The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early-Modern Europe (review)

Across a collection of fourteen essays on the imagery of body parts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary, medical, religious, and philosophical texts, The Body in Parts, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, traces an imaginary bodily representation in the early modern. The body parts and the theoretical focus range throughout the book, including pieces on the breast present in poetry or missing in narratives on Amazons, the tongue and the problem of boundaries, fundaments as rectums and foundations, lesbianism and the medical view of the clitoris, the belly and social order, fantasies of the eye's power, and the sacred heart of Jesus. The result is not a comprehen-sive overview of the early modern body, but a collection of essays linked by a shared focus on the body and on the ontological status of the part. In the process, The Body in Parts raises questions about location and dis-location, subjects and objects, and the ways in which aspects of culture came to be imagined within the parts of a dissected body.

One of the critical blurbs on the book jacket claims: "The Body in Parts is a must-read not only for those interested in the culture of early modern Europe, but for anyone interested in thinking about the modern and postmodern body as well." It is certainly true that the book will help to define the early modern edge of the recent cross-disciplinary fascination with the body. It is part of a newly invigorated and refocused field of literary and cultural studies of bodies fragmented, dead, written on, dissected, volatile, ventriloquized, and "freaked." It also appears at a time of new scientific, social, and ethical conundrums raised by the Human Genome Project and the technologies of cloning and body part replacement. The Body in Parts contributes to the field a tighter focus on images of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the "early early modern" for some) and certainly will have something of interest for those working on the body in literature, medical history, religious philosophy, or travel narrative, as well as those studying sexuality or theories of fragmentation.

World historians may find elements of interest in several of the essays. Kathryn Schwarz's study of the breast includes early modern tales of milk-squirting Aztec women and monomastic Amazons. For Schwarz, the breast nurturing, missing, squirting, or threatening finds its place within a European context of socialized anxieties and desires centered on the female body. Katherine Park's essay on images of lesbianism and female genital hypertrophy in early modern medical literature includes a commentary on the female diviners of Fez in Mauritania from Leo Africanus' Historical Description of Africa. Stephen Greenblatt's essay includes accounts of self-mutilation in the travel narrative of a Portuguese visitor to what is now Laos. Even essays with a focus on primarily English material offer broader theoretical perspectives. Fantasies of ocular power (Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky), the patriarchal narrative of social productivity (Gail Kern Paster), and monstrous orality (Carla Mazzio) are among the themes that could be developed in other realms.

World historians, however, should not expect to find the broader world perspectives offered by Zone Press's earlier Fragments for a History of the Human Body (1989). The Body in Parts, despite its wide subtitle, retains a primary focus on material from England, especially literary matter. Shakespeare's theater is by far the dominant source throughout the book, with twenty-nine plays discussed in twelve of the fourteen essays. The fact that Shakespeare appears on eighty pages (one-quarter) of The Body in Parts is not surprising, as all the contributors except two teach in English departments and six have published books on Shakespeare or English drama. Medical history also tends to rely heavily on English...