A Complex Delight:The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (review)

This book is difficult to review: On the one hand, it is the work of a scholar whose earlier publications (e.g., Image as Insight[Boston, 1985] and Carnal Knowing[Boston, 1989]) were in the forefront of women's studies and feminism in the 1980s; on the other hand, it largely adheres to the epistemologies that informed feminist scholarship then, as immediately evinced by the bibliography. For one chapter in A Complex Delight, the author revises and expands her seminal article "The Virgin's One Bare Breast' (1986). Yet these retro aspects do not vitiate a present contribution that builds and enlarges upon older scholarship. As a significant departure from the author's concern with European cultural production of the Middle Ages, this work traces the reception of visual representations of the uncovered breast up to the eve of the modern era. The subject has resonance in the United States, where scandals surrounded a statue of a symbolically nude "Spirit of Justice" in Washington (covered up by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft) and a momentary "wardrobe malfunction" by the popular singer Janet Jackson in front of a football crowd.

The author states her aim in chapter 1: To understand, by contextualizing, her observation that "by the mid-eighteenth century, the absence of paintings of the Virgin with an exposed breast suggests it was no longer possible to signify religious subjectivity by depicting a naked breast" (p. 14). One consequence was to dramatize eroticism without nakedness, as in Bernini's famous St. Teresa in Ecstasy(1652) and similar works (figs. 5, 6). Eventually, secular discourses—medical, pornographic—took over the exposed female body.

The author also lays out her theoretical framework at the outset (pp. 19–21), bravely acknowledging the problems that arise from postmodern notions of multivalence and "meaning," gender and sex, and briefly pondering the significance of a "Period Eye," and of alterity ("did people of early modern societies see what I see?"). She intends to "triangulate" (my term) the visual object between historical/contextual and postmodern/theoretical sightlines, but the chapters are weighted toward the former, following the mantra that "bodies are historically contingent." An apt summary is provided in an afterword: "I have sketched the interaction of an art historical and religious phenomenon with the intellectual, religious, social, and economic history and technology that created a Western European early modern world vastly different from its late medieval predecessor" (p. 131).

The meat of the book is presented in two sections, each with two chapters: "The Religious Breast" (The Virgin and Mary Magdalen), and "The Secular Breast" (anatomy and pornography). The Magdalen is eroticized from the Renaissance on, even as she repents the sins of the flesh (sensual/sexual pleasures) that were attributed to her. The author's narrative is not disturbed by the sado-eroticism of the tortured bodies of Ss. Agatha, Barbara, and Catherine, frequently represented with their breasts about to be cut off. She does perceive tensions "between cultural and natural meanings," and between "erotic attraction and religious meaning" (p. 45). "Natural" is a freighted concept in postmodern gender theory, since it essentializes the experience of some (lactating) women. Late-medieval women's intensely erotic devotional writing may be viewed as somatized spiritual experience.

The author sets the scene for her analysis of the later secular representations, by invoking the negative or conflicted attitudes to the female body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (pp. 79–83). In the same period, artists and physicians showed an increased interest in the gynecological body, usefully summarized by the author (pp. 89–95). There were also changes in parenting, such as conflicting attitudes to wet nurses (pp. 104–06). The rise of pornography is associated with witch-hunting and the circulation of printed images (pp. 111–20). The author unquestioningly accepts the view that pornography is always objectifying and demeaning of women, denying the possibility that it might have...