1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Illustrations vii
4. List of Contributors viii
5. Acknowledgements xi
6. List of Abbreviations xii
7. Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration 1
8. 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration 29
9. 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs 48
10. 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity 73
11. 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary 87
12. 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law 108
13. 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject 131
14. 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources 149
15. 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs 174
16. 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga 188
17. 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee 210
18. 11 Eunuchs of the Grail 229
19. 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris’s Romans de la rose 255
20. 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Fèvre’s La Vieille 280
21. 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration 295
22. Select Bibliography 314
23. Index 345