, 98–99)19 What seems to have prompted especial discomfort was that audiences both did and did not have to suspend disbelief when castrati played female roles. That discomfort highlighted how opera and its castrato stars disrupted gender norms in ways that increased scrutiny of their corporeal differences. By the late eighteenth century, commentators often wedded gender nonconformity to difference, emphasizing the ways that the castrato’s aberrant embodiment undermined his musical ability. On his tour of Italy published in 1770, Pierre-Jean Grosley reported mixed responses. In Naples, he observed, “The French people present at this performance forgot the clumsy appearance of the castrato who was playing Timante, along with the contrast between his voice and his great height, his vast arms and legs, and mingled their tears with those of the Neapolitans” [Les François présens à ce spectacle, oublièrent eux mêmes l’air gauche du Soprano, qui remplissoit le rôle de Timante, & la dissonance de sa voix avec l’énormité de sa taille, de ses bras, de ses jambes, pour mêler leurs larmes à celles des Napolitains] (1774, 3: 256). But Grosley obviously did not forget. He was less than impressed: Moreover, I was unable to share the pleasure derived by the Italians from these effeminate voices. They emerge from bodies which are so little in keeping with them: these bodies are made up of parts which fit so badly together; their movements in the theatre are so heavy and clumsy that I would have preferred an ordinary voice in an ordinary body to the most marvellous musico. [Au reste, je n’ai pu partager le plaisir que donnent aux Italiens ces voix efféminées. Elles sortent de corps qui leur sont si peu analogues: ces corps sont formés de parties si mal emmanchées; ils ont au Théâtre des mouvemens si lourds & si gauches, que j’aurois toujours préféré au Musico le plus merveilleux, une voix commune dans un corps ordinaire.] (ibid., 3: 61–62) Grosley could not enjoy the effeminate voice of the castrato because of the disjuncture between the sound and the visible body. As his account attests, the castrato’s musical ability still “worked” for most auditors, but many were dissatisfied that his person blended male and female elements. The often ill-proportioned bodies combined with the requirement that the “high” heroic/romantic voice belonged to men who wore dresses and played women on stage.

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3. Cacophonous controversy In 1736, a satirical verse epistle circulated in England and took peculiar aim at the superstar castrato Farinelli. The poem inquired whether the singer was pregnant: Say, my dear Count, and, with thy solemn Face, Confirm, or clear, the Charmer’s foul Disgrace. What may we think? the Doubt has made me wild; Is the soft Warbler then a Wench with Child? (H–dd–g – r, 3)20 It was not the only such language applied to Farinelli, and in all its iterations, it was the logical extreme of some of the ideas that had been developing in the preceding decades and which would play out in subsequent ones. Pregnant men were a natural impossibility and/or the ultimate in feminization.21 Querying Farinelli’s physicality in this way accentuated the association of castrati with unnatural gender crossing. The rising discomfort between the artificially created castrato voice and the Enlightenment idealization of the “natural” has been highlighted elsewhere (Feldman 2008). I want to situate the disconnect between castrati and emergent cultural ideals in terms of how disability and gender concerns, both embedded in the notion of a pregnant castrato, came to mutually reinforce each other. The social disability of the castrato was widely known, but over the eighteenth century, his physical disability became increasingly unacceptable. Whether because of their sterility or sexual dysfunction more broadly, castrati attracted attention to their disability. Although many observers were sympathetic to the fact that castrati were deliberately disabled, many others were at least uncomfortable that castrati capitalized on their disability and effectively flaunted it in public. Critics fused gender and transsexual anxieties, effectively rendering castrati as defective and deformed. Despite the recognition that most castrati did not properly consent to their creation, detractors insisted that the resultant disability enabled degeneracy, making castrati disgusting and dangerous. Vilification of castrati is not news. From caricatures aimed at the peculiarities of castrate physiognomy, to outraged denunciations of castrati for sexually stimulating listeners (female mostly, but also male) with their singing, to accusations of cupidity that threatened household budgets and national solvency, critics routinely singled out castrati as marked by and as markers of corruption and moral turpitude. Musicologists, historians, and literary critics have amply demonstrated these themes. Berta Joncus has examined the types of negative rhetoric aimed at castrati, and at Farinelli in particular. Thomas McGeary has argued that the satires aimed at castrati in England from 1724 to 1736 were prompted largely by fears of opera as a foreign import that brought sexual corruption in its wake (McGeary 1992; 2000; see also Lindgren

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1995). Xavier Cervantes has also highlighted the derogatory discourse aimed at castrati in early eighteenth-century London (Cervantes 2005; 1998). He particularly emphasizes the ways that attacks on Farinelli were framed in terms of danger to the nation and threats to gender norms. Suzanna Aspden (1997) has explored the diverse cultural fears behind many of the accusations leveled at castrati. Wendy Heller (2005) has pointed out that much of the negative reaction to castrati was about the effects of losing their genitals on their masculine self-presentation. Todd S. Gilman (1997) has nuanced a number of these broader readings, arguing that the vilification aimed at the castrati must be understood as having multiple components, including disgust toward castrati as effeminate sodomites colliding with loathing (and envy) over the ways that castrati were attractive as sexual partners for men and women. Scorn, derision, gender aspersions – the castrato was fair game for any and all. But how did castrati become visible embodiments of the dangers of gender-crossing because of their disabled bodies? How did their disability contribute to their reputation as dangerous because transgendered? A number of these issues came together around the notion of the pregnant castrato. The controversies about castrati in England began in earnest when Nicolini (Nicola Grimaldi, 1673–1732) sang to wild acclaim in 1708.22 The poem The Signior in Fashion: Or the Fair Maid’s Conveniency recounted the passionate devotion of his female audience: “‘Tis too much! she cryes, and I can hear no more,/How sweet’s his Voice, how tender is his Air?” The woman might be infatuated, but the castrato was a curious choice: “A tuneful Race, and ready cut for Song,/Whose airy Forms had Warbled in a Paste,/More soft than Man’s, and more than Woman’s chaste” (Anon. 1973, 314–315). Already and as soon as a castrato appeared in public opera, commentators fretted about the problems of female attraction, effeminacy and physical disability. The transgender aspect of his sexual disability provoked the seemingly contradictory concerns that women and men would be attracted to him. His effeminacy was somehow contagious to men, putting “normal” masculinity at risk while suggesting that women might be attracted to his womanliness. Satires continued to instantiate the association of castrati with the dangers of effeminacy as at once contagious and attractive to irrational female desire. In 1724, the next major castrato star, the contralto Senesino, found himself at the center of a flap over an amorous gesture on stage toward his co-star, the soprano Anastasia Robinson (c. 1692–1755). Robinson’s lover and later husband, Charles Morduant, Earl of Peterborough, demanded an apology, prompting an anonymous poem published in Senesino’s name. “Senesino” denied any wrongdoing, explaining that his on-stage behavior was a performance of something he could not actually do: If in that Scene of Love I seem too rude, And my false Transports disoblige the Prude;… Love I may feign;—but can’t go thro’ the Part: ‘Tis but a Blaze, which does to Nothing turn,

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He backed it up with the bathetic comment, “My Childhood robb’d me of the Means to please.” But he undercut his claims of innocence with suggestive puns about impotence: “Who near a stately Spire wou’d dare to stay,/When its Foundation Stones are stole away?” and “Your Sex demands Supporters – that can stand” (reproduced in McGeary 2000, 54–55).23 A reply appeared in Robinson’s name (written by Aaron Hill) in which “she,” in high dudgeon, claimed that he had seduced her and England with his wily foreign ways. Whatever his skill, his “shrill, unnatural, ungraceful Strains” were inappropriate for singing heroic parts (1753, 4: 61). Fusing national interest and refusal of castrati as effeminate, the exchange deepened the association of castrati as defective men who seemed like women with fickle, irrational desires. Once established, the pattern was available for elaboration. Three years later, a second round of verses revisited Senesino’s incapacity, this time with an allegedly overly amorous Faustina Bordoni (1697–1781). “Senesino” again explains that he cannot respond: “In vain you lavish thus your Stock of Charms,/I droop my Head and freeze within your Arms/O that your Heat cou’d alter Nature’s Law!/And bless what’s frozen with a kindly Thaw” (Senesino/Faustina 6). “Faustina’s” answer expresses indignation at his lack of response to her charms, alternating between calling him “cold” and speculating that he already has a lover. On the one hand she is among those “Who scoff at Eunuchs and dislike a Thing,/ For being but disburthen’d of its Sting.” On the other hand, she tells him that women always want castrati in order to: “Enjoy the Pleasure, but avoid the Shame;/ They know that Eunuchs can their Wants supply” (Faustina/Senesino, 60–61). The several exchanges in this series rehearse his incapacity and her desire, which is sufficiently rampant that one poem has Faustina making a pass at another woman (Faustina/Lady). The amorous woman revealed the castrato to be a defective man, while she hid her lasciviousness by choosing partners who could not reveal her by getting her pregnant. Deception, inappropriate desire, effeminacy, and the defective male body all ran together. By 1734, the themes of impotent but desiring castrati and amorous (whether prudish or seductive in their expression) women have been established. An Epistle from the Platonick Madame Barbier to the Celebrated Signor Carestino mocks Giovanni Carestini (1700–1760) as “neither Man, nor Woman,” highlights the castrato’s effeminacy, complains about his seductive deception, and wishes for “endless Pleasure” without consequences (1734, 69, 71). Reusing verses from the Senesino/Faustina exchange, The Happy Courtezan incorporated Farinelli into the scheme that linked castrati and women in circuits of ineffectual desire. Written in the name of Constantia Phillips, the poem claimed that Phillips was saving herself for Farinelli. He is more

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attractive than intact men, and “Eunuchs can give uninterrupted Joys,/Without the shameful Curse of Girls and Boys” (1735, 6). She is confident that he can satisfy her sexually, but he is also attractive because she is greedy: “Be Gold Thy Aim, let them on Musick love,/Nor cease to sing, until they cease to give” (ibid., 15).24 No longer irrational desire, the women in this iteration are making calculated choices: Castrati can provide physical pleasure and, perhaps a particularly English concern, money. The dominance of women in these poems underscores the effeminacy of the castrati, who have become entirely passive. “Senesino” apologizes and replies, but “Carestini” and “Farinelli” do not. The women do all the talking. Castrati occupying the passive, effeminate space in discourse could easily be imagined as women. The joking speculation that Farinelli actually was a woman and pregnant indicated as much. The desire of the sexually aggressive woman transforms Farinelli into a woman: “Her lovely Eunuch to a Woman turn’d,/For whose secure Embrace so long she’s burn’d!” (H–dd–g–r 4). Before, the effeminacy wrought by sexual disability endangered spectators; here, it transformed the castrato. Farinelli’s effeminacy and his status as “half a Man” tipped over into transsexuality, and the mechanism seems to be female desire pushing the effeminate castrato over the corporeal line. As with his emasculation, the castrato’s transsexuality is not his own doing or a matter of choice. Unlike later historical iterations that account for transsexuality, the narrative is not a matter of the woman inside, but rather, the woman outside who causes the defective man to devolve. Although the narrator doubts the story, Farinelli is nonetheless gendered female: But after all, perhaps the Account’s untrue, And the dear Thing no more with Child than you; Or if it is, how came the Tale reveal’d, Which should have been with th’utmost Care conceal’d? Has the base Man who first posses’d her Charms, Now sated, thrown her from his faithless Arms? (H–dd–g–r 7) Simultaneously treating the notion as absurd and plausible, the satire posits that Farinelli, as “half a man,” could lose whatever remnant of masculinity he might possess and actually become a woman. Farinelli as transsexual to the point of becoming pregnant might seem like a rather farfetched idea, but it was not the only time it was expressed. In addition to the satirical and symbolic attacks in the poems, one source was Farinelli’s friend, Pietro Metastasio, who teased Farinelli in 1750 about being pregnant. Chiding Farinelli for tormenting him about Attilio Regolo, the librettist warned Farinelli, “I am beginning to suspect that you are pregnant, because this [complaining behavior] is never a masculine desire” [Io comincio a sospettare che siate gravido, perché questa non è mai voglia mascolina] (1954, 3: 565). But more in the harsh vein of the Heidegger satire, Fielding’s

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Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire on the Times (1754) picked up the pregnancy theme when Miss Mayoress says, “Yes, Mama, and then we shall see Faribelly, the strange Man-Woman that they say is with child” (Sc.2.1, 18). The transsexual imagery was meant to be ridiculous, but also to highlight the castrato’s distance from “normal” men. In her essay on freaks, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz points out that freaks inspire both horror and fascination because they are ambiguous. They imperil the usual organization of social life by occupying impossible middle ground. Grosz is interested in the history of teratology with particular attention to hermaphrodites, but castrates have many of the same disruptive effects (1996, 57–61). Castrates, like hermaphrodites, challenge the clear cut delineation of sex difference, are highly medicalized, and their indeterminacy is often publicly intolerable. What made the situation of castrates particularly acute was that Enlightenment thought increasingly privileged a more rigid model of male and female bodies as fundamentally different. Where humoral models of human anatomy described gender operating on a spectrum with individuals expressing a range of male (hot/dry) and female (cold/wet) elements, the incommensurate model allowed little room for differences along the gender scale (Laqueur 1990; Freitas 2009, 107–112). As there is no stable middle with respect to binary sex, bodies at odds with normative structures are readily demonized. The freakish qualities that enabled castrati to be imagined as transsexual were provoked by concerns that bodies – once male and then feminized by castration – were malleable. Although not all commentators went as far as imagining complete sexual transformation, effeminacy and gender indeterminacy of castrati drew attention to the underlying “pathology” of sexual disability, whether understood as infertility or inability to perform sexually or both. The 1687–1688 travelogue by François Maximilien Misson (c. 1650–1722) served as a model for later visitors writing about the sites and spectacles of Italy. Misson articulated a version of the relationship between castrati and disability that hinged on the deliberate alteration of the castrato’s body: There is also one Thing which charms them, which I believe would not please you; I mean those unhappy Men who basely suffer themselves to be maimed, that they may have the finer Voices. The silly Figure! which, in my Opinion, such a mutilated Fellow makes, who sometimes acts the Bully, and sometimes the passionate Love, with his effeminate Voice, and withered Chin; how is such a Thing to be endured? (1739, 1: 270) Misson’s hostility was typical of many French commentators, but it reflected the widespread idea that playing female or effeminate parts could corrupt men (see also Chapter 4). Harshly and mistakenly, Misson also blamed castrati for accepting being “maimed,” making them unreliable in body and in moral judgment and prone to slip over the gender line.

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Already not admirers of the castrato voice, French critics increasingly insisted that the gender-bending castrati were ruining opera. Sparked by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona performed at the Académie royale de musique on August 1, 1752, the Querelle des Bouffons [War of the Comic Actors] was a literary battle between defenders of French opera and proponents of Italian opera.25 As Elisabeth Cook (2005) notes, the controversy was part of the political debates swirling in 1752, which included wide-ranging critiques of the French monarchy. The Querelle recapitulated the familiar litany of national artistic differences, and the Apologie du goût françois relativement à l’opéra encapsulates the dominant French position, castigating Italian opera for its lack of spectacle because of its reliance on castrati. These singers are bad for opera companies because theaters do not need large casts: “One could even dispense with the woman; the castrate in times of need could serve as an actress and then become an actor again” [On pourroit même se passer de femme; le Castrat dans un besoin sert d’Actrice, puis redevient Acteur]. This limits the spectacular possibilities, but even more distressing to the author is that castrati do this happily, and playing both parts does not seem to upset them: “it is all very equal” [cela qui est fort égal]. This, the author says, proves “the bizarre nature of their taste” [la bisarrerie de leur goût]. The castrato is “a mixed personage, and outside of nature” [un personnage mixte, & hors de la nature], reliance on whom corrupts all of Italian music. The sounds they make are unpleasant, their manners are distracting, and substituting “a person of the neuter gender” [un personnage du genre neutre] destroys the natural beauty of the music (Querelle, 1973, 2: 1566–1567). French critics fused the castrato as defective with presumptions that his gender performance was unconvincing or insufficient, and his voice, rather than excusing his gender non-normativity, exemplified it. As Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out, “deformity” and “defect” were current in eighteenth-century usage. William Hay’s Deformity: An Essay (1754) emphasized the visibility of deformity, and encouraged the notion that its intractability ought to be regarded with sympathy or pity (ibid., 35). But castrati were not reliably visible unless and until they sang, relegating them to the category of the “defective.” Even worse, their defect was ostensibly made with their consent or at least without their effective resistance. If deformity could inspire compassion and empathy, the defect of castration increasingly could not. Joseph Jérôme Le Français de Lalande allowed that young boys should not be despised, but he condemned fathers who had their sons castrated in the hope of pecuniary gain. In their avarice, these unnatural parents relegated their sons to a difficult and precarious life trajectory. To be sure, castrati in the Naples conservatories learned music at a very high level, but “They are very badly nourished” [il sont très-mal nourris] (1769, 6: 346), perhaps least of all in matters of food. Their deprivation was far more profound, and Lalande suggests that this is why, distressingly, many fail to develop in intellectual and moral terms. A self-described atheist, Lalande

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called out the Catholic Church for hypocritically encouraging and sustaining human castration: It seems that this sort of barbarity is authorized in Rome, giving those unfortunates who no longer have the resource of their voices permission to become Priests: but following our canon law, they are irregular if they are not entire in all their members, so one adds a formality, which acts as a kind of palliative, but does not diminish the indecency of this practice. [Il semble qu’on autorise à Rome cette sorte de barbarie, en donnant à ces malheureux qui n’ont plus de resource du côté de la voix la permission de se faire Prêtres: mais comme suivant nos canons ils seroient irréguliers s’ils n’étoient pas entiers de tous leurs membres, on y ajoute une formalité qui sert pour ainsi dire de palliative, mais qui ne diminue pas l’indécence de cette pratique.] (ibid., 6: 348)26 The boys might not be culpable, but people (no matter how desperate in their poverty) who exploited defect for personal gain made it difficult to avoid ethical questions around castration. Critics did not hesitate to lay the blame first on greedy fathers and then on the Church for theologically rejecting actual castrates as inferior to the elective celibate, and then setting in motion the large-scale production of castrati for sacred and secular purposes. The urgency of questions about coercion and consent escalated precipitously over the course of the eighteenth century. Charles Burney’s account of castrati derived from his tour of Europe in 1770. He reported hearing a number of castrati and recounted at length his interview with Farinelli (1959, 147–161). Burney famously tried to find out where castration was carried out, and his inability to do so reflects his own scruples and the embarrassment over castration that Italians experienced: “I enquired throughout Italy at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration, but could get no intelligence. I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice, that it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome I was sent to Naples. The operation most certainly is against law in all these places, as well as against nature; and all the Italians are so much ashamed of it, that in every province they transfer it to some other” (ibid., 247). His disapproval notwithstanding, Burney’s main concern seems to have been that castration often failed in its aim. Ignoring that boys who did not develop into renowned singers nonetheless usually found employment whether as journeyman singers or other instrumentalists, Burney focused on the wastage. Although boys sometimes tried out in the conservatories, “the cruel operation is but too frequently performed without trial, or at least without sufficient proofs of an improvable voice” (ibid., 247–248). Burney’s formulation sounds mildly rueful, as if the guarantee of an excellent voice would justify castration.

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If musical skill seems to justify making castrati to an opera aficionado, by the time the final volume of his General History appeared in 1789, Burney had to defend castrati from their detractors: “But though I detest the perpetrators of such horrid crimes against human nature as the parents commit, who sacrifice that tenderness which every other part of creation manifests for its offspring, in order to gratify avarice or ambition; yet I cannot subscribe to the common assertion that Evirati are all cowards, devoid of genius for literature, or any solid study; and that even the voice, for the melioration of which they are so inhumanly treated, is inferior to that of a woman or a boy.” He called castration, “the inhuman practice of mutilating children in order to keep the voice in its adolescent state,” but insisted that castrati were every bit as capable of military and intellectual accomplishments as intact men (1935, 2: 528–530). His depiction of Farinelli as a modest, graceful host and the epitome of a country gentleman served to counter claims that castrati were hopelessly defective. Throughout Burney pointedly omitted references to castrati as epicene, frail, or effete. Burney’s defense could not balance escalating attacks on castrati as unnatural and therefore intolerable.27 In his Dictionary of Music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau announced his disapproval of the castrato, whose genital “mutilation” prevents the natural voice associated with manhood from developing. Against the dictates of natural development, “There exist in Italy, some inhuman fathers, who sacrificing nature to Fortune, give up their children to this operation, for the amusement of voluptuous and cruel persons…but let us explain, if we are able, the voice of modesty and of humanity, which vociferates loudly against this horrid custom” [Il se trouve, en Italie, des pères barbares qui, sacrifiant la Nature à la fortune, livrent leurs enfans à cette opération, pour la plaisir des gens voluptueux & cruels…mais faisons entendre, s’il se peut, la voix de la pudeur & de l’humanité qui crie & s’élève contre cet infâme usage]. Castrati cannot assist in “the preservation of the human race” [la conservation de l’espèce humaine] and are doomed to an existence of personal misery, professional affectation, and (at least to Rousseau) general repulsiveness (1768, 75–76). In 1777, Irish-born Sara Goudar asked, “Must one mutilate men to give them a perfection that they do not have at birth?” [Faut-il mutiler les hommes pour leur donner une perfection qu’ils n’avoient pas en naissant?] (1777, 109). With a caustic edge probably at least encouraged by her husband, Goudar praised individual castrati at length and repeatedly, but regarded them as fundamentally defective. Despite praising their voices, she closes by dismissing castrati for their gender failures: “That is enough about eunuchs: let us speak now of men” [Voilà assez d’Eunuques: parlons maintenant des hommes], and she compares the castrati to her neutered cat (ibid., 17, 93). Sara’s husband, Ange Goudar (writing under the pseudonym Jean-Jacques Sonnette), also called castrati “mutilated ones” [mutilés], and explained, “He is defective in the three relationships that render a man useful to society, that is to say, in the physical state, the economic state, and the moral state” [Il est défectueux dans les trois rapports qui rendent

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l’homme utile à la société, c’est-à-dire, dans l’état physique, l’état économique, & l’état moral]. Physically, he is “a neuter being” [un être neuter] incapable of contributing socially by reproducing. Economically, he offers no fiscal benefits to society, but instead causes the wasting of resources. Morally, his example as neither husband nor father who does not serve the future of his country [Patrie] is one of degradation that ought not to be allowed to corrupt others. Central to Ange’s assertion that castrati are defective is that they have lost their gender stability: “They dress themselves sometimes as girls, in order to forget that they were boys, and they forget themselves so well, that they take certain liberties which one would not distrust between persons of the same sex” [On les habillait quelquefois en filles, afin d’oublier qu’ils étaient des garçons, & on l’oubliait si bien, qu’on leur laissait prendre certaines libertés dont on ne se méfie pas entre personnes du même sexe] (Sonnette 1978, 49–50, 128–129). Gentle mockery about cross-dressing has given way to judgmental anxiety. With their feminine propensities of body, castrati may become the epitome of the unnatural by degenerating entirely from their masculine selves. In 1784, the imprisoned Christian Schubart dictated his denunciation of castrati, which emphasized the voice and the person as unnatural: It is a pity that the number of castrati increased so noticeably around this time. The Italians first happened upon the shameful thought to procreate the human voice through castration. Even a papal edict authorized castration, and this edict even has the abominable phrase ‘ad honorem dei.’ If God wanted castrations for his greater glory, we would find explicit commands in his words; yet God and his beautifully conceived nature hate all mutilations: nothing proves this more than the castrati themselves, who, in spite of the artistic accomplishment that they undeniably acquired, still howl and crow. God and nature command that one should cast women as sopranos and altos and men as tenors and basses. If we transgress this great law Mother Nature will avenge herself through discord and disgusting impression. [Nur Schade, daß um diese Zeit die Anzahl der Castraten so merklich zunahm. Die Welschen kamen zuerst auf den schändlichen Gedanken, die Menschenstimme durch Entmannung fortzupflanzen. Selbst durch ein päpstliches Breve wurden die Castrationen autorisiert, und dieses Breve hat noch dazu die abscheuliche Klausel: ‘Ad honorem Dei.’ Wenn Gott zu seiner Verherrlichung Castrationen verlangte, so würden wir wohl ausdrücklich Befehle in seinem Worte dazu finden; allein Gott und seine herrlich eingerichtete Natur hassen alle Verstümmelungen: nichts beweist dies mehr, als die Castraten selber, die bei aller Kunst, zu welcher sie sich unläugbar aufschwangen, dennoch heulen und krähen. Gott und die Natur gebieten, dass man mit Frauenzimmern Discant und Alt, mit Mannsleuten aber Tenor und Bass besetzen soll. Uebertrifft man dies grosse Gesetz, so rächt sich Mutter Natur durch Mißlang und widrigen

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Eindruck. Heil unserm Vaterlande, daß wir zwar Castraten belohnen, aber keine machen! Deutschen, die Kunst versteht, Frauenzimmer gehörig zu bilden, bedarf der Eunuchen nicht.] (Schubart 1839, 52. Translation: Krimmer 2005, 1552)28 Made by man and perverted by religion, the castrato was an abomination, a mutilated man, and a mockery of the natural gender order. The space for pity had all but disappeared, and blame for gender transgression fell on the castrato, regardless of his lack of agency in his castration. The de-gendered, defective castrato might occasionally be worth grudging respect for his singing or a bit of compassion for being the victim of a rapacious father, but these mitigating factors did not make up for the growing sense that the disabled, transgender castrato was not to be borne.

4. Muffling the (semi-)men By the 1770s, even those who were not so deeply hostile revealed that castrati no longer fit with prevailing values because of their disabled, transgendered bodies. Where cross-dressing castrati had been part of the illusion that made opera so spectacular, the rejection of illusion as deception or delusion in favor of “truth” defined by “reason,” and above all, by “nature” marked Enlightenment philosophy. Nature – which Italians first cited as the reason to favor castrati over falsettists – was the touchstone that made castrati especially unacceptable on the grounds that their natural male bodies had to be altered and made unnatural. Whether they succeeded or failed in their gender performance, the very artificiality of it as performance was evident and a transgression of Enlightenment ideals, especially for men. As Rousseau and Kant emphasized, women had to be trained to play their part, but men should come to it naturally (Rousseau 1979; Kant 1995). Tacitly, castrati weren’t men if they had to perform their gender. Moreover, “ambiguous beings” playing women could only succeed if the spectator is ignorant – the opposite of what proponents of the Enlightenment valued. The transformation from castrati as part of gender play that enabled the marvels of opera to castrati as a problem that had to be excised is apparent in the history of one of the most influential early operas. In 1641, Francesco Sacrati’s opera, La finta pazza (“The Feigning Madwoman”) premiered in Venice with a libretto by Giulio Strozzi. A female singer, Anna Renzi, played the title character, but the story also featured a castrato playing the part of Achilles and another castrato, appropriately enough playing the Eunuch. As Ellen Rosand has argued, the opera was both simple and complex in its plot, with its use of multiple levels of fiction within the fiction serving as the model for later opera. The main story is about Achilles on Skyros, disguised as a daughter of King Lycomedes (Licomede) to avoid being drafted for service in the Trojan War. Achilles has revealed his secret to Deidamia, with whom he is in love. When Ulysses arrives looking for Achilles and tricks him into

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revealing himself, Deidamia feigns madness to keep her beloved safe. To complicate matters, the characters stage a play within the opera, often referring to matters in the main plot and within the play. On top of these two levels, the opera itself references theatrical illusion by invoking the fact that there is an audience in a theater watching a play within an opera. The allusions and inferences that are associated with castrati are crucial to the layers of illusion. The Eunuch guards the daughters of Lycomedes, and of course, he sings. He is not happy about the singing, has to be pressed to perform, and when he does, his songs include bitter references to castration. But the Eunuch is what he appears to be: a castrated man playing a castrated man. Achilles, also sung by a castrato, is first disguised as a woman and then revealed as the high-voiced hero (Rosand 1991, 118–125).29 The illusions invite acceptance of their conceits and expect the audience to recognize that they are illusions. Castrati can play castrates or women or heroic men, and they are accepted in all their guises. With its self-referential acknowledgment of castrati in a complex relationship to the music they performed, La finta pazza was an enormous success, with numerous productions all over Italy, as well as in Paris and Lisbon. The layers of illusion were tremendously appealing, and the use of castrati was integral to the proceedings – not just for the voice, but also for the play of gender that it allowed. Achilles was a bog standard castrate hero, but the Eunuch was unusual, and a castrate playing a castrate added a bit of an edge to the proceedings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his part disappeared as castrati became more problematic. His role waxed and waned for a time, but the 1747 production at the Teatro Giustiniani di S. Moisè in Venice jettisoned the character entirely (Sartori 1990–1994, 3: 185–186). The quiet dropping of the Eunuch as a character was one thing, but as we have seen, rejections of castrati were often rather more vicious. Martha Feldman has highlighted another such example, noting Francesco Albergati Capacelli’s Il ciarlator maldicente [The Badmouthing Chatterbox, 1794?] for its rejection of castrati. In addition to a scorching denunciation in the preface, Capacelli announced that the castrato character, Scarpinello, was to be played by an actual castrato or a man singing falsetto, but never by a cross-dressed woman. For Feldman, Capacelli’s stance exemplifies the move toward Enlightenment rejection of castrati as unnatural (2008, 178–179). This is absolutely true, but the rejection of castrati by Enlightenment figures was also about the evolution of discomfort around the display and adulation of disabled, gender-crossing, castrated men. Celebrated, castigated, and recuperated for two and half centuries, castrati in the late eighteenth century could no longer count on the recuperation part of the formula. Some observers might blame their families for castrating them as young boys, but according to the discourse of individual reason privileged during the Enlightenment, castrati were often held responsible for the status of their bodies. If they were in effect blamed for being defective, for being disabled socially because of their dysfunctional genitals, their gender crossing enabled

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and enhanced that propensity toward hostile reproach. As historians of sexuality have argued, binary models of gender were gaining purchase as normative in the eighteenth century. The older, humoral-based understanding of male and female on a spectrum lost ground to the idea of two incommensurate sexes (Laqueur 1990; Simons 2011) Castrati might have been male, but they were not reliably so, and their ability to cross and pass and muddy the lines gradually – why so gradually is in part the story of the next chapter – became intolerable. To the familiar story that the rising hostility contributed to the decline of castrati in the opera and eventually in the Catholic Church,30 we must add the fact that pejorative characterizations of castrati as gender-crossing, sexually disruptive, physically problematic, and morally dubious remained co-constitutive. Even as the castrati all but disappeared, genital disability and gender nonnormativity remained obstinately fused.

Notes 1 Davies (2005) traces the hostile reception to Giovanni Battista Veluti, the last of the great opera castrati in the first half of the nineteenth century. Part of the change was aesthetic, with audiences shifting away from the pure, static castrato voice to the grainy, powerful female mezzo/soprano voice. Where the castrato had been “natural” compared to falsettists, castrati were now deemed unnatural compared to the “Romantic voice.” Even so, the rise of the female soprano did not mean the end of castrati. They were still being created and employed in the Papal States until the unification of Italy in 1871. Alessandro Moreschi performed in the Sistine Chapel until 1913, and some observers suspected that Domenico Mancini, who sang from 1939 to 1959, was also a castrato. 2 The attempt by Fritz to bring together history, endocrinology, and music unfortunately collapses under the incoherence of its self-imposed structure and a general lack of methodological clarity. 3 See also Clapton’s (2004; 2008) studies of Alessandro Moreschi. The contrast between when castrati were relatively visible and their eclipse highlights both the consistencies and changes in how they were regarded. 4 For opera and “queer sensibility,” see Koestenbaum, which focuses on modern opera, noting that the castrato’s voice, however extraordinary, did not prompt efforts to return to the practice of castration (1993, 159). 5 Although castration was technically illegal, the Church did not prohibit it entirely. The medical exception remained in place on the grounds that losing a part of the body to save the whole was acceptable. This is still true per Canon 2354 of the Code of Canon Law. (See also Chapter 1.) 6 See also Prüfening (1717, 5: cols. 1585–1586), which objects to high, femininesounding male voices. See Page and Parrot (1981) for discussion of ambiguities in the medieval documents. 7 For the roots of opera in intermedi and pastorale, see Leclerc (1987, 125–213). 8 Both Caccini and Peri seem to have contributed to both operas, although Caccini is usually credited as the primary composer of Cefalo and Peri of Euridice. See Carter (2003); Brown (1970). 9 Huarte is discussed by Gerbino (2004, 339–341). 10 There is also the Cappella Giulia, which was populated with Italian singers exclusively, some of whom also sang in the Cappella Sistina. Occasionally, the Cappella Sistina was referred to as the Cappella Palatina.

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11 On the Pope as a prince, see Prodi (1987). 12 In contrast, opera in Rome centered on aristocratic households, with the first public opera house approved by Clement IX (Giulio Rospigliosi) before his death on December 9, 1669. Before his election, Rospigliosi wrote libretti for a number of operas supported by the Barberini. The subject matter was almost entirely drawn from sacred history (Murata 1981). 13 For the development of opera in Venice, see Rosand (1991). 14 Historians and musicologists have evinced considerable skepticism about the possibility of consent, given the economic and familial conditions prevalent in early modern Italy. See Feldman (2015); Rosselli (1988, 152–153). There are a few examples of boys apparently seeking castration. In 1613, an agent claimed a tenyear-old boy sought castration in order to serve the duke of Mantua. Bertolotti (1969, 90): “il puttino ha buona voce, pronto, e con buona dispostitione, et ha gran desiderio di farsi castrare et a me ne fa grandissima istanza.” Burney (1959, 1: 203) comments on “il Grassetto, a boy, who submitted to mutilation by his own choice, and against the advice of his friends, for the preservation of his voice.” La Borde (1780, 3: 494) claimed that Antonio Bannieri did so at the court of Louis XIV, but the report is considerably after the fact. 15 Byzantine tradition sometimes compared castrates to angels. See Ringrose (2003, 142–162). 16 For Moreschi, see Clapton (2004; 2008). Examples of Moreschi singing can be found on YouTube and on CD as Alessandro Moreschi: The Last Castrato (Pearl 1993). 17 The monstrosity is central to Giuseppi Parini: Aborro in su la scena un canoro elefante che si trascina a pena su le adispose piante, e manda per gran foce di bocca un fil di voce. Ahi, pera lo spietato genitor che primiero tentò di ferro armato l’esecrabile e fiero misfatto onde si duole la mutilate prole! (438). The poem is sometimes called “La musica o L’evirazione.” 18 According to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Mariano Nicolini debuted on the opera stage in Rome during Carnival in 1731 playing a female part, and he specialized in such roles until 1740. 19 Raguenet’s generally positive views of Italian music prompted a rejoinder by Le Cerf de la Viéville, to which Raguenet replied point for point in his Défense (1705). 20 Senelick (2000, 194) reads the poem within the lineage of female singers who crossdressed to impersonate castrati. 21 News items such as “Kaci Sullivan: ‘I Gave Birth as Both Genders’” (BBC, December 21, 2017) notwithstanding, men do not usually give birth. Sullivan is an FtM who stopped taking male hormones in order to conceive. 22 There had been Italian opera in England before per Evelyn (1901, 2: 95): “I saw an Italian opera in music, the first that had been in England of this kind” (January 5, 1674). 23 Among the contemporary comments on the scandal is a letter from Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford that is critical of Peterborough. See Swift 6–7 (February 13, 1724). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on the other hand, found Robinson’s behavior absurd and the ruckus amusing. See Montagu (1966, 37–38) (To Lady Mar, March 1724).

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24 Both ideas are repeated throughout. The pamphlet was attributed to Phillips, but she emphatically denied that she wrote it, attributing it to agents of her estranged husband with whom she was in a protracted legal struggle. See Thompson (2000, 19–79 for Phillips’ writing career, and 30, 63, 211 for the dispute over Courtezan). 25 For a selection of comments on castrati, see Querelle des bouffons (1773, 1: 68–69; 1: 91–93, 95; 1: 504; 1: 748 [note]; 1: 789, 806; 2: 892; 2: 1099, 1124 [notes]; 2: 1380, 1406, 1413; 3: 1709; 3: 1896–1898; 3: 1935; 3: 2039). 26 See Curtis-Wendlandt (2016, 85) on Lalande’s atheism. 27 Bianconi (1987, 238) offers a tidy summary of French objections to Italian opera and castrati: “Of particular repugnance for contemporary French observers is the sheer ‘improbability’ of singing a dialogue, together with the propensity of Italian composers for melodic expression (which interrupts the action), secondary episodes, comic digression, the non-observance of the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, floridity of style and the artificial voice of the castrati (savagely mocked by a Parisian public whose preference lies clearly with the high range of the French male contraltos or haute-contres).” 28 Elisabeth Krimmer (2005) emphasizes the class politics of opposition to castrati in Germany, where the singers were associated with aristocratic court culture. Once a theology student, Schubart was imprisoned for criticism of the Jesuits. 29 Text was printed as La finta pazza (Venice: Gio Battista Surian, 1641). Consult Heller (1998) for the importance of La finta pazza in the shift to opera as an entirely sung performative mode. 30 The last great opera castrato was Giovanni Battista Veluti. His relationship to changing musical fashion and Romantic sensibilities is analyzed by Davies (2005) and Davies (2014).

6

Exotic others Racial mappings on the castrate body

By the mid-seventeenth century, the opera stage was one of the primary sites where castrates were not only imaginatively, but actually located. However complicated the conversation, much of the discussion about castrates focused on whether and how to fit them into the social vocabularies defined by law, medicine, and religion. Western encounters with castrates in the Muslim world – the Ottoman Empire primarily, but Persia and the Mughal Empire as well – not only instantiated the negative perception of castrates, but also provided justification of western castration practices.1 On the one hand, Europeans linked Muslim castrates to the cultural scripting of them as disabled and transgendered. To this, Europeans added racial othering to the familiar pejorative associations with castrates. On the other hand, the complexities of non-western social, political, and cultural practices challenged perceptions of Western “superiority.” Some kinds of Ottoman castrates in particular made nonsense of clear distinctions between East and West; Muslim and Christian. “Exotic” castrates simultaneously confirmed and undermined certainties about the disabled, transgendered men created in the West. Central to this narrative is the imperfectly understood (from the perspective of Westerners) practice of making two kinds of castrates – black and white – produced by different methods of castration. White castrates had their testicles disabled or removed; black castrates were fully ablated, a far more dangerous operation that resulted in a much higher mortality rate and raised the value of black castrates considerably. According to Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: “The black eunuchs who come from Africa in much smaller quantities, and as I said, are much more expensive” [Les Eunuques noirs qui viennent d’Afrique en bien moindre quantité, comme j’ay dit, beaucoup plus chers] (1675, 18). Black or white, the castrates who worked in the sultan’s palace were household slaves. Whether captives sold to the Ottomans from Ukraine or the Polish steppe, prisoners taken by Algerian pirates, children of poor peasants in Circassia, or forced converts from the Balkans, Ottoman slaves made up the backbone of not just the palace infrastructure, but of the entire Ottoman bureaucracy.2 Not unlike modern ones, early modern westerners understood Ottoman practices, including the functions of castrates in Ottoman palace culture, very

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imperfectly. At least since Edward Said, scholars have been aware of the patronizing propensities of westerners in their descriptions of “oriental” cultures.3 Many of the accounts of the harem and its castrate inhabitants aspired to claim western superiority of the sort that Said denounces. But “aspire” is crucial in this context, for most observers recognized that the Ottomans in particular were not to be discounted as political, military, or economic inferiors. To the contrary, the Sublime Porte threatened the west regularly, with Ottoman navies wresting control of the eastern Mediterranean from the Venetians and the Holy Roman Empire routinely fighting off Ottoman incursions. As Halil Inalcik, Colin Imber, and Caroline Finkel indicate, the Ottoman sultans had also spectacularly appropriated the ancient Roman tradition as it had been maintained in the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople. Western observers were by no means sure that their beliefs, military might, and governmental structures were “better” or “right,” because it was not clear that they would prove stronger, fitter, and more powerful than their Ottoman neighbors and rivals. In this context of western ignorance and uncertainty, castrates were not the only site of cultural differentiation, but they were a visible and significant one. The harem, often confused by westerners with the seraglio,4 was (and perhaps is) the locus classicus of female seclusion, “oriental” despotism, and the alleged Ottoman propensity to brutality.5 In western eyes and depending on one’s point of view, among the most powerful fantasies or worst offences was the castration of men who were then relegated to protect the sultan’s harem from incursions by intact men other than the sultan. In a series of slippages, the harem was a space ruled by women; the “men” in the harem were not really men; the lack of “real” men feminized the harem; and the feminized space rendered the men in it suspect even if they weren’t castrates. All of these violations of normative gender supported and created a space presumptively devoted to sexual excesses alternatively of deprivation and consummation. Westerners presumed the sultan sexually enjoyed as many women as he wanted, whenever he wanted, while the women allegedly enjoyed each other for lack of sufficient male attention, and of course the castrates presided over all, deprived of capacity but not necessarily of desire. By the eighteenth century, travel accounts and fictional renderings treated the harem as paradigmatically licentious, gender-corrupt and corrupting, and sexually despotic (Kra 1979). But the convergence of race, gender, and disability that was the prerequisite for access to power – literally, access to the sultan – complicated the attempts by westerners to situate harem castrates as abject. The understanding of castrates as disabled could be maintained, but had to be reinterpreted in the face of the privileging of fully ablated black men, whose access to power ran counter to the assumptions and presumptions about the castrate’s effeminacy and to western racial prejudices. Western observers wrestled with the exotic castrate as at once powerful and demeaned, as both the key to the corruption at the heart of the harem and as the embodiment of its systemic strength as

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an institution. If the ambivalence was partially resolved by recourse to the disabled, transgendered, and now racially marked castrate, that resolution nonetheless unsettled western “knowledge” about its own castrates.

1. Defamiliarity breeds contempt The black harem attendant was, and perhaps still is, the archetypal castrate in the eyes of many westerners. Both examples and analysis of pictorial representations of the harem are abundant, although the castrates as part of those images have received less attention (Nochlin 1983; Lewis 1996; Roberts 2007; Rosenthal 1982; Peltre 1998; Alloula 1986). The 1714 engraving Le Grand Seigneur dans le sérail avec le Kislar Agassi presented one side of the image: the black attendant in close proximity to and serving the powerful Ottoman sultan. Richly attired, the black castrate is posed with his hips slightly forward, gesturing delicately like a woman. His smooth, round face and pudgy, pearshaped body contrast with the white-skinned, bearded sultan. To be sure, in this western image, the sultan, too, is feminized, with bejeweled clothing that seems to cause his heroic stance to sag. In keeping with the mythology of the harem that circulated in the west, the sultan is poised to drop his handkerchief.6 Sources claimed that doing so was the signal indicating the sultan’s choice for sex that night. Implicitly living vicariously through his master, the castrate here seems to be advising on the choice. Unable to enjoy sex with the

Figure 6.1 Jean-Baptiste Vanmour’s image features the Kizlar Ag˘ asi presumably advising the sultan on his choice of sexual partner. Western witnesses claimed the sultan dropped his handkerchief on the woman of his choice. Credit: JeanBaptiste Vanmour, Le Grand Seigneur dans le sérail avec le Kislar Agassi (1714). In Recueil de cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris: L. Cars, 1714). New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection.

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Figure 6.2 Like many images of the harem, Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo’s painting is more fantasy than reality, as the disposition of the castrates indicates. Credit: Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo, La sultane servie par des eunuques blancs et noirs. (c. 1777). Musee des Beaux-Arts Jules Cheret, Nice, France. (Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY)

women in his charge, the black castrate serves as a go-between, not unlike a madam in a brothel. Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo’s painting, La sultane servie par des eunuques blancs et noirs, depicts the other side. Here, the black castrates contrast with the bright white faces of the harem women. One black castrate kneels while presenting a tea service to the women, while another stands in the rear, also serving. A white castrate holds a basket of bread and gazes at the sultana, with the other white castrates (all of whom are visibly white, but not as white as the sultana and her female attendants) arranged standing in the background. Unsurprisingly, the western images are inaccurate in a variety of ways, but perhaps most significantly for our purposes: only black castrates served inside the harem and they were not at the bottom of the harem hierarchy, as western artists presumed and insisted. Although castrates had many other, more important roles to play, especially in the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia, the images are not wrong in associating black castrates with the harem. What the images garbled or left incomplete was largely because the harem was almost entirely inaccessible, encouraging imaginative, often highly fanciful accounts.7 But some observers did take care to collect and convey reliable information. Almost all visitors noted that castrates served visibly in some areas of the palace, and far less visibly in others. In actuality, castrates had been employed at royal courts and

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in the military in Middle Eastern contexts beginning in Antiquity, if not earlier. Assyrian stone friezes showing beardless men accompanying their fully bearded counterparts in hunting scenes attest to the presence of castrates in the area that is now much of Iraq and Syria. The Assyrian Empire collapsed in 612 BCE, but castrates continued to be utilized in the region, with references to them in the Hebrew Bible, the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), and the Hellenistic kingdoms.8 Both the Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) empires before the rise of Islam utilized castrates, and medieval Islamic empires continued the practice (McDonough 2006, 77).9 By the eleventh century, the Great Seljuks in Iran and Iraq were employing castrates as harem guards, royal tutors, and companions to rulers. Most of the castrates were African, but the Fatamids in the Arabian Peninsula and areas under Muslim rule in Spain utilized castrates (often called Saqaliba) originating from Slavic and Eastern European populations (De la Puente 2003). The Mamluk sultanate, with its governing body composed of slaves from the Black Sea region or the Caucasus Mountains, also used castrates to educate new recruits and serve as tomb guardians (Hathaway 2005, 7–11; Ayalon; Marmon 1995). In all these contexts, castrates were usually slaves and deliberately castrated to enable them to provide these services. Sexual disability, combined with compensatory power by virtue of proximity to the ruler and their own lack of heirs, made castrates especially attractive in positions of royal intimacy.10 At least by the reign of Murad II (1421–1451), castrates were employed in the palace of the Ottoman sultan, and contacts with the Byzantine Empire before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided an additional model for how castrates could operate in the halls of power. Within the Ottoman tradition, castrates settled in as the empire became sedentary. From its origins in northwestern Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire extended its reach and influence through the reign of Süleyman I (1520–1566; also called Süleyman the Magnificent and Süleyman the Lawgiver) and his son, Selim II (1566–1574), with conquests from Hungary to Ethiopia and Morocco to Baghdad (Finkel 2005, 1–80). Castrates were part of the personnel of Topkapı- Palace, which was built by Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481) after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.11 Initially, most of the castrates seem to have been from the Balkans, Hungary, and the Caucasus, and were considered “white.” A mix of white and black castrates served in the female harem until the conquest of the Mamluk sultanate by Selim I (r. 1512–1520) gave the Ottomans regular access to African trade routes. Süleyman I added Abyssinia (presently Ethiopia and part of Sudan), allowing Abyssinian castrates to emerge as the most valued in the Ottoman Empire (Thévenot 1980, 60; Hathaway 2005, 12–13). By the sixteenth century, political and economic rivalries in and among western powers led to increased interest in the Ottoman Empire. Venice and Genoa had trade agreements with the Ottomans before the fall of Constantinople, but conflicts, especially those between the Venetians and the Sublime Porte, enabled other western powers to move in and situate

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themselves as allies and trading partners. After several less formal exchanges, François I sent ambassador Antoine de Rincon (d. 1541) to Süleyman’s court to shore up Ottoman support against the Hapsburgs. Despite criticism for allying with a Muslim power, François pursued diplomatic ties, joint military efforts, and trading privileges – the French and the Ottomans negotiated for extensive mutual trading considerations in 1536 – throughout his reign.12 Relations between the French monarchy and the Ottomans ebbed and flowed, but contact never ceased entirely. Following a 1580 treaty that gave English traders rights equal to those of the French, Elizabeth I approved the charter of the Levant Company in 1592, enabling the Company to establish trading centers (called factories) in Aleppo, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Smyrna (Mather 2009; Skilliter 1977). The Dutch traded in the Levant under the French Capitulations of 1569 until they established diplomatic relations in 1611–1612.13 Although contacts over trade were extensive and generally peaceable, Ottoman expansion, particularly in the Mediterranean and the Hapsburg lands, made for regular friction with western powers, but also encouraged diplomatic contacts. At times, this meant occasional encounters with castrates who served the sultan, although western understanding of the organization of the Ottoman palace life of castrates and changes to it was both anecdotal and limited. Many of the details of the organization of the seraglio were obscure to westerners, but they did learn that the castrates who served there shifted in their roles and political importance in the late sixteenth century. According to court registers in 1574, Murad III appointed Mehmed Agha to the position of Chief Black Eunuch (Kizlar Ag˘ asi, literally: officer of the girls). At this point, the Kizlar Ag˘ asi started to displace the Chief White Eunuch (Kapi Ag˘asi) as the more significant figure in the geography of the sultan’s palace and its political hierarchy (Lad 2010, 142–143). The Kapi Ag˘asi continued to guard the “threshold” of the palace and supervise the palace school. But in 1582, the sultan shifted some responsibilities for the pious endowments (vakifs) to religious sites, especially in Mecca and Medina, to the Kizlar Ag˘ asi. In 1591, Murad transferred all control of the endowments to the Kizlar Ag˘ asi, who also took over command of the treasury and supervision of the purveyance officials previously under the Kapi Ag˘ asi. In 1598, the Kizlar Ag˘ asi added management of the sultan’s endowments (evkaf-i selâtin) (Tournefort 1717, 2:199; Ag˘ ca 2012, 12; Davis 1986, 20). The changes instantiated the racial split that put white castrates at the outer doors and black castrates guarding the interior spaces and the harem, as well as controlling significant financial resources. The specifics of these changes were not always apparent to outsiders, but whether in diplomatic or in mercantile capacities, visitors routinely commented on castrates at the Ottoman court with varying degrees of accuracy and comprehension. Imperial ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522– 1592) spotted castrates close to Süleyman I in an army procession, indicating that Busbecq understood that proximity entailed responsibility (2005, 147). Philippe du Fresne-Canaye visited the seraglio in 1573 and considered the

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castrates around the Sultan to be part of the ceremonial staging: “Leaving the chamber of the Grand Seigneur, I returned to the court, saluting these eunuchs, sanjaks, and all the others who came running toward me, and who returned my salutations politely” [Sorti de la chambre du Grand Seigneur, je m’en retournai dans la cour, saluant ces eunuques, sandjaks et tous les autres qui accouraient à moi, et qui me rendaient humainement mon salut]. FresneCanaye relegated castrates to a visible but largely cosmetic part of the spectacle and dismissed them as not terribly important (1980, 70). The official account of the French embassy to the Ottoman court also conveyed that those around the sultan were merely window-dressing, revealing a superficial understanding of the roles castrates played. The Mercure François described the reception of the ambassador, complete with introduction and escort by the “Capigi Bassy,” identified as the chief porter, but not as a castrate. Later, when the ambassador approaches the divan, his party encounters “the Castrated…who are there on guard” [les Chastrez,…lesquels sont là comme en garde] (127v, 129v). Recognized as an element in the ceremonial of the Ottoman palace, castrates black and white captured the attention of westerners, who did not always comprehend their significance. In 1606, Jean de Gontaut Biron, Baron de Salignac entered the seraglio, passing rows of silent Janissaries on his way to meet the Sultan. Biron noted the chief porter (“Capigy Aga”) and added that the sultan, “is conducted to his Taht or throne by the Kapi Aga, chief of all the eunuchs, and the Hasnadar Bashi or grand treasurer, who are the two most important officers of the seraglio” [est conduit sur son Taht ou trosne, par le Capy Aga, chef de tous les eunuques, et Hasnadar bachy ou grand thrésorier, qui sont deux des plus grands officiers du Sérail] (Biron 1888, 1: 68).14 Biron understood that the role of castrates in the ceremonial display of power reflected their importance in the regime, but was mistaken in some specifics. He evidently did not know about the shift of power to the Kizlar Ag˘ asi, for instance. Routinely, the castrates at these encounters were much noted, but not entirely understood. Part of the incomprehension stemmed from the ways that castrates played a menacing role at such ceremonies. The Venetian Ottaviano Bon served as Bailo or consul in Constantinople from 1604–1607, and remarked on the intimidation factor in which the white castrates played a significant part. His account of an ambassadorial audience emphasized the range of officials and the extent of the spectacle, including the Janissaries as a prelude to the physical restraint and coercion of the ambassador. After an interview and dinner with the Grand Vizier, the Master of Ceremonies summoned the ambassador to the Sultan’s presence, “…where the Capee Agha standeth with a company of Eunuchs. Then the Capee Agha leadeth him to the door of the room, where there do stand two Capoochee Bashaws, who take the Ambassador, the one by one arm, and the other by the other arm, and so lead him to kiss his Highness’s hand, which in truth is but his hanging sleeve” (Bon 1996, 42–43).15 The ambassador found himself subject to physical constraint at the hands of the white castrates. Writing during the reign of Mehmed IV (1648–1687), Paul

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Rycaut also noted the element of coercion. The sultan’s castrates forced the appropriate behavior from the visiting dignitary: “bringing him to a convenient distance, laying their hands upon his neck, make him bow until his forehead almost touches the ground.” Rycaut had nothing but scorn for the white castrates, calling them “a disease” and telling readers they suffer from “the libidinous flame of depraved nature” (1668, 85, 35).16 Repeated expressions of disgust over the use of castrates in the intentional ceremonial abjection of western representatives to the Ottoman court indicate indignation and discomfort from the perspective of western commentators. Diplomatic receptions were deliberately scheduled for the day the Janissaries were paid, which happened in person. The Janissaries and assembled splendor were intimidating enough to a westerner and Christian supplicant entering the sultan’s seraglio; it was demeaning to be manhandled by castrates who weren’t even fully male (Tollot 1742, 282; Wratislaw 1862, 59). Part of the elaborate structure designed to impress visitors with the sultan’s power, the ceremony demonstrated that castrates served as the point of access to the sultan’s person, but also to remind visitors of the sheer physical compulsion the sultan could deploy. He could have men unmanned and still be certain of their loyalty. Scorn castrates as they might, westerners nonetheless had to submit to them.17 Westerners gradually accumulated more detailed knowledge about the meanings behind the ceremonial significance of castrates. The protective function was the most visible role castrates played, and as early as 1519, Bertrandon de la Broquière reported that castrates surrounded the sultan, with eighty of them sleeping in the sultan’s household guarding him. Broquière noted that the sultan’s treasurer was also a castrate, and believed (apparently correctly) that he was third in power in the Ottoman Empire, behind only the sultan and the Grand Vizier. The porter and the treasurer were also castrates, meaning that the sultan was not only perpetually physically surrounded by them, but also turned to them to fill important practical offices (Broquière 1519, chs. 11, 18 [unpaginated]).18 Thirty-five years later, Busbecq made a concerted effort to watch the sultan as he processed through Istanbul. Busbecq noted that the sultan stood out from his guard, indicating Busbecq’s recognition (presumably shared by other spectators) of the distinction between the complete, bearded man and the incomplete, beardless castrates (2005, 147). As a few westerners gained access, a fuller picture of the castrates in the palaces emerged. In the mid-seventeenth century, Antonio Bobovi reported that there were castrates in virtually every department of Topkapı- Palace (1987, 20–81).19 Bobovi had been captured by Tatars and sold to Ottoman merchants, who passed him on to the sultan’s service, where he served as a musician for nineteen years. He entered the seraglio as a music page, leaving in 1658 under something of a cloud because of his excessive drinking. As a slave in the palace, Bobovi had far more extensive and extended access, and while he complained about castrates on several occasions, he also understood them to

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be part of the routine workings of the sultan’s household. Bobovi corrected a number of misconceptions and indicated how things really worked: This officer [the Kizlar Ag˘ asi] is more important than the kapi ag˘ asi because, in addition to greater revenues, he has easier access to the prince, and more occasion to approach him at any hour, even when he has retired with his mistresses. These are the men who direct the best part of the affairs of the Empire and, while they have perhaps never left the palace which they entered when very young, they give advice on state interests and use the favorable ear of their master at will to their own liking. The kizlar ag˘ asi has a thousand ways of making the sultan do what they wish. (ibid., 26–27) Bobovi explained the trifecta of power that the most important castrates enjoyed: resources, access, and influence. Because all three elements were obviously dependent on the sultan, Bobovi and others could regard castrates as dependents; they were fundamentally feminized in that, like women, their status was utterly dependent on a man. If dependency was theoretically true for everyone in the palace, what singled out the castrates – perhaps especially those occupying significant roles at court – was that they utilized what was routinely considered a feminine mode of power: manipulation. Because their dependency on the sultan was less apparent, white castrates seemed to fit within more familiar (western) structures of court personnel. Under the Kapi Ag˘ asi was the Kapuji-bašı˘ (head doorkeeper), who was responsible for the second gate of the seraglio and had at least twenty white castrates serving under him. Benedetto Ramberti described each castrate in a titled position as a capo (boss or leader), transliterating Kapi (which actually means “door”), but also using capo to refer to other castrates who performed “boss” functions (14v).20 The Khazinehdar-bašı˘, or treasurer, was always a white castrate and the Khas Oda-bašı˘ (head of the Inner Chamber) was a page during Süleyman’s reign, but designated a white castrate after that.21 Tavernier identified the Kilerji-bašı˘ (or Kilargi-bašı˘) as the chief of the pages in the kitchen service (1675, 25); Bon called the Keelerge Bashaw “the chief butler” (Bon 1996, 80).22 Bon, Tavernier, and Henry de Beauvau specified that the Seraï Ag˘ asi (spelled variously) was the “keeper of the Seraglio,” the attendant of the sultan’s chambers, and superintendent of buildings respectively (Bon 1996, 80; Tavernier 1675, 21, 105; Beauvau 1615, 58). Giovan Antonio Menavino and Guillaume Postel added the Odobascia (or Odabassi), who they described as a wardrobe attendant or chamberlain (Menavino 1548, 124; Postel 1560, pt. 3, p. 4). Beauvau called the “Adobachi” the “grand Chambelan” (1615, 52). Rycaut calls the Khazinehdar-bašı˘ the “Lord Chamberlain” and the castrates who serve under him “Gentlemen of the Bed-Chamber” (1668, 36). For the most part, white castrates performed tasks that comparative outsiders could assimilate (sometimes

Figure 6.3 In charge of the palace school, the chief white castrate had significant power at the Ottoman court, although far less than his black counterpart. Credit: Seray Agasi ou Chef des Eunuques blancs [Head of the white eunuchs]. From a set of illustrations with Turkish costumes at the court of Constantinople. 1720. Ottoman dynasty. OD-6–4 Planche 16. Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France (Photo: BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

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accurately, sometimes not) to positions and roles as defined at the princely European courts. Not everything the white castrates did matched up with western court structures. Their control over the training of boys as pages for service in the Ottoman state or military through the palace school (often referred to as the Enderun, or interior) was unparalleled.23 In general, accounts expressed admiration for the discipline instilled by the white castrates, but found the entire enterprise abhorrent. Commentators decried the fact that pages in the palace school were drawn from Christian minorities or taken as prisoners of war, typically from the Balkans and the Caucasus. The pages were then converted to Islam, and as Muslims, often assumed high bureaucratic and military positions.24 Despite admiration for the extent and level of education provided by the palace school, observers complained that the castrates who oversaw the pages enforced excessive discipline. This was on top of the outrage of presumably forced conversion to Islam, and comments about the rigorous punishment and surveillance of the pages rendered them as victims of Muslim brutality.25 The white castrates were thought to be especially brutal. As Rycaut put it, he admired the foresight of the Ottomans for the school system, but, “The Eunuchs have the care of these Scholars committed unto them, whom they treat with an extraordinary severitry [sic]…they will not let slip the smallest Peccadillo without its due chastisement, either by blows on the soals of the feet, or long fastings, watchings, or other penance” (1668, 26). Housed in dormitories, the pages were monitored closely by the white castrates to prevent sexual attachments from developing. They also restricted and regulated all contact between the pages and the outside world, including with relatives. A variety of observers judged the white castrates harshly. Bobovi denounced the practice of collective punishment, seeing it as a way for the white castrates to brutalize their charges (1987, 33, 81). Laurent D’Arvieux insisted that the white castrates were particularly cruel because they waited for their charges to leave the baths to administer punishment so that it would be more painful to the softened skin (1735, 4: 546–547). Even the most positive accounts – Louis Deshayes de Courmenin emphasized that the white castrates in charge of each phase of education provided extensive training, including years of education in writing, reading, and religious instruction – noted the prohibition of all communication with the outside world and considered the isolation of the boys to be excessive (1645, 144–150). Commentators condemned the white castrates of the palace school as cruel and vindictive, making vulnerable boys endure isolation, physical pain, and sexual deprivation, just as the white castrates had been made to suffer. Westerners regarded the white castrates as embittered, prone to capricious (read: womanly) violence, and vindictive because of their lost manhood. Although the palace school was not directly akin to structures most observers recognized, training the next generation made sense to them. Without ready analogues and because of their own racial prejudices, commentators were far more resistant to understanding the roles of black castrates.

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Observers recognized the Chief Black Eunuch, (Kizlar Ag˘ asi), but only rarely did they mention other offices occupied by black castrates at any length. Rycaut provided a list: the Valide Ag˘ asi (Queen Mother’s castrate); Schahzadelar Ag˘ asi (s¸ehzâdeler, castrate of the royal progeny); Fazma Ag˘ asi (Queen Mother’s Treasurer); Kilar Ag˘ asi (“he that keeps the Sugar, Serbets and Druggs of the Queen Mother”); Bujuck Oda Ag˘ asi and Kiatuchuk Oda Ag˘ asi (büyük oda and küçük oda ag˘ asi, commanders of the greater and lesser chambers); Bash Capa Oglani (bas¸ kapi og˘ lani, Chief Porter for the women); and two imams to provide religious services (1668, 37).26 All of these, save the imams, were explicitly associated with serving the valide sultan (mother of the sultan) and women of lesser status. Occasionally, westerners understood these roles as providing access and as crucial to the internal patronage patterns of the palace, but more typical was the belief that black castrates presided over an isolated, insignificant, female space.27 Observers seem not to have fully understood that the harem in many ways mirrored the male training of the palace school. Like the pages, girls entered the harem and remained there for eight years, and were extensively educated

Figure 6.4 Like other castrates, the Kizlar Ag˘ asi lacks a beard and has soft features, despite the marks of his high status indicated by his staff, high head covering, and rich clothing. Credit: Kizzlar Aga Portrait from A briefe relation of the Turckes. Istanbul, Ottoman dynasty, 1618. Album leaf painted in opaque watercolor and ink, with découpage on paper. Inscribed. AN 1974,0617,0.13.4.v. British Museum, London, Great Britain (Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY)

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for a range of highly skilled positions.28 Those who were not selected as favorites for the sultan were usually married off and left the palace with a trousseau and a husband who typically came from the male side/the palace school and had been prepared to fulfil a role in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Within the harem, wages, rations, and clothing allowances were assigned according to rank. Girls learned skills ranging from basic service to keeping treasury accounts, depending upon aptitude and vacancies in the higher ranks. Black castrates guarded them and protected the harem from intrusion, but they also taught or supervised the teaching of the girls under the charge of the Kizlar Ag˘asi, also known as the Dârüssaâde Ag˘ asi, who presided over the Kara Ag˘ alar Kog˘ us¸u (Hall of the Black Eunuchs). Whether the women stayed in the harem or married out, the palace training provided a bureaucratic elite that served throughout the Ottoman Empire (Ag˘ ca 2012, 12–17). Western observers understood few of these finer details of seraglio organization. Because access to the harem was highly restricted, fantasy stood in place of fact. Commentators dismissed black castrates as little more than sexually safe protection service providers, and some stressed that black castrates were prone to sexual and political intrigue on behalf of the women of the harem. Unable to “do” anything sexually and presumed to be damaged cognitively as well as physically, black castrates were suspected of living vicariously by presiding over a licentious playground. This was a fundamental lack of comprehension of how palace politics and personal status operated. As Colin Imber has emphasized, in the Ottoman Empire, a person’s status did not depend on what he or she did or whether they were enslaved or free; it did depend on the household to which they belonged. Of course, there were hierarchies within the household, and individuals figured within the household according to their location in these hierarchies. Proximity to the powerful and important as a member of the sultan’s household solidified the prestige, political power, and social position of the Kizlar Ag˘ asi (2002, 151–152, 168, 323). Moreover, modern research has confirmed that the changes within the sultan’s household included the gradual increase of influence of the female side of the harem.29 As Leslie P. Peirce (1993) has demonstrated, changes in marital practices and concubinage at the Ottoman court reflected shifting political realities as an expansive state settled into a bureaucratic system. As the Ottoman sultans after Süleyman the Magnificent became more sedentary and ceremonial practice heightened their isolation, the harem at Topkapı- gained in significance. Although sources present some difficulties in ascertaining exactly how many lived there (who was counted and how the counting was done is not entirely clear), over time, the harem grew in numbers and importance. As Gülru Necipog˘ lu has emphasized, the key point is that Topkapıprobably always had a harem, but it initially housed concubines and did not include the royal family (1991, 160–161). During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman rulers abandoned the practice of the new sultan executing his brothers as rivals. Instead, they were effectively imprisoned (albeit in some

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luxury) in the harem and kept alive in case they were needed. The princes, along with servants and castrates serving as guards and go-betweens, increased the size of the harem, but also reflected changing inheritance practices. In theory, any slave concubine who had a son by the sultan was taken out of the rotation, as it were. The idea was to prevent her from having more children to limit the potential rivals to her son, since each son theoretically could claim the throne. Exceptions to the one child rule were not common, but they were significant when they happened: Süleyman I’s favorite/wife Hürrem Sultan had a daughter and five sons, and Mahpeyker Kösem Sultan (c. 1590–1651), who began her career as haseki of Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617), was the mother of two sultans. Nonetheless, the norm was supposed to be one son per mother, but multiple sons of the sultan, all of whom remained in the harem, with factions forming around the mothers and their sons. Historians have noted that the seventeenth century has been called the “sultanate of women” or the “reign of women,” and while castrates have figured in the story, few accounts have foregrounded their significance in the political configurations of the Ottoman Empire. As Fariba Zarinebaf emphasizes, the key change that enabled the expansion of female power was the recognition that the valide sultan (mother of the sultan) displaced the grand vizier in cases of youth or incapacity of the sultan. This remained controversial among Ottoman commentators, with some complaining that the valide sultan’s role violated sultanic law while others accepted that the sultan’s mother could provide crucial continuity and protection (2016, 197–198). The emergence and efficacy of the valide sultan depended on the black castrates who served her and the sultan. Kösem Sultan was already a significant figure when she became valide sultan as mother first of Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) and then Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648). Murad was a minor when he became sultan, and Kösem served as regent until 1632, remaining a part of the sultan’s inner circle until his death. Ibrahim succeeded his brother, but proved mentally unstable, and Kösem effectively ruled in his place until her disgrace in 1647. The next year, she consented to Ibrahim’s deposition (and later, his strangulation), and served again as regent for her grandson, Mehmed IV. But Mehmed’s mother, Turhan Hatice, clashed with Kösem, who may have planned to depose Mehmed in order to replace Turhan with a more pliable daughter-in-law. At Turhan’s instigation, Kösem was assassinated. In the more elaborate version of this history, Dervish Abdullah Efendi accused the former Kizlar Ag˘ asi, Lala Süleyman Agha of deliberately playing Kösem and Turhan against each other. The official court historian, Mustafa Naima, reported more moderately that Lala Süleyman with the backing of Mehmed, plotted to eliminate Kösem. Despite the corps of three hundred Janissaries protecting Kösem, an armed group broke into her apartment and pulled her from her hiding place. Lala Süleyman strangled her himself, perhaps with a piece of curtain, or in some reports, with Kösem’s own long braids as a garrote (Peirce 1993, 252; Zarinebaf 2016, 199–202; Çelebi 1846– 1850, 1: 153; Thys-Senocak 2006, 28). Associated with the “sultanate of

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women,” black castrates used their privileged access to women as a source of power, engaged in the backstage manipulations that shaped political outcomes, and finally, acted with a level of violence that was expected of men who had been physically utterly unmanned and enslaved. The black castrates enacted a script of racially marked gender crossing to which they may have contributed, but which they did not write. Where castrates were concerned, western observers usually missed the point. The various roles of castrates in the seraglio contributed perceptions of them as integral to Ottoman ceremonial, but knowledge of their importance in government remained circumscribed by western understanding of how courts functioned. Moreover, the comparative invisibility of the harem led to misunderstanding the importance of the respective types of castrates. Routinely, observers considered the Kapi Ag˘ asi to be more important, but the Kizlar Ag˘asi was more politically significant. Control over the religious endowments gave the Kizlar Ag˘ asi economic power, which was combined with his ability to communicate with both the male and female parts of the seraglio as well as personal access to the sultan and special intimacy with the valide sultan. Why were these misperceptions so stubbornly maintained? Usually, the answer is that outsiders did not and could not know the workings of the harem. But they also did not and could not overcome the routine understanding of castrates as disabled and transgendered. Observers considered castrates, even in positions of great power at the Ottoman court, to be defective half-men, who either took out their frustrations on school boys (white castrates) or became effeminate schemers in the harem (black castrates). To this already problematic mapping, westerners added racial difference as a “defect” that both enabled cultural distancing and brought Ottoman practices uneasily close to western ones.

2. Access and (the anxieties of) race What westerners “knew” was that castrates marked the boundaries of the seraglio, with white castrates serving in the more visible areas and black castrates forming a barrier of sorts between the harem and the outside world. The first key spatial division was the Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), which was the entrance to the House of Felicity (Dar-üs Saadet; Inner Palace). The sultan received foreign ambassadors in the audience chamber just inside the gate, but otherwise, entrance was restricted to the sultan, members of his family, and the castrates (Freely 1999, 40–41).30 The second spatial division was about access to the third courtyard or “imperial harem,” which was restricted to the sultan, black castrates, and the pages of the palace chosen for purpose of serving in the innermost sanctum. As permanent residents, the black castrates had intimate access to the sultan, but also served as mediators between and among the harem, the seraglio, and the larger world outside the palace.31 Most westerners only partially understood or accepted that certain

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kinds of people – certain kinds of castrates – could function to cross these barriers, and this was a positive result of the combination of their racial difference and genital disability. The marker of western incomprehension was the insistence that black castrates served in the harem because they were repulsively different – disabled not only by their genital mutilation, but also by their appearance. Unsurprisingly, this characterization says far more about western prejudices than about Ottoman practices. The proximity of castrates to the sexual lives of the sultans is of course famous. Indeed, it is the basis of much western fascination with and speculation about the exotic east (for instance: Manfray 1621; Scudéry 1652; Montesquieu 1973). The harem was a women’s world marked by black castrates protecting its perimeter from intrusion by any man save the sultan. The central issue for early observers was the seclusion of women, which was understood in terms of rivalries among men. The origins of castration among the Ottomans seem to have been with the adoption of the seclusion of women per Byzantine practice (Miller 1970, 91). Busbecq commented, “The Turks set greater store than any other nation on the chastity of their wives. Hence they keep them shut up at home, and so hide them that they hardly see the light of day.” He attributed this attitude toward the presumption that men are not to be trusted: “The Turks are convinced that no woman who possesses the slightest attractions of beauty or youth can be seen by a man without exciting his desires and consequently being contaminated by his thoughts” (2005, 117– 118).32 Implied was a failure of self-control among Turkish men. The result of this reading was a three-fold condemnation of Ottoman gender norms. First, genitally intact men were unable to control themselves, which in western eyes was a fault typically associated with women. Second, women were protected from effeminate, out-of-control men by effeminate, genitally disabled castrates. Third, these castrates by distributive (il)logic were not men. If this sounds like kettle logic – multiple arguments defend a point, but they are inconsistent with each other – it is.33 The arguments are also, in this case, wrong. The misinformation did not stop there. What applied to the top of the social hierarchy, observers presumed, spread down and out, creating a broad cultural resonance. Any man with the means to support a harem had to have castrates to guard the women. Nicolas de Nicolay condemned Persians as “much addicted to all pleasures and delights” [fort adonnés à tous plaisirs & voluptez] which, combined with their marital customs, explained why they needed castrates: “It is permitted to them by their laws to have several wives, who, because they [the men] are very jealous, are firmly under the guard of eunuchs” [Il leur est permis par leurs Loix d’avoir plusieurs femmes. Lesquelles à cause qu’ilz sont fort jalous, enferment soubs la garde des Eunucques] (1989, 215). Johann Boemus (c. 1485–1535) noted both polygamous marriage and the utter separation of the sexes, in which castrates figured prominently: There is seldome any speech or conference betwixt men and women, in any publike place, it beeing so out of custome, as if you should stay with

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Observers presumed insufficient male self-control required both unnatural female seclusion and unnatural castrates. In fact, the ability of castrates, especially black castrates, to cross boundaries was far more important in the functioning of the seraglio than the guarding its borders. As several scholars have noted, castrates facilitated movement across boundaries – physical and spiritual (Pierce 1993, 119–125; Marmon 1995; Davis 1986, 20–22). Some, such as Giovan Antonio Menavino noted this function, reporting that castrates carried messages back and forth between the harem and the sultan (1548, 12–14, 122–126, 137–139, 168). Although comments often highlighted the entanglements generated by internal harem politics (read: female jealousy and rivalry), observers did allow that the Kizlar ag˘ asi had exceptional access to the sultan. Unsurprisingly, the Kizlar ag˘ asi’s power was typically attributed to his ability to manipulate the sultan, and observers assumed bribery of the Kizlar ag˘ asi could secure the sultan’s favor (Bobovi 22). As an intermediary, the black castrate operated like the scheming, manipulative woman straight out of an early modern misogynist’s repertoire. What westerners saw as feminizing and disabling, the Ottomans considered a corporeal qualification. The particular qualification of black castrates was the method of castration they suffered. Rather than removing or disabling the testicles, as was the case for white castrates, black castrates were fully ablated. Per early modern medical practice, they utilized a hollow tube in order to urinate. Not only were they infertile; they lacked the equipment for erection, intromission, and ejaculation. Whatever they may have felt in terms of desire, they had no genital capacity to express that desire, making them unmistakably acceptable for close proximity to the women of the harem. Even if they had desire, black castrates could perform no recognizable forms of normative male sexual behavior. How much westerners understood of the differences in the modes of castration is unclear. George Sandys suggested that all castrates were fully ablated: “Many of the children that the Turkes do buy (for these markets do affoord of all ages) they castrate, making all smooth as the backe of the hand, (whereof divers do die in the cutting) who supply the uses of nature with a silver quill, which they weare in their Turbants” (Sandys 70). John Bulwer also seemed to make no distinction, implying that all Turkish (and some

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Persian) castrates were fully ablated, and all used a tube to urinate (Bulwer 1653, 359–360).34 For Bulwer castrates were corporeally feminine because of complete ablation. Like women, they were stupid (often showing off their disability by means of the tube treated as a fashion accessory) and of course, a man who could not urinate properly was hardly a man at all. Others were aware that black and white castrates had been created differently. Antoine Geuffroy distinguished those who had been deprived of their testicles from the fully ablated: “In addition there was a Capigi captain of the door, who was a completely castrated eunuch” [Plus y a ung Capagaz capitaine de la porte, qui est Eneuche chastré tout] (1546, unpaginated). Rycaut specifically informed his readers that black castrates were made so “by wholly dismembring them.” It was, he averred, the only way to make certain they could not act on any inclinations they might have (1668, 37). For Rycaut, serving women required womanly men, and the way to be certain was to completely unman black castrates. Westerners attributed the origins of the split between the black and white castrates to differences that were steeped in deeply pejorative racist presumptions.35 In the course of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Jean Palerne (1557– 1592) visited Constantinople and included in his account of the seraglio the alleged origins of complete ablation of black castrates: “From whom they only removed the testicles, until Sultan Süleyman one time saw a gelding mount a mare, from this he thought that his eunuchs, however castrated they may be, could do that as well, so from then on, he made them cut off everything. This has been observed since by his successors” [Ausquels on ne souloit oster que les génitoires, jusques à ce que Sultan Solyman vit une foy un cheval hongre sur une jument, lequel pensa par là, que ses Eunuques, quoy qu’ils fussent chastrez, en pouvoyent bien faire autant, tellement que dès lors il leur fit tout couper: cela a tousjours despuis esté observé par ses successeurs] (1991, 251). Palerne and others who repeated the story – there are at least three variations – equated black castrates with animals.36 Actually, black castrates were worse than animals: it was not enough to render them sterile; they had to be made completely incapable of sexual activity. To this was added the characterization of castrates, but especially black castrates, as physically hideous. Observers occasionally provided negative physical descriptions of white castrates, as when Laurent D’Arvieux described the Kapi Ag˘ asi as “fat and swollen, of yellow fat like that of a capon, without any facial hair, disfigured and pale as to revolt one; one might have taken him for moribund with dropsy” [gros & bouffi, d’une graisse jaune comme celle d’un chapon, sans aucun poil de barbe, défiguré & pale à faire mal au coeur; on aurait pu le prendre pour un hydropique moribond] (1735, 4: 546). The white castrates rarely inspired such comments; the black castrates often did, and commentators insisted that black castrates were physically repulsive for a reason. Bobovi explained that black castrates were assigned to the palace women: “The reason is that (according to my opinion) the women are thus removed from temptation which might be caused by faces less hideous than those of these monsters of nature” (1987, 20). Vincent Stochove repeated the

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claim that black castrates were deliberately chosen because of their ugliness: “All those who serve these women are black eunuchs, who are completely cut, the most ugly are the most esteemed, doing this so that these women only see the deformity of these monsters, finding the Sultan more handsome and the benefit of love” [Tous ceux qui servent à ces femmes sont des Eunuques noirs, qui ont le tout coupé, les plus laids sont les plus estimez, faisant cela affin que ces femmes ne voyant que ces monstres de deformité trouvent le Grand Seigneur plus beau, & l’aiment d’avantage] (1650, 88).37 These ideas about the physical appearance of black castrates remained in place over generations. Upon returning from a voyage to the Ottoman Empire in 1621, Louis Deshayes de Courmenin told his readers that the black castrates were “all Moors” who “more resembled monsters than men.” This was so that the women of the harem would “find the Sultan more handsome” [ressemblent plustost à des monstres qu’à des hommes, elles en trouvent le Grand Seigneur plus beau] (1645, 165). In 1735, the envoy D’Arvieux commented that the women of the harem would find the sultan, any sultan, “a veritable Adonis” in comparison (1735, 4: 546).38 Actual descriptions varied from vague and general to specific and stereotypically negative. Rycaut commented broadly that black castrates were deliberately chosen for their unattractiveness: “to create an abhorrency in them; they are not only castrates, but Black, chosen with the worst features that are to be found among the most hard-favoured of that African race” (1668, 37).39 Others were more precise, as when Tavernier emphasized physical features associated with Africans that were the staple of derisive early modern racial descriptions: “The most deformed [black castrates] cost the most, their extreme ugliness taking the place of beauty in their case. A flat nose, a frightful gaze, and a big mouth with fat lips, and teeth black and spaced far apart from each other (because ordinarily Moors have beautiful teeth) are advantages for the merchants who sell them” [Les plus difformes sont ceux qui coûtent le plus, leur extrème laideur leur tenant lieu de beauté dans leur espece. Un nez plat, un regard affreux, & une grande bouche, de grosses lèvres, de dents noires & écartées les unes des autres, (car d’ordinaire les Mores ont de belles dents) sont des avantages pour les marchands qui les vendent] (1675, 18–19).40 If some presumed black castrates were necessarily ugly, others insisted on explaining why. Both combined negative assessments of appearances with castration to render black castrates not only incapable of sex, but also positively repellent to the women who were capable of it. In an inversion of neo-platonic celebrations of the association between physically beautiful men and moral goodness, some commentators insisted that the (ugly) appearance of the black castrate reflected his moral depravity as well. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort believed that being “incapable of pleasing the fair sex” [incapables de plaire au beau sexe] made black castrates inclined to personal ambition and greed (1717, 2: 275). Evliya Çelebi blamed the corruption and subsequent fall of Ibrahim I in part on the nefarious machinations of the harem castrates (Çelebi 1: 149). Embittered because of their ablation, the

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black castrates were considered prone to changing their minds, succumbing to jealousy, and indulging in impudicity (Du Loir 1654, 94). For Jean Chardin, castrates “have neither tenderness, nor pity; but for the same reason, they have an incomparable attachment to their Master” [ils n’ont ni tendresse, ni pitié; mais par cette même raison ils ont un attachement incomparable à leur Maitre] (1735, 2: 159). Even the much-celebrated fidelity of the black castrates was the result of their “miserable condition,” rather than their particular qualification for their role.41 The black/white distinction was pronounced, but westerners made more out of it over time – and specifically more that was negative. Domenico Hierosolimitano (c. 1552–1622), who served as third physician to Murad III, dictated his account of the Ottoman court, noting, “On one side there are the rooms of the Grand Turk (used by him) when the women serve him, and one goes through high corridors with keys held by him alone or by his chief eunuch” (2001, 19). Hierosolimitano’s version is neutral on the racial aspects of roles at the Ottoman court. The Sieur Lenoir, in an early eighteenthcentury French adaptation of Hierosolimitano, added to the original: “their deformity inspires such horror of them that the women are terrified, and apprehensive to encounter them, giving them an especially favorable idea of the Sultan” [leur deformité leur inspire une telle horreur, qu’elles en soient épouvantées, & en apprehendent la rencontre, & ayent une idée d’autant plus favorable du Grand Seigneur] (Lenoir 1721, 67–68; Hierosolimitano 2001, 92, n. 2). Alfonso Chierici (1816–1873) supplied further pejorative racialized meanings. Describing the castrates who were assigned to the harem, Chierici asserted, “The eunuchs are black, and so in this way, if they should be seen by the women, which can happen only with difficulty, seeing them so deformed they will make them more quickly terrified, than otherwise” [quali Eunuchi sono negri: acciò se in qualche modo soffero veduti dalle donne: ilche difficilmente può succedere, vedendosi così diformi, più tosto le faccino spavento, che altrimenti] (1621, 32–33). Comparatively neutral difference between black and white castrates over time turned into significant physical and moral distinctions, with black castrates always regarded as inferior. Black inferiority was then aligned with the long history of medical, legal, and religious thought that rendered castrates as gender ambiguous, and the liminal position of black castrates provided additional impetus for understanding them as neither male nor female. As guards of the women, the black castrates were distinct, and in some ways expected to perform as men. Keeping the biological sexes apart in the seraglio with only the black castrates able to cross over between worlds encouraged commentators to cast aspersions on the gender presentation of black castrates. As Chardin put it repeatedly, “access is forbidden to every other man except the Sovereign…they do not permit any man to approach” [l’accès est interdit a tout autre homme qu’au Souverain… l’on ne permet à nul homme d’approcher] (1735, 1: 339; similarly, 3: 383). If no man has access or can approach, black castrates are not men. Bobovi bitterly complained that the appointment of black castrates to

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high office revealed that royal favor prevailed over merit, and this was especially galling because, “they are properly speaking only half-men” (1987, 22). Chardin asserted that the gender ambiguity of the black castrates was precisely why they were qualified for their job: “These slaves are neither properly men nor women, they are equally free to communicate with the two sexes without causing jealousy to anyone” [Ces Esclaves n’étant proprement ni hommes ni femmes, sont également propres à communiquer avec les deux sexes sans donner de jalousie à aucun] (1735, 2: 159). Moreover, westerners considered jealousy to be built into the system in ways that required castrates, especially black ones, to enact a fabulously contradictory set of gender imperatives: they were to be ferocious and violent (male) to the point of irrationality (female). Descriptions of castrates when they escorted women out of the physical confines of the harem space in the seraglio indicate this concoction of contrasting logics. Castrates made certain that no men were in the vicinity. Thomas Dallam, an Englishman sent to the Ottoman court to assemble an organ that was a gift to the sultan from Elizabeth I, had been warned by his interpreter to keep quiet about having seen the harem, but the point was driven home when his interpreter went running by: he saide the Grand Sinyor and his Conquebines weare cominge, we muste be gone in paine of deathe; but they run all away and lefte me behind, and before I got oute of the house they weare run over the grene quit out at the gate, and I runn as faste as my leggss would carrie me aftere, and 4 neageres or blackamoors cam runinge towards me with their semetaries drawne; yf they could have catchte me theye would have hewed me all in peecis with there semeteris. When I cam to the wickett or gate, thare stood a great number of jemoglanes, praying that I myghte escape the handes of those runninge wolves; when I got out of the gate they weare verrie joyfull that I had so well escaped their hands. (1893, 79) Dallam had unusual access to the seraglio because he had to adjust the organ once it was in place. His presence was acceptable to a point, but neither he nor his Turkish minder could do anything but run from the violent threat presented by the black castrates. This sort of story was proverbial in descriptions of harems on the move. Montesquieu included a version of it in The Persian Letters, perhaps drawing on Tavernier’s account of Persia (1973, 103). Tavernier explained that castrates rousted anyone in the path of the women as they were taken on their travels, and, “if any one be asleep in the high-way, and be perceiv’d before he wakens, he is immediately cut to pieces as he lies” (Tavernier 1678, 239).42 The situation was much the same in the Mogul Empire. François Bernier warned, “Woe to any unlucky cavalier, however exalted in rank, who, meeting the procession, is found too near.” “It is a great misfortune for a poor cavalier…to find himself in the country too close to [the

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women]” (1891, 373). The implication was that the castrates enjoyed the opportunity to take out their frustrations on other men who were presumably intact and who represented embodiment in the world in ways that fully ablated castrates never could. The justification seemed logical within the terms established around the harem women, but the practice was also excessive, determined by emotion, and driven by a sense of revenge – all sensations typically associated with women. If the cruelty of castrates was archetypal, it was also peculiar to their castrated condition. Rycaut thought so: “For Eunuchs are naturally cruel, whether it be out of envy to the Masculine Sex which is perfect and intire, or that they decline to the disposition of Women, which is many times more cruel and revengeful then that of men” (1668, 26). In either case, whether a lack of masculinity or an excess of femininity, the result was the same. Bernier hinted that the fault might not be with the castrated: “the people being tender-hearted towards animals of every description, men only excepted” (1891, 251). But even his sympathy is limited. He decries “the power and malice of the eunuchs,” which is supposed to make castrates “gentle and tractable,” but instead makes them “vicious, arrogant and cruel” (ibid., 131– 132). The black castrate’s complete sexual disability caused him to be more like a woman – even more like a woman than castrates who had the lesser procedure. The more extensive destruction of the male sex organs, commentators implied, made black castrates more capricious, vicious, and vengeful. These qualities, as they were for women, were weapons of the weak, but for black castrates, they combined with physical strength to make an especially terrifying monstrous creature. At the same time, observers deployed rhetorical efforts to reduce the monstrous to the merely feminine. Du Loir insisted that black castrates behaved irrationally like women, and both behave in ways that disrupt the gender order. While the women become enraged at not being chosen by the sultan, “The abominable monsters of horror and impudicity avenge their powerlessness by a jealousy so strange that they do not permit themselves anything that can console their passion” [Ces monstres abominables d’horreur & d’impudicité, vangent leur impuissance pas une ialousie si estrange, qu’ils ne leur permettent pas d’avoir rien qui puisse consoler leur passion] (1654, 94). Several reports maintained that black castrates had special nicknames: “they are named by the names of Flowers, as Hiacynth, Narcissus, Rose, Gillyflower, and the like” (Withers 1905, 9: 369).43 The ascription of flowers for names rendered castrates as not only less than human, but also associated them with a pretty, fragile, delicate – in a word, feminine – nature. In the minds (or at least the texts) of westerners, black castrates were defined as inferior, irrational, and inhuman because of their absent genitals and their racial difference. That black castrates had important administrative roles – indeed, often more important roles than white castrates – at the Ottoman court mattered little. The logic of the harem that had black African slaves in close proximity to white slaves from eastern Europe or the Balkans

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escaped early modern observers. Instead, proximity was the feminized intimacy of monstrous half-men whose main purpose was literally to make the sultan look good.

3. Eliding complicities Taking up the “knowledge” of the harem produced in travel memoirs, fictions imagined the lives and desires of castrates who served there. The incomplete descriptions of the harem encouraged fiction writers to imagine backstories, emotional lives, and elaborate plots. At the same time, fictions reproduced much of the problematic (inaccurate and prejudicial) content of the source material. Reflecting and shaping extant beliefs, fictional presentations solidified perceptions of gender insufficiency, debility, and often, racial inferiority of castrates. Often, the central move was to use the fear of castration as part of an apparatus of critique. At the same time, even as authors relied on a cultural understanding of castrates as figures of pity and contempt, their stories rendered castrates in more human terms. The castrate was still a disabled gendercrosser, but his humanity combined with his debility and undermined the clear differences that critiques of castrates preferred to imagine. The most successful and much imitated version of this complex dynamic appeared in Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721). The plot trajectory for Montesquieu’s main character, the Persian prince Usbek, hinged on his relationship with the castrates of his harem behaving according to gender and disability expectations.44 Although fiction often gets a pass on matters of accuracy, some of Montesquieu’s liberties with elements of Persian society and practice matter in terms of how he constructs his castrate characters. Montesquieu conflates the harem and the seraglio throughout, ignoring the fact that the harem is the separate space for the women and the seraglio is the whole complex that is the ruler’s palace. Fusing the two allows his castrates to move across what were hard boundaries in actual Persian or Ottoman contexts. For Montesquieu, the seraglio is the harem, but for us, the more precise meaning of harem remains, even as we follow castrates into “wrong” places where they perform “wrong” tasks (Schaub 1995, 71–72). Where critics have noted that the competition among Usbek’s wives is a male fantasy about female desire, it is worth noting that Montesquieu uses that fantasy to establish the disidentification of castrates with the harem. The reality that the female quarters of the seraglio (used in the Ottoman sense of the term, rather than Montesquieu’s) were highly ordered and sexual access followed lines of rank and protocol is less interesting to Montesquieu than how pity and contempt complicated the characterization of castrates. Montesquieu’s alterations of what was known about actual conditions facilitated his depiction of castrates as men with personal histories, frustrated desires, and variable abilities. In Letter 9, the First Eunuch writes that he is a bundle of misery and anxiety. Pressured into accepting castration, he retains

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desire for the women he guards while lamenting his inability to fulfil it. A single, fleeting moment of contact has left him vulnerable to a woman he touched, and now he has to let her get away with all sorts of mischief. He hates Usbek’s wives, exulting in a sense of masculine pride only when he orders them around (1973, 49–51). Revising assertions that one of the “horrors” of eastern castration is that castrates were created young and so deprived of most of the usual physical pleasures men enjoy, Montesquieu’s castrates do feel sexual pleasure and desire. Montesquieu’s castrates layer presumptions about disability, insufficiency, and typical (read: normal) human desires and expectations. Sexual disability enables access, but complicates expressions of masculinity. The First Black Eunuch, lamenting that he accepted being “separated from myself for ever,” feels like a real man when he commands obedience from Usbek’s women (ibid., 49). But most of his pleasures are distinctly feminine: he revels in harem machinations, is vindictive, engages in petty tyrannies, and is involved in the intrigue all around him (ibid., 50–52).45 The First Black Eunuch admires his mentor for how he kept strict order, but describes the method as at once tyrannical and manipulative (ibid., 130–132; 178–180). The ambivalence plays out when the Chief Black Eunuch dies. His first replacement, Narsit, is ineffectual, credulous, and easily deceived (ibid., 271; 273–274). Excessively feminine, Narsit is replaced by the implacable Solim, who is brutal in his efforts to discipline the harem. But Solim is also deceived – as is Usbek – by Roxana (ibid., 279–281). Montesquieu’s castrates are hindered by genital insufficiency and effeminate gender. If in the end, the intact man is no better, and no better off, than the castrate, at least he does not suffer from the sexual disability that makes the castrate weak, brutal, and effeminate. Castration causes the castrate’s deviance from proper genital and gender function, but Usbek’s status indicates the distance between the castrate and the normal man. Montesquieu may have gone further in imagining the castrate in positive terms, but the corrosive racism remains. As in travel narratives, race, gender, and disability are fused in the observations of Montesquieu’s characters. Fatme tells Usbek that no man has seen her but him, “for I do not count as men those horrible eunuchs, whose least imperfection is that they are not males. When I compare the beauty of your face with the ugliness of theirs, I cannot help thinking myself happy” (ibid., 46– 47).46 Zelis rebukes Usbek, “If a brutal eunuch raises his disgusting hand to me, he does so on your orders” (ibid., 278). Usbek himself calls the black castrates “contemptible rejects of the human race” (ibid., 276). Writing to Zashi condemning her for having a white castrate in her room, Usbek anticipates her defense: “It is no use to say that eunuchs are not men, and that your virtue puts you above any ideas that you might get because of their incomplete resemblance to men” (ibid., 67). Throughout, readers are reminded of the conventional belief that all castrates were not really men, and their debility was amplified when racial difference was added to the mix.47 Generously, we could assume Montesquieu’s agenda was to imply that this was

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intolerable; that such men should not be created. At the same time, he reproduced some of the worst, most dehumanizing, and decidedly racialized characterizations of castrates. It is no accident that westerners focused on black castrates and elaborated fantasies about them at the same time that the castrati phenomenon was at its height in Europe. For westerners, black castrates in effect “excused” the deliberate castration practices for the purpose of making astonishing voices, with the eastern white castrate as the mediating figure. In speaking of black castrates, no commentators actually said, “At least we don’t do that,” but they might as well have. In this reading, the underlying logic is that westerners constructed cultural superiority, even with respect to a practice that happened in the west as well, by rendering the eastern version as demonstrably worse. The trick was that eastern castrates sometimes looked a lot like western ones. In addition to being racially similar, western and eastern white castrates shared the type of castration (disabling or removal of the testicles only). Both were perceived as effeminate, but eastern castrates were less likely to be characterized that way. Observers knew that all castrates were infertile, but where discussions of western castrates fixated on infertility and possible sexual function, most observers focused on the associations with power of white eastern castrates. Religious difference and slave status made eastern and western white castrates a bit more dissimilar, but in the construction of difference, white castrates were too much alike. Black castrates were another matter. They, too, were slaves and Muslims, and unlike white castrates who westerners believed to have been forcibly converted, most black castrates were from Muslim lands to begin with. Although black castrates were actually more powerful than their white counterparts – in terms of access to the sultan, control over key aspects of the Ottoman bureaucracy, and entitlement to attack intact men under some circumstances – westerners consistently downplayed their significance. The mechanism for characterizing black castrates was to combine knowledge of the kind of castration with racial prejudice. Black castrates were fully ablated. This might make them more valuable because of scarcity, but it also meant they were fully sexually disabled and more transgendered. Lacking both testicles and penis, black castrates shared physical qualities with women: they had to squat to urinate; they were subject to incontinence like women, especially after childbirth, were; their secondary sex characteristics – like other castrates – were likely to resolve in typically feminine ways. More significantly, westerners insisted that full castration made black castrates behave even more like women than effeminacy-prone white castrates. Locked away among the women of the harem, black castrates were capricious, manipulative, vindictive, jealous, and ultimately, monstrous. The last was sealed by race. The insistent claims that black castrates were violent and hideous depended on western ideas about race that only became more marked and extreme over time. The focus on black castrates as creations of a corrupt and despotic system that would do “that” to men obscured the fact that castration was imposed

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routinely and widely in the west, and arguably, with an even more tenuous likelihood of it improving the castrate’s life prospects. In the west, castrates were barred from the usual life trajectories by medical, legal, and religious strictures. If some transcended these limitations to become opera stars, the vast majority did not. But again, westerners could cite the fact that “their” castrates were only partially disabled and only somewhat transgendered. In making the black castrate the paradigm for the evils of castration, western commentators protected western castration practices – but not western castrates. To the contrary, their comparative fortune in not being Muslim/ slaves/black/fully ablated/having “chosen” castration or having “needed” it for medical reasons meant that no one would think too hard about what castrates endured because of being genitally disabled, with all the consequences their condition entailed.

Notes 1 Western knowledge of Chinese castrates was more limited, but there were some reports. See for instance Dampier (1697, 81–85); Du Halde (1736). 2 Generally, see House of the Sultan (2012, 8–11). Like virtually everyone in the Ottoman bureaucracy, palace castrates were slaves of the sultan, but this was a position of some privilege (exemption from taxation, for instance). Although not without significant abuses, Ottoman slavery was not like chattel slavery in the United States. See Baer (1967); Toledano (1998); Toledano (2007). 3 For relevant critiques of Said, see Mather (2009); Mackenzie (1995); and Irwin (2006). 4 “Harem” (Turkish) and “Haram” (Arabic) mean “forbidden place.” Because of the centrality of Ottoman practices to this chapter, harem will be generally used, with the exception of quotations that use haram. “Seraglio” has come to mean virtually the same thing as harem, but the term originally referred to the entire palace complex, and it will be used that way unless otherwise indicated. 5 Isom-Verhaaren, “Royal French Women” (2006) argues that the Ottoman harem has long been a part of political representation, particularly around foreign, often French, women about whom myths and tales continue to be embellished. 6 For the selection by handkerchief, see Rycaut (1668, 39). Bobovi includes the sultan dismissing the woman by putting a handkerchief on her face (1987, 67–68). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu disputed the story. Her informants said it was not true: “The Sultana…assured me, that the story of the Sultan’s throwing a handkerchief is altogether fabulous; and the manner upon that occasion, no other but that he sends the kyslár agá, to signify to her the honour he intends her” (1966 1: 345–346). 7 Tavernier’s informants, identified as members of the treasury staff, could provide little detail on the interior service, despite fifty years in the outer service (1675, 244). Chardin says that it is even harder to gather information about the Persian haram, and he admits there are officers within it, but he does not know exactly what they do (1735, 3: 384). 8 For Biblical references, see for instance Isaiah 56:3–5; 39:7; 2 Kings 20:18; 9:32; Daniel 1:3; Esther 1:10, 12; 2:3, 14, 15, 21; 4:4–6; 6:2, 14; 7:9; Jeremiah 29:2; 34:19; 38:7–12; 39:15; and Acts 8:27–39. Bagoas (d. 336), the vizier of Artaxerxes III, is the most famous castrate of the Achaemenid Empire. For castrates at the Hellenistic courts, see Guyot (1980, 95–102).

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9 Scholars often scorned Byzantine castrates until Rudolphe Guilland’s articles (“Eunuques”; “Fonction I”; “Fonction II”; “Études I”; “Études II”) offered a balanced account of their significance in the politics and culture of the Byzantine court. For recent studies, see Ringrose (2003); Tougher (2008). 10 The combination seems to have applied in China as well. See Tsai (1996); Mitamura (1970); and Laven (2012). 11 “Topkapı-” seems to have simply become the name of the palace in much scholarship. Topkapı- means “the new palace” and referred to variously with or without the definite article. 12 Isom-Verhaaren (2011); Setton (1976–1984, 3: 346–494). For cultural differences and exchanges a bit later, see Göçek (1987); Goffman (2002). 13 “Capitulations” in this context meant “conditions” (with no connotation of surrender). 14 See also Beauvau (1615, 39–42); Mercure (1613, 129v–130r). 15 The English edition was by Robert Withers (1650), published as A Description of the Grand Seignor’s Seraglio. Withers translated Bon without acknowledgment, and as Penzer (1936, 36–37) points out, several others, including Michel Baudier, also silently used Bon’s account. Sometimes the description of the ambassador being hauled around is somewhat comical, although perhaps not intentionally so. See for instance Quiclet (1664, 148). 16 Rycaut served as private secretary to the Earl of Winchilsea, appointed ambassador by Charles II. Rycaut also served as consul for the Levant Company in Smyrna for eleven years (Anderson 1989). Darling (1994) argues that Rycaut deliberately reported on Turkish practices as a way of commenting on contemporary English politics. 17 Necipog˘ lu (1991) argues that both ceremonial occasions and palace architecture served to impress an image of the sultan’s majestic isolation. 18 The numbers reported in early modern sources are highly variable and likely unreliable for the most part, but “eighty” represents an impressively large number. In fact, under Selim I (r. 1512–1520), there were about forty castrates in the seraglio. During Süleyman’s reign (1520–1566), numbers may have reached 800, and over 1,000 served Murad III (r. 1574–1595). See Köseog˘ lu (1988, 29). 19 Bobovi was quite helpful to later visitors to the Ottoman court. His account, which circulated in Italian, French, and German in the seventeenth century, provided information for Louis XIV’s ambassador, Pierre de Girardin. See BN MSS fr. 7162–7175; MS n.a.f. 4488; BL Add. MS 72561, fols. 183–271. 20 For a visual representation, see Menavino (1548, 139). 21 Postel (1560, pt. 3, p. 11) identifies him as the Chasnandar bassi. Postel (ibid., pt. 1, p. 6) assimilates castrates to Byzantine usage, referring to them as “gardescouches” [guardians of the bed]. Beauvau (1615, 43–44) calls the Kapi Ag˘ asi the “chef des Eunuques” and emphasizes that he and the “Asnadarbachi” [Khazinehdar-bašı˘] are the most important because they have the largest suites of attendants. 22 Menavino (1548, 125–126) specifies that twenty-five young men between twenty and twenty-two work under the Chilegibasia. 23 “Page” is widely used in the scholarship for the iç oglanlari (often called Ichoglans in early modern texts) meaning literally “inside boys.” These “boys” were often men, and at the highest levels of the Has Oda Kogusu (Hall of the Privy Chamber), had titles that indicated their tasks for the Sultan: Silahdar (sword-bearer), Cuhadar (raincoat-bearer, Tirnakçi (nail trimmer), and Tezkereci (secretary) are among the functions. See Hierosolimitano (2001, 91). 24 Imber (2002, 150–151) notes that curriculum of the palace school remained remarkably static over time. 25 See for instance Thévenot (1980, 61). 26 All identifications follow Rycaut (1668).

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27 See for instance Ramberti (1541, 20v–21r). 28 Numbers are very unreliable, but westerners believed them to be large. Guillaume Postel attributed forty to fifty wives to the Sultan, each with her own room and all the rooms guarded by castrates (1560, pt. 1, pp. 6, 31.) Giovanni Maria Angiolello claimed Mehmed II’s harem included seventy castrates serving 300 women. See BN MS ital. 1238, fols. 50–51; Geuffroy sigs. bii(v)-dii(v). 29 It is somewhat commonplace in Ottoman historiography to attribute the decline of the Ottoman Empire to the rise in influence of the harem. See for instance Penzer (1936, 185–186). In contrast, Finkel argues that flexibility of the seraglio structures has been understood as one reason for Ottoman longevity. 30 The harem was originally designed as a small space, but expanded to accommodate its growing population and importance. See Necipoglu (1991, 91–93 and Ch. 8). 31 Chardin (1735, 2:48) reports that castrates had similar access in Persia. Chardin, a Protestant who found Louis XIV’s France inhospitable, was often hostile to the French in his travel accounts. See Longino (2015, 129–144). 32 Peirce (2007, 221–122) emphasizes that women were very invested in protecting their reputations, but did leave their homes, as long as they were suitably protected from contact with strange men. Elite women were not barred from engaging in business transactions. 33 “Kettle logic,” sometimes called “the kettle defense,” was referred to by Freud. See Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) (Freud 1953–1974, 4: 119–120; 13: 62, 206). 34 Tournefort (1717, 2: 275) specifies that black castrates used a tube to urinate, but believes that castration was performed in infancy, which is not correct. 35 Among the Ottomans, views of black castrates were less about race and more about corruption. Mustafa Ali (1541–1600) complained about the rapaciousness of black castrates in Cairo, while Dervish Abdullah Efendi railed against black castrates as the source of every problem he could think of. See Hathaway (2016, 228– 229). See also Tezcan (2007) for the discussion of Mullah Ali’s defense of black Africans. 36 Thévenot (1687, 24) repeats the story, but does not name Süleyman. Villamont (1595, 232r) attributes complete ablation to Süleyman as well, but leaves out the horse. 37 See the almost identical claim in La Boullaye-Le Gouz (1653, 29–30) and similar wording in Courmenin (1624, 146, 150). 38 D’Arvieux repeats much from earlier accounts but is mildly innovative in his details. On D’Arvieux, see Longino (1650, 57–107). 39 See also Bon (1996, 88) for the ugliness of black castrates. Baudier (1626, 56) borrows heavily from Bon in his description. 40 See also (1675, 27–28) for much the same language. Chardin (1735, 3: 387) calls them “difforme & fantastique.” He also insists that only “old and decrepit” (vieux & décrépits) castrates are posted near the women (ibid., 3: 389). See also Iskandar (1951, 102). 41 For the fidelity of black castrates, see for instance Bernier (1891, 132): “It is vain to deny, however, that many among them are exceedingly faithful, generous, and brave.” 42 See also Chardin (1735, 3: 392–393), which emphasizes the inconvenience of the practice, as well as the violence of the castrates. 43 Withers accompanied ambassador Sir Paul Pindar to the Ottoman court in 1611. See also n. 15 above on Withers and Ottovanio Bon. 44 This is not how the castrates in Montesquieu’s corpus have usually been understood. More frequently, critics consider castrates as part of the architecture of Montesquieu’s critique of organized religion, as metaphorical figures within

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political commentary, or as exotic “others” whose differences point to western inconsistencies and inequalities. Barrière (1951) stressed the analogy between castrates and celibate priests, toward whom Montesquieu elsewhere indicated his antipathy (see Pensées, nos. 591, 2161bis). Kempf (1962) emphasizes how castrates are tormented, dehumanized, and rendered as both victims and brutes. Singerman (1980) understands castrates as part of the seraglio as a critique of the ministerial politics of the French monarchy. 45 This is Montesquieu’s version of the idea that castrates were inclined to violent vengeance because of their castration. 46 The echoes of earlier accounts are inescapable. Bobovi (1987, 20): “The reason is that…the women are thus removed from temptation which might be caused by faces less hideous than those of these monsters of nature.” 47 One of the riffs on Montesquieu, by Lyttleton (1988, 2–3) took aim at opera castrati, expressing incredulity through a Persian character that women would fall in love with defective singers and men would accept the preposterous substitution of a castrate for a heroic figure of antiquity.

Conclusion A history of interlocking vilifications

In an ancient joke collection, a fragment of a joke about a castrate survives: “Seeing a eunuch, an Abderite asked him how many children he had. The eunuch replied that he had none, since he lacked the means of reproduction. Retorted the Abderite….” (Philogelos 22, #114). The punch line is lost.1 One proposed ending is the Abderite asks the castrate when he will get balls; another has the Abderite asking if the castrate has grandchildren. Even without the culminating tag, the joke tells us that castrates were a marked category, and their genital impairment served as the basis of derogatory humor. Jokes about or aimed at genitally impaired men persist. In an episode of the television show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox), Sergeant Terry Jeffords (played by former American football player Terry Crews) prepares to have a vasectomy and the ever-immature Detective Jake Peralta (played by Andy Samberg) stubbornly insists on referring to the operation as though Terry is going to have his penis removed (Episode 2.2, “Chocolate Milk,” October 5, 2014). If the comedy rests in part on Jake’s (feigned) ignorance and underhanded attack on Terry’s masculinity, jokes in other venues are aimed directly at castrates. Jokeindex.com offers an example. A man goes to his doctor and demands to be castrated. The doctor tries to talk his patient out of it, but the man insists. When it is done, the doctor tells the patient that he noticed the man wasn’t circumcised, so the doctor went ahead and did that too. The patient says, “Circumcised! That’s the word!” The long history of regarding castrates as intellectually inferior echoes in tag lines. News stories report castrations of errant, violent, or drunken husbands with startling relish, perhaps most infamously Lorena Bobbitt’s cutting off of her husband’s penis, which she then threw into a field. Footage of athletes getting their testicles kicked, punched, or twisted; baseballs, footballs, soccer balls, and basketballs to the groin are the stuff of Not Top Ten lists. A man with damaged or destroyed genitals is reduced to a punchline. Laughing at castration is really laughing at the castrate – a man who has lost a significant part of claim that he is a man. Humor directed at castrates is deliberately humiliating. Not only has he lost bodily integrity; he has lost the salient symbol of his gender privilege, his masculinity, and his sexuality. I use these jokes dating from early antiquity to very contemporary modernity to suggest that the issue of genital disability and its effects on the male

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body, its social status, and its cultural location are persistent and tenacious in their pernicious effects. By focusing on the early modern elaboration and consolidation of pejorative gender scripting based on the genitally altered male body, this essay has argued that interlocking formulations created castrates as disabled and transgendered. Understanding castrates in this way reveals how a variety of vilifications mutually supported each other and proved very difficult to dislodge. Arguing for the significance of castrates may in itself seem perverse. We don’t deliberately castrate boys to preserve their singing voices, and other forms of modern castration, especially vasectomy, have tremendous social utility. But castrates offer a way to understand how prejudice is born of the narcissism of minor differences.2 Precisely because castrates were not as obviously different as people suffering from serious physical deficits or some forms of mental debility, they had to be made radically “other.” Castrates were beardless, had female fat patterns, and soft skin, but intact men overlapped in each of these characteristics. Castrates (some, at least) could sing magnificently, but other men sang well, and especially in France with its haut-contre tradition, they sang well in high registers. Castrates overlapped enough with “normal” men that they could disappear from view on the theatrical stage via the bodies of the actors who played them. Castrates were not different enough. To make them sufficiently different, commentators of all kinds emphasized the disability and gender non-normativity of the castrate. Here, gender meets sexuality around the altered male body. The castrate in many ways is paradigmatic of disabled sexuality. As disability scholars have noted, people with disabilities have particular problems with respect to sexual expression. Modern disability activism has focused on such public issues as access and discrimination in education and employment. Because sex is usually considered private, it has received far less activist attention (Shakespeare 2000, 159–160). Historically, commentators have dismissed people with disabilities as either asexual or hypersexual. The continuity in the discourse is striking: castrates were alternately despised for their lack of sexual capacity (asexual in practice; desire was irrelevant) or chastised for their rampant lack of selfcontrol (sexual in practice; desire regarded as indiscriminate and/or amoral) (Crawford 2016). Detractors of all kinds – from medical authorities committed to narrow notions of physical ideals, to critics of castrati in opera, to racists with colonial-inflected assumptions about black castrates, to theologians committed to voluntary celibacy – fused transgender and disability prejudice. Each enabled the other. Transgender persons could be (and still are) dismissed or condemned as disabled relative to normative gender presentation and heterosexual hegemony, often regardless of sexual object choice. Disabled persons could be (and still are) routinely overlooked as sexual subjects, chided or worse for expressing desire, and denied the status benefits of gender conformity (McRuer and Mollow 2012). These mutually constituted pejorative

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framings were then available for deployment to denigrate and dismiss other non-normative people. I am not saying that vilification of castrates was the only mode of prejudicial discourse centered on gender and sexuality. As modern critics have abundantly demonstrated, “sodomy” was highly prejudicial as both a matter of gender and sexual expression (Puff 2003; Freitas 2009; Rocke 1996; Jordan 1998; Boswell 1980; Chauncey 1995; Canaday 2011). But castrates were at the center of a prominent and powerful cultural script that supplied negative formations and formulations that were both remarkably pliable and deeply destructive. Castrates, of course, were visible before disability and trans activism were available to them to counter these notions. Castrates never had or formed a social movement that could provide group identification. They always remained an “other” unable to appeal to an ideology of inclusion or an institutional logic such as legal rights that attached to persons. The echoes with persistent forms of prejudice seem inescapable. Kimberlé Crenshaw has traced how “races,” created out of broad human traits, became so tenacious and difficult to dislodge. Racial classifications based on binary claims of difference allowed the dominant race to ascribe inferiority arbitrarily. Repetition made oppositional dualities “real” in the sense that they undergirded discrimination, legal disadvantage, and social marginalization (Crenshaw 1995, 111–113). Intact men gained advantage over castrates in similar binary terms. Where intact men were potent, responsible, strong, masculine, and smart, castrates were sterile, irresponsible, weak, effeminate, and stupid. Castrates did not and could not repudiate the notion that they embodied absent or monstrous sexuality. In the long history of sexual disability attached to physically altered men, there was little to counter the hegemonic violence of exclusion and silencing. One of the great ironies of studying castrates is that a group mostly known for their voices said very little about themselves and what castration meant to them. Certainly Abelard indicated castration altered his sense of masculine selfhood; Filippo Balatri felt pride in his abilities even as he was embarrassed about their source; and Bartolomeo de Sorlisi covered over his castration with a narrative of heroic injury, suggesting at least some shame about his castration (Abelard 1974; Balatri 1924; Delphino 1737, 1–2). But mostly, we know very little. Perhaps castrates talked among themselves in the Capella Sistina or while in opera productions with several castrated singers. We don’t know. We do know from twenty-first-century memoirs that transsexual people who have chosen genital alteration put a premium on self-acceptance. Jamison Green, an FTM based in San Francisco, writes: “It’s the balance we find in ourselves that matters….For transsexual people this means legitimizing the transformed body; for all people it means legitimizing the self” (2004, 121– 122). Deirdre McCloskey, an MTF living primarily in Iowa, regards selfacceptance as a woman to be crucial. Both Green and McCloskey understand that acceptance of self in part hinges on the acceptance of others. Both sought out the company of their chosen sex – Green played percussion with the Sons

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of Orpheus; McCloskey worked self-consciously and hard at being a woman. As she put it, “You become a woman by being treated as one of the tribe. Nothing else is essential” (1999, 176). Green and McCloskey are privileged, white, relatively affluent Americans, and if they struggle to find and maintain a sense of acceptance, it is not difficult to imagine the effects of race, class, and ethnic disadvantage for many other trans people. Still, trans individuals can hope that acceptance is a possibility. Early modern castrates did not have access to the kinds of resources to which twenty-first-century trans and disability activists can point. To the contrary, the resources were all devoted to isolating castrates in order to insulate society from their disruptive effects. Natural philosophers and medical practitioners combined to situate castrates below intact men and proximate to women in the hierarchy of being applied to humans. Law and religion separately and together marked the castrate as a criminal or potential offender against the reproductive order. Even as Catholicism celebrated celibacy, doctrine excluded castrates from the community of the voluntary chaste. To be sure, the Catholic Church made exceptions for medical reasons or accidents, but it did so to ensure a continuing supply of singers. Marked as insufficient men whose genital debility made them effeminate, castrates suffered further as objects of ridicule and fear on the theatrical stage. For all their magnificence as singers, castrates routinely encountered critics who harped on their deficiencies as men. Castrates encountered the peculiarity of misogyny directed at them, which was often combined with an overlay of racism. This enabled estrangement from foreign castrates and facilitated the excusing of deliberate castration for musical purposes in the west. At best, castrates were objects of pity, but more often, they were scorned and treated as though they lacked the full and appropriate range of human emotions, desires, hopes, and fears. This is a rather grim story, but there is some space for optimism. Castrates are no longer created to be beautiful voices, and that particular pressure on poor families to have sons castrated has been relieved. Castration is, with a few exceptions, regarded as an inappropriate form of punishment (Cheney 2003). Within Catholicism, men with vasectomies are not barred from marriage, although some Catholic theologians have qualms about letting them do so (McGrath 1988). In popular culture of the modern variety, castrates appear in fantasy, historical fiction, and detective stories often as protagonists and usually portrayed with at least a modicum of sympathy. Routinely encountering hostility and derision from other characters, castrates often voice self-consciousness or embarrassment about their condition, but also present themselves as fully human in every other way. Aware of their distance from “normal” men, they often know they are disabled relative to other men, and that their physical embodiment is gender-transgressive. If that seems like more of the same in fiction, recently (and incompletely), fictional castrates have been depicted in ways that counter the narratives of disability and transsexuality. The ethical status of pejorative reactions to castrates does not jettison the pariah aspect, but does depict castrates with emotional and

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physical capacity, at once preserving the castrate’s disabled, transgender status and challenging it. The list of castrates in fiction could go on if not endlessly, at least extensively, but I have chosen three brief examples because they recall types of castrates and issues that have recurred throughout this book. Beverle Graves Myers has created a castrato/detective named Tito Amato, who solves murders in and around Venice in the eighteenth century. Jason Goodwin’s castrate (who is white), Yashim Togalu, does the same in the service of the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series and its television version on HBO represent the fantasy genre, with Martin’s fictional world set recalling the medieval past and the east/west divide as marked on the bodies of castrates. Martin’s castrates include the (white) spymaster, Lord Varys, and the army of the Unsullied, who are black, castrated, and former slaves. Tito, Yashim, and Lord Varys are all outsiders, whose non-normative selves are crucial to the narrative. Tito is an opera star with privileged access to the corridors of power. Yashim can move about freely in the seraglio and harem. Varys uses the scorn for his person – in a typical insult, Tywin Lannister calls Varys “that cockless wonder” – to maintain distance as he gathers information and influence (2011, 770). All three answer the negative views they encounter. Tito counters complaints about castration with an impassioned explanation of how much work he has put in so that he can contribute his musical skill to the Venetian economy (Myers 2009, 123–124). Yashim undercuts the derision of his detractors with his physical toughness, bravery, and tenacious pursuit of the truth. He takes on the Grand Vizier, a murderous art forger, scheming Russians, and a variety of Ottoman subjects hostile to modernization. Martin balances Varys’ effeminacy (his manners are “delicate,” and he “titters” or “giggled like a little girl”) with the fearless, utterly disciplined soldiers of the Unsullied (Game, 2011, 173–174, 525, 545; Clash, 2011, 54, 66, 68, 129, 276). If castrates are brave and capable, they are also emotionally and sexually complete. Tito reflects, “There had been a time when I shrank from my role as a musical eunuch, but I had given up my doubts and my meekness long ago. I was what I was. If that disturbed some people, so be it” (Myers 2006, 7). He “marries” a woman who already has a son – the marriage can’t be legal because of Cum frequenter (see Chapter 3) – and settles in as a family man. Tito has a sex life, although he does admit he must husband his sexual resources. Yashim is hesitant about sex at first, but eventually beds several women (the Russian ambassador’s wife; the widow of a murdered French archeologist; a Venetian countess) before falling in love. Unfortunately, his beloved turns out to be a murderous psychopath, which Yashim only recognizes belatedly. In the television series of Game of Thrones, the captain of the Unsullied, Grey Worm, admits that his love for Missandei makes him vulnerable as a soldier. Missandei responds by taking off her clothes and Grey Worm apparently provides oral sex (HBO Game Ep. 7.2; 23 July 2017). Fictional castrates laugh and cry, love and desire, aspire and achieve.

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Twenty-first century fictional castrates also challenge other characters – and readers/viewers – to understand their difference as indifferent; to understand castrates as like other people with complicated physical and emotional lives. They are not just exceptions that prove the rule, but fully formed characters whose difference is a positive good. While still noted for their disabled and transgendered status, fictional castrates get credit for handling more, including the historical baggage of prejudice. It is not just that there is quite a bit of baggage, but also that the elements of animosity and antipathy came from so many directions and mutually reinforced each other. Even if castration was medically “necessary,” the male body became perilously feminine, as well as sterile. That the combination of sterility and effeminacy was disastrous was signaled by debate over castration as punishment and the routine exclusion of castrates from the typical paths of “normal” sociality. Regarded in medical, legal, and religious terms as physically inadequate and incapable of appropriate gender behavior, castrates were ready targets for cultural derision. Plays, opera culture, and travel narratives infused with race bigotry turned medical, legal, and religious “knowledge” into enmity, discrimination, and injustice. This project has been devoted to understanding how medical and social disability, fused to fear and anxiety about gender non-normativity, created castrates as objects of prejudice. The ways that fusion was affected matter, and not just for a population we congratulate ourselves for no longer creating. Learning how interlocking of detrimental discourses make exclusion is crucial. It is not enough to no longer make castrates; we have to understand how the edifice of intolerance was and is constructed and dismantle it.

Notes 1 Abderites (from Abdera in Thrace) were regarded as particularly stupid from at least the first century BCE. Another joke follows: “Seeing a eunuch chatting with a woman, an Abderite asked him if she was his wife. The eunuch replied that people like him could not have wives. ‘Ah, then she must be your daughter.’” (Philogelos 22, #115). The date of the collection is unclear, but probably around the fourth century CE, with some material dating well before that. See iv–ix. 2 Freud discusses the narcissism of minor differences in Civilization and its Discontents (1930).

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Index

Abderite 191 Abel, Sam 131 Abelard, Peter and Heloïse 55–7, 68n41, 193 Achaemenid Empire 166 Albertus Magnus 22 Alciati, Andrea 27 Allison, Dale C. 71 Ambrose, St. 133 Ancillon, Charles 28, 38n19; 93–4, 99n28 anti-theatricalists 108–9, 119, 123 Aphrodisias 26 Aquinas, Thomas St. 22, 83, 86 Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm von 144–5 arie di baule 138 Aristotle 11, 17, 18, 20–2, 27, 30, 31, 79–80, 88, 90, 134 Aspden, Suzanna 149 Assyrian Empire 166 Attis 73–6 Augustine of Hippo, St. 2, 76, 78, 96 Bajada, Joseph 71–2, 87 Balzac, Honoré de 27 Barbier, Patrick 32, 92–3 Bardi de Vernio, Count Giovanni de’ 134 Barnes, Colin 8 Baroe, Charles 95 Beard, Mary 73–4 Behrend-Martínez, Edward 34–5, 60, 63 Bell, Alexander Graham 13n7 Bernard of Clairvaux 133 Bernier, François 182–3, 189n41 Berry, Helen 94 bestiality 52–3 Big Business (1988) 128n39 Bloom, Gina 107 Bobbitt, Lorena 191 Bordoni, Faustina 150

Boswell, John 53 Bremmer, Rolf 49, 52–3 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 191 Brundage, James A. 52, 67n22, 81 Burney, Charles 27, 142–3, 154–5, 160n14 Butler, Judith 104–5 Byzantium [Constantinople; Istanbul] 3, 11, 113–14, 163, 166–9, 171, 173, 177, 179 Cano, Gabriela 10 canon law 58–9, 65, 71–91, 97n12, 98 n14, 98n17, 154, 159n5 canonists and theologians: Almain, Jacques 84; Aversa à Sanseverino, Raphaele 88–9; Bonaventura 84; Burchard of Worms 98n15; Carletus a Clavasio, Angelus 82; Costanus 86; Gratian 79–82, 96; Gutiérrez, Juan 83; Ivo of Chartres 98n15; Lombard, Peter 79–82, 96; Mazzolini da Prierio, Sylvester 83; Meldula, Bartholomaei 98n23; Palude, Pierre de La (Petrus Paludanus) 81–2; Peñafort, Raimundo de 83–4; Sánchez, Tomás 87–91; Soto, Domingo de 85; Trovamala de Salis, Battista 84; William of Pagula 83; Zemeke, Johannes Teutonicus 83 (see also jurists) Capacelli, Francesco Albergati 158 Cappella Pontificia 136, 193 Casanova, Jacques Seingalt de/ Giacomo 94 Cascales, Francisco de 139 castrates: and marriage 11–12; 40–1, 44, 58–63, 70–99, 101, 195; medical effects 6–7, 11, 19, 20–31; appearances of 3, 6–7, 9, 12, 19, 21,

Index 25–6, 91, 95, 132, 136, 145–7, 177, 180, 192 Castrati: 1, 2, 12, 58, 96, 101, 105, 107, 130–62, 187, 192, 195; securing the services of 134–5; Angeletti, Francesco 139; Balatri, Filippo 137, 193; Berenstadt, Gaetano 146; Bernacchi, Antonio Maria 145; Bigelli, Antonio Girolamo 145; Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano) 131; Carestini, Giovanni 131, 150–1; Farinelli (Carlo Broschi) 131, 139–40, 142–5, 148–55; Ferrotti, Angelo 137; Guadagni, Gaetano 27, 131, 137; Magli, Giovanni Gualberto 138–9; Marchesi, Luigi 138; Marconi, Anselmo 139; Medici, Girolamo 139; Melani, Atto 4, 131, 137; Moreschi, Alessandro 142, 159n1; Nicolini (Nicolò Grimaldi) 93, 99n29, 145, 149; Nicolini, Mariano (Marianini) 145; Pacchierotti, Gaspare 27, 145; Pales, Jacomo Antonio 134; Pasqualini, Marc’Antonio 93, 137; Potenza, Pasquale 132; Raffaelli, Raffaello 145; Senesino (Francesco Bernardi) 145–6, 149–51; Siface (Giovanni Francesco Grossi) 137; Sorlisi, Bartolomeo de 91–4, 193; Tenducci, Guisto Ferdinando 94–5; Veluti, Giovanni Battista 159n1; Vittori, Loreto 137, 139; Zampetti, Girolamo 137 castration: and sexual function 1, 7, 11, 21–2, 25, 44, 48, 50, 56, 60–4, 78–89, 91, 96, 119, 123, 131, 139, 141, 149–51, 186, 195; associated with sodomy 48, 116, 131, 149; associated with male prostitution 48, 72; legal status of as punishment 5, 11, 40, 47, 49–57; as illegal: 28, 40, 45–8, 65, 194 castration techniques: 7, 28–30, 43, 56, 61–2, 94–5, 162; medical necessity 10, 19, 28, 31–6, 48, 187, 194; involuntary 10–12, 18, 57, 73, 78–9, 154–5; gender alteration because of 6, 20–31, 40; alteration of voice 1, 6, 8, 25, 27–8, 35–6, 65, 72, 79, 89, 96, 101, 103, 106–7, 112, 124, 130–59, 186, 192, 194 Catholic Church 3–4, 6, 37n7, 48, 70–2, 78–81, 87, 89 133, 136, 154, 159, 194 Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) 74 Cavalieri, Emilio de’ 134 Çelebi, Evliya 180 celibacy 6, 48, 54, 64, 70–2, 77–8, 85–6, 89–90, 192, 194

233

Celsus, Aulus Cornelius 31 Cervantes, Xavier 149 Charles, Casey 122 Chase, Cheryl 18 chastity 3, 48, 116, 118 Chaucer, Geoffrey 26, 38n28 Chinese eunuchs 13n3, 13n4, 188n10 Cistercians 133, 137 Claudian 68n32 Code of Hammurabi 49, 67n19 Codex Justinianus 42, 47–8, 66 Collins, Jack 77 Constantinople. See Byzantium Contarini, Gasparo 114 Cook, Elisabeth 153 Corpus iuris canonici 80, 98n17 Corpus iuris civilis 41, 58–9 Corsi, Jacopo 134 Coryat, Thomas 114, 135 Council of Nicaea 77–8 Council of Trent 86 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 193 critical race theory 15, 193 Cross-dressing 4, 10, 105, 116, 120, 125, 137, 140, 143–7, 153, 156–7 Cum frequenter 12, 70–1, 86–94, 96, 103, 195 Curll, Edmund 93, 95 Cuzzoni, Francesca 146 Cybele (Magna Mater) 73–7, 128n37 D’Éon de Beaumont, Charles-GenevièveLouis-Auguste-André-Timothée, Chevalier 10 Dalla, Danilo 48, 69n46 Darmon, Pierre 69n49, 103 Davies, J. Q. 159n1 Davis, Lennard J. 5 Dean, Trevor 49 Decretum 81, 98n17 Degenhardt, Jane Hwang 115 Desens, Marliss 116 Despenser, Hugh 55 Digest 41–7, 58–65, 81, 84 disability: medical model of 4–5, 36, 101, 196; social model of 4–5, 11, 196; and impairment 5–6, 8–9, 13n9, 19, 57, 72, 89, 96, 130, 191; legal 40–65; genital 5, 12–13, 19, 57, 64, 101, 109, 112, 159, 177, 191–2, 194; social 12, 15, 19, 52, 72, 89, 96, 130, 148; civic 41, 57, 101; sexual 6, 11–12, 19, 40–65, 109–10, 113, 115, 117, 119, 149, 151–2, 159, 166, 183, 185–6, 193;

234

Index

physical 4, 8, 42, 96, 101, 117, 130, 148–9 disability activism 9, 192–4 disidentification 101, 104, 124, 184 Doni, Giovanni Battista 144 Dupont, Jacques 71 Durastanti, Margherita 139 early modern vocal theory 107–11 Effeminacy 12, 19, 26–7, 30, 34, 36, 53–8, 73, 76, 90, 96, 103–5, 109, 111, 124, 130, 135, 137–9, 144–52; 163, 176–7, 185–6, 193–6 (see also feminization) Elam, Keir 120 Eska, Charlene 53 Ethiopian eunuch 103 Eu, William of 55 Eugenics 5, 8 European rulers: AEthelberht 50; Alexander III 98n16; Alfonso X 52; Charles II 188n 16; Chindasvindus 52; Clement IX (Guilio Rospigliosi) 137, 160n12; Clement VIII 136; Constantine I 42, 47; Domitian 47, 62; Edward II 55; Elizabeth I 167, 182; Flavius Egica Rex 68n30; François I 167; Gregory I (the Great) 58; Hadrian 42, 46; Henri IV 134; Henry I 50; Honorius III 58; James II 137; Johann Georg II 91–2; Justinian 41–3, 47–8, 58; Leo I 47; Medici, Cosimo de’ 137; Medici, Marie de’ 134; Nerva 47; Richard III 8; Sixtus V 12, 70, 86–9, 91–2, 98n20, 136; Sulla (Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix) 45–6; Theodosius II 42; Urban VIII 136–7 Evelyn, John 135, 137, 160n22 fabliaux 53–4, De la dame escolliee 37n4; Du Prestre crucefié 53–4; De Connebert 54; Du Prestre at du Leu 54 Fach system 135 Falsettists 133–6, 157–8, 159n1 familia 42–5, 64 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 18, 104–5 Fear, A. T. 76 Feldman, Martha 4, 37n3, 38n30, 133, 138, 148, 158, 160n14 female castration 18, 37n4 feminization 10, 12, 21–8, 30, 35, 40, 49, 55–7, 74, 95, 101, 111, 119, 122,

144–5, 148, 152, 163–4, 170, 178, 184 (see also effeminacy) Fernel, Jean 25 Ferroul, Yves 56 Ficino, Marsilio 107–8, 143 Fielding, Henry 151–2 Finkel, Caroline 163 Finucci, Valeria 27, 38n19, 98n26 Fisher, Will 25 Foucault, Michel 127n22 Frandsen, Mary E. 91 Freitas, Roger 4, 131, 137, 152, 193 French attitudes toward castrati 126, 143–4, 146–7, 152, 161n27, 192 Freud, Sigmund 2, 13; penis envy 2, 109; castration and blinding in psychoanalysis 67n26; kettle logic 177 Froissart, Jean 55 Gade, Kari Ellen 53 Galen 11, 17, 21–3, 31–2, 79–80, 88–9 Galilei, Vincenzo 134 galli 73–8, 97n5, 135 Galton, Francis 5 Game of Thrones 195 Gardner, Jane 43, 48 Garland Thomson, Rosemarie 37n10 Gates, Jay Paul 50 Geier, Martin 91–3 gender performance 104–5, 109, 117, 124, 144–5, 153, 157 Gerbino, Giuseppe 113–14 Ghezzi, Pier Leone 140, 143, 145 Gill, Pat 123 Gilman, Todd S. 149 Gordon, Ignatius 88 Goudar, Ange [Jean-Jacques Sonnette] 95, 155–6 Goudar, Sara 155 Grazzini, Anton Francesco 38n19 Green, Jamison 193–4 Groppo, Antonio 138 Grosley, Pierre-Jean 147 Grosz, Elizabeth 152 Gruen, Erich 73 Hall, Thomas/ Thomasine 39n40 Hammond, Frederick 136–7 Hanson, Ellis 113 harem 1, 2, 8, 10, 47, 90, 101, 124, 163–7, 173–86, 195 Harris, Elizabeth 94 haute-contre 144, 192 Hawkins, Sir John 142

Index

235

Hay, William 153 Haywood, Eliza 27 Heartz, Daniel 143 Heller, Wendy 149 Heriot, Angus 91, 131 hermaphrodites 10, 36, 37n5, 45, 152 Hill, Aaron 150 Hippocrates 11, 20, 88, 125 Hitchcock, Alfred 2 Hobgood, Allison P. 9 Hoffman, E. T. A. 67n26 Hogarth, William 146 Hooker, Richard 108 Horstmanshoff, H. F. J. 25 Hotman, François 41 Howard, Patricia 131, 137 Huarte, Juan 24, 135–6 humoral theory 18–19, 21, 25, 27–8, 36, 28, 59, 61, 63, 65, 80–8, 91, 107, 135–6, 152, 159 Hürrem 175

(Calvinus) 62, 64; Lopez, Gregorio 61; Marcus, Franciscus 63; Medina, Miguel de 61, 69n47; Nievo, Alessandro 60, 83; Pepo 68n42; Pontano, Ludovico 60; Socinus, Bartholomaeus 62; Tudeschi Nicolò de’ (Abbas Panormitus) 62 (see also canonists and theologians) Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis) 123

ideology of ability 19 Imber, Colin 163, 174 impotence as marital impediment 60, 63, 71–2, 79–82, 84–7, 91, 94, 96, 103 Inalcik, Halil 163 Institutes 41, 43, 58 intersex 10, 18 Irvine, Martin 56 Istanbul. See Byzantium. Ius commune 80

Lacan, Jacques 13n1 Lactantius 76 Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Le Français de 153–4 Laqueur, Thomas 18–19; critics of 152, 159 Le Cerf de la Viéville, Jean-Laurent 160n19 Leges Visigothorum 52, 58 Leis Willelme 52, 67n28 Lenski, R. C. H. 71 Levant Company 167 Levine, Laura 105 Lewknor, Lewis 114 Lex Alamannorum 50 Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis 46, 62 Lex Frisionum 49 Lex Ribvaria 50 Lex Salica Karolina 50 Lex Talionis 49, 52, 54, 57, 67n22 Lichtwer, Dorothea 91–3 liminality 3–4, 107, 112, 118, 120, 142, 181 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) 66n7 Lloyd, Lowowick 109 Lombardi, Lorenzo 95 Lucian of Samosata 68n32 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 73–4 lynching 5 Lyttleton, Lord George 190n47

Janissaries 168–9, 175 Jardine, Lisa 105 Jarman, Michelle 5–6 Jerome, St. 76 Jewish attitudes toward castration 72, 76–8 Junghanns, Moritz 92 jurists: Accursius 59; Alciati, Andrea 62–4; Azo 59, 60; Azpilcueta, Martín de (Doctor Navarrus) 61, 82–3; Bassianus, Johannes 59; Bologneti, Giovanni 63; Bracton, Henry de 51–2; Brechaeus, Joannes 61; Brisson, Barnabé 61; Brunellus, Ioannis 62, 64; Budé Guillaume 61; Caepolla, Bartholomaeus 62; Conanus, Franciscus 61; Cujas, Jacques 61, 64; Goffredus de Trani 60; Guido da Baisio 60; Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis) 60; Henriquez, Henricus 61, 63; Irnerius 58–9; Kahl, Joannes

Kant, Immanuel 157 Kapi Ag˘ asi (Chief White Eunuch) 167–71, 176, 179 Keyser, Dorothy 4, 139 Kingsman, William Long 94 Kizlar Ag˘ asi (Chief Black Eunuch) 164, 167–8, 170, 173–8 Kösem 175 Krimmer, Elisabeth 161n28 Kuefler, Mathew 3–4, 43, 48 Kuttner, Stephen 58, 80–1

236

Index

Mamluk sultanate 166 Mancini, Domenico 159n1 Mann, David 105 Marmon, Shaun 3 marriage 11–12, 19, 40–1, 44–5, 49, 52, 58–64, 70–97, 103, 195 marriage plots (theatrical) 105, 115, 120–1, 125 Martial (Marcus Maritalis Valerius) 66n7, 74–6 Martin, George R. R. 195 masculinity 2–3, 5, 6, 9, 15, 18, 21, 24–5, 35, 40, 45, 48–50, 56, 59, 73–8, 89, 104–5, 109–11, 118–19, 138, 146, 149, 151, 156, 183, 185, 191, 193 Maternus, Julius Firmicus 76 Maunsell, Dorothea (Tenducci) 94–5 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules 137 McClive, Cathy 38n21, 137 McCloskey, Deirdre 193–4 McGeary, Thomas 148–50 McGrath, Aidan 71–2, 87–8, 194 McPherson, David 114 McRuer, Robert 96 McVaugh, Michael 32 medical commentators (early modern): Banister, John 32–3; Barbette, Paul 33; Bell, Benjamin 24, 35; Benedetti, Alessandro 25; Bulwer, John 17, 19, 26, 27, 178–9; Brunschwig, Hieronymus 33; Chauliac, Guy de 34; Cocles, Bartolomeo della Rocca 24; Colbatch, Sir John 33; Columbo, Realdo 33; Cooke, James 35; Crooke, Helkiah 23, 25, 27, 31; Culpepper, Nicholas 23; Du Laurens, André 23, 25–8; Edwards, Edward 39n34; Falloppio, Gabriele 34; Huarte, Juan 24, 135–6; La Charrière, Joseph de 35; La Vauguion, M. de 35; Lanfranco of Milan 34; Leclerc, Charles-Gabriel 35; Lowe, Peter 27–8, 30, 34; Marten, John 24, 26, 28; Master Nicholas 22; Mojon, Benedetto 27; Paré, Ambrose 23–5; Read, Alexander 33; Ryder, Hugh 31; Salmon, William 35; Scultetus, Johannes 24; Stromayr, Caspar 30; Vicary, Thomas 23; Vigo, Giovanni da 22–3, 32–3, 38n32; Wiseman, Richard 31–2. Mei, Girolamo 134 Metzler, Irina 13n9; 127n21 Meun, Jean de 56 misogyny 36, 118–19, 145, 194

Misson, François Maxilimien 152 Moloney, Francis J. 71 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 160n23, 187n6 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de 1,182, 184–6, 189n44, 190n45 Montfort, Simon de 55 Morduant, Charles, Earl of Peterborough 150 Moryson, Fynes 114 Mos italicus/mos gallicus 68n43 Mughal Empire 162 Mulvey, Laura 2 Munn, Mark 73 Muñoz, José Esteban 104 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 146 Murray, Jacqueline 56 mystical castration 98n13 Naima, Mustafa 175 Narses 27 Necipog˘ lu, Gülru 174, 188n17 Neoplatonism 107, 126n9, 143, 180 normativity 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 19, 26, 36, 41, 44, 49, 64, 89–90, 104–5, 111–13, 116–17, 119, 121, 123, 130–1, 135, 142, 147, 149, 152–3, 159, 163, 178, 192–6 Novellae 41–2, 47–8, 58 Oliver, Lisi 49–50 opera 1, 2, 12, 27, 58, 96, 101, 105, 107, 130–61, 195–6; early emergence of: 133–42 opera composers and librettists: Caccini, Guilio 134; Calzabigi Ranieri de’ 131; Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 144; Clement IX (Giulio Rospigliosi) 137, 160n12; Gluck, Christoph Willibald 131; Handel, George Frideric 139; Lully, Jean-Baptiste 144; Manelli, Francesco 139; Metastasio, Pietro 151; Monteverdi, Claudio 134; Pergoliosi, Giovanni Battista 153; Peri, Jacopo 134; Predieri, Luca Antonio 143; Rinuccini, Ottavio 134; Rossi, Luigi 137; Rovetta, Giovanni 135; Sacrati, Francesco 157; Strozzi, Giulio 157; Vinci, Leonardo 143 operas: Andromeda (1637) 139; Antonio e Cleopatra (1725) 143; Attilio Regolo (1750) 151; Dafne (1598) 134; Ercole in Lidia (1645) 135; Euridice (1600)

Index 134; Farnace (1724) 143; Guilio Cesare in Egitto (1724) 139; Il Palazzo d’Atlante (1642) 137, 139; Il rapimento de Cefalo (1600) 134; La finta pazza (1641) 157–8; La maga fulminata (1638) 139; La serva padrona (1752) 153; Orfeo (1607) 134, 138; Orfeo (1647) 137; Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) 131; Sant’Alessio (1632) 137; Scipione (1724) 143; Sofonisba (1722) 143 Origen 77 (see also self-castration) Ortkemper, Hubert 131 Ottoman Empire 2, 11–12, 101, 162–87, 189n29, 195 Ottoman offices 168–73 (see also Kapi Ag˘ asi and Kizlar Ag˘ asi) Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 37n5, 73 Pactus leges salica 50 palace school 167, 171–6 Paris, Matthew 51 Park, Katharine 32 Passerini, Francis Michael 95 Paster, Gail Kern 24, 145 Paul of Aegina 28–30 Paul, St. 133; and marriage debt 67n23, 83–4, 92, 96 Peirce, Leslie P. 174, 189n32 Pepys, Samuel 127n18 Perrin, Pierre 143–4 Persia 162, 165–6, 177, 179, 182, 184–5 phallocentrism 2 Phillips, Constantia 151 Philo of Alexandria 76–7 Plato 108, 143 plays: A Game at Chess 114–15; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 106; All’s Well that Ends Well 113; An Excellent Tragedy of Mulleasses the Turke 113; Antonio and Mellida 110–12; Antony and Cleopatra 112–13; Cleopatra, Queen of Ægypt 113; Cymbeline 107; Don Gil de la calzas verdes 125; El amor médico 125; El Cerco de Santa Fe e ilustre hazaña 124; El mesón de la corte 125; Eunouchos 119; Eunuchus 119, 125; Every Man in His Humour 106; Herod and Antipater 113; La Calandria 120–1; La gran sultana doña Catalina de Oviedo 124; La Mariane 125; Menaechmi 120; Mithridate 125; The Comedy of Errors 128n39; The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub 111; The Country Girl 124; The

237

Country Wife 123–4; The Duke of Milan 106; The Emperor of the East 113; The Eunuch 116–17, 119; The Eunuch, or, The Darby Captain 128n35; The Fair Maid of the West 103; The False One 127n20; The Fancies, Chaste and Noble 122–3; The Guardian 110–11; The Hollander 106; The Insatiate Countess 109; The Novella 115–16; The Renegado 104, 115; The Rival Friends 121–2; The Tragedie of Valentinian 107, 117; Titus Andronicus 112–13; Twelfth Night 107, 121–2; Two Noble Kinsmen 106; Valentinian, a Tragedy as ‘tis Altered by the Earl of Rochester 118–19; Volpone 114 playwrights: Beaumont, Francis 106, 117; Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da 120–1; Brome, Richard 115; Cervantes, Miguel de 124; Cowley, Abraham 110; D’Avenant, William 113; Etherege, George 111; Fletcher, John 106, 117; Fontaine Jean de La 125; Ford, John 122–3; Garrick, David 124; Glapthorne, Henry 106; Hausted, Peter 121; Hemmings William 116–17, 120; Heywood, Thomas 103; Jonson, Ben 106, 114, 126n7; L’Hermite, Tristan 125; Markham, Gervase 113; Marston, John 110–12; Massinger, Philip 103–4, 106, 113–14; May, Thomas 113; Menander 119, 128n37; Middleton, Thomas 2, 114–15,; Plautus 120; Racine, Jean 125; Sampson, William 113; Shakespeare, William 8, 106, 112, 121; Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 119–21, 123, 125, 128n37; Tirso de Molina 125; Vega, Lope de 125; Wilmot, John (Earl of Rochester) 118; Wycherley, William 123–4, 128n48 Pliny 66n7; 91n11 Plutarch 125 prick songs 111 Prynne, William 108–9 Puff, Helmut 127n24 Querelle des Bouffons 153 Quintilian 66n7 race 12, 15, 101, 115–16, 162–87, 189n35, 193–4, 196 Raguenet, François 146–7

238

Index

Rainolds, John 119, 123 Ranke-Heinemann, Ute 70–1, 93, 118–19 rape 51–3, 57, 67n26 Raynaud, Théophile 27, 90–1 Rear Window 2 Reeser, Todd 6, 137–8 Reilly, Philip R. 5 Renzi, Anna 135, 157 Rincon, Antoine de 167 Ringrose, Kathryn 3, 127n23 Robinson, Anastasia 149–50 Robles, Amelio (Amelia Robles Ávila) 10 Roman jurists: Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus) 41–3, 45–6, 61; Paul (Julius Paulus Prudentissima) 41–2, 46; Gaius 41–2; Marcianus 46; Venuleius Saturninus 46; Julian 41, 45; Modestinus 41, 46 Roman law 11, 40–8, 57; revival of 57–64, 70–2, 80, 87, 91 Rosand, Ellen 157–8 Rose, Sarah 8 Rosselli, John 127n18, 130 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 155, 157 Ruggieri, Carmela Russo 43 Said, Edward 163 Saint–Évremond, Charles de 139, 141 San Cassiano 137 Sarrasine 27 Schubart, Christian 156–7 Schwankmären 54: Die Rache des Ehemannes 54–5, 67n21; Die Wolfsgrube 55 scopophilia 2 Sed est quaesitum 45, 59, 61–3, 103 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 123 self-castration 73–8, 97n12 Semiramus 17 Senelick, Laurence 161n20 Serano, Julia 38n27, 128n34 sexual identity 3, 4, 19, 21, 112, 191, 193 Shakespeare, Tom 192 Si serva § si spadoni 43–4, 59, 62–3, 103 Siebers, Tobin 19, 96 Simons, Patricia 25, 50, 68n36, 109 Singerman, Alan 190n44 sodomy 48, 52, 55, 57, 68n30, 116, 121, 149, 193 Spacciani, Cesare 86 spado/spadones 11, 42–65, 66n.7, 70, 82–7,128n44; as character in a play 122–3 Sporus 69n48

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 138 Stewart, Jimmy 2 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus) 66n11 sultans (Ottoman Empire): Ahmed I 175; Ibrahim I 175, 180; Mehmed II 166; Mehmed IV 168, 175; Murad II 166; Murad III 167, 181; Murad IV 175; Selim I 166; Selim II 166; Süleyman I 166–7, 170, 174–5, 179 Swift, Jonathan 160n23 Tacitus 66n7 Tagereau, Vincent 90 Tamburini, Tommaso 139 taurobolium 73, 76 Taylor, Gary 2–3, 124, 127n25 Tertullian 76 Topkapı- Palace 166, 169, 174, 176 Tosi, Pietro Francesco 143 Tougher, Shaun 3, 66n10, 73, 135 Townshend, Aurelian 127n17 Tragiense, Lauriso 144 transgender 9–10, 12–13, 15, 35–6, 41, 64, 74, 101, 106, 112, 114, 119, 130, 132–3, 149, 157, 162, 164, 176, 186–7, 192, 194–6 transphobia 10 transsexuality 9–10; 14n18; 17–31, 36, 64, 74–6, 124, 148, 151–2, 193–4 Tuchel, Susan 67n17; 68n31 Turhan Hatice 175 Urfé, Honoré d’ 118 Valerius Maximus 66n10, 67n16 Valéry, Paul 1, 4 Valide sultan 173, 175–6 Van Loo, Charles-Amédée-Philippe 165 vasectomy 7, 13n8, 87, 191–2, 194 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 116–17 Vertigo 2 Vettori, Piero 134 virginity 51–2 Vitalis, Oderic 55 Wallace, William 55 Weismantel, Mary 10 Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire (early modern): Angiolello, Giovanni Maria 189n28; Baudier, Michel 188n15; Beauvau, Henry de 170, 188n21; Biron, Jean de Gontaut 168; Bobovi, Antonio 169–70, 172,

Index 178–9, 181–2, 190n46; Boemus, Johann 177–8; Bon, Ottaviano 168, 170, 188n15; Broquière, Bertrandon de la 169; Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de 167, 169, 177; Chardin, Jean 181–2, 189n40; Chierici, Alfonso 181; D’Arvieux, Laurent 172, 179–80; Dallam, Thomas 182; Deshayes de Courmenin, Louis 172, 180; Du Loir 181, 183; Fresne-Canaye, Philippe du 167–8; Geuffroy, Antoine 179; Girardin, Pierre de 188n19; Hierosolimitano, Domenico 181; Lenoir, le Sieur 181; Menavino, Giovan Antonio 170, 178; Nicolay, Nicolas de 177; Palerne, Jean 179; Postel, Guillaume 170, 188n21; Quiclet 188n15; Ramberti, Benedetto

239

170; Rycaut, Paul 169–70, 172–3, 179–80, 183; Sandys, George 178; Stochove, Vincent 179–80; Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 162, 170, 180, 182; Thévenot, Jean 166; Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 167, 180; Villamont, Jacques de 189n36; Withers, Robert 183, 188n15 Wheeler, Bonnie 68n41 Winroth, Anders 69n42; 98n17 Wood, David Houston 9 Wright, Thomas 108–9 Zacchia, Paolo 71, 98n22 Zanetti, Antonio Maria 145 Zarinebaf, Fariba 175