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

Miles traces the changing visual representation of the female breast in the Western world. According to her, the breast was predominantly a religious symbol in paintings made during the late Middle Ages, but by 1750, it had become a thoroughly erotic and medical phenomenon. This book expands on Miles’ influential essay, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast,” first published in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Miles revisits familiar subject matter but includes a wider array of images of female breasts, placing them within a broad, pan-European context that features gradual changes in religious practice, medical concepts, women’s economic status, and the rise of witch hunting. The book’s methodology is traditionally art-historical and not interdisciplinary. The author arranges the images by date and theme, considering how they changed over time in relation to contemporary theological, medical, political, and philosophical written texts. Her historical evidence is primarily gleaned from work published by historians within the past thirty years or so.

The originality of Miles’ approach consists in her collection and analysis of the images themselves. This focus on visual evidence allows her to challenge Steinberg’s famous claim that Renaissance imagery draws attention to Christ’s penis in order to emphasize his embodied humanity.¹ Miles contends that the humanity of the Christ child is also central to early modern paintings that show him breast feeding—his fleshly body prominently figured in relation to his mother’s breast, thus drawing attention to the importance of the female body in early modem religious belief. This point is in accord with Bynum’s work.²

Scholars now regularly examine the shifting representation of the female breast in Western culture, focusing on debates about breast feeding, medical understandings of lactation, and the significance of stories about supposedly single-breasted Amazons.³ Most of these publications are restricted to a single country or locale, noting the specificity of regional and historical beliefs about the breast. In contrast, Miles’ book takes a broad view of the subject, resembling the survey of representations of the female breast written by Marilyn Yalom—The History of the Breast (New York, 1997). Unlike Miles, Yalom takes her analysis into the modern period to consider the commercialization of the breast. Both authors portray, however, the gradual transformation of the breast from a sacred to an erotic object during the early modern period in Europe. Miles’ book, which is aimed at a general audience, provides a good starting point for those beginning to think about the historical nature of the human body.