 

 

rim * LIBRARY
\. 0 Michigan State
2 0‘ .... University ,

 

 

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

THE MAKING OF THE MONSTROUS: FEMALE NAVIGATION OF
THE GALENIC HUMORAL MODEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

presented by

Brittany Lynn West

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

Master of degree in Literature in English
Arts

 

 

I\/t abate C %L

7Major Professor’ 5 Signature
5/] lo 1/ at) I D

Date

MSU is an Afﬁrmative ActiorVEqual Opportunity Employer

 

—- -.-._-Aa-y--L--.-.-.-.—_—,-.- .—

--.-«— -—-

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5I08 K1IProleoc8PresIClRC/DateDueindd

 

ll. .l-l r lI lllrll‘lllillillt 1.. .ti

 

.i III- I. i E .l Ills.

 

THE MAKING OF THE MONSTROUS: FEMALE NAVIGATION OF THE
GALENIC HUMORAL MODEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

By

Brittany Lynn West

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Literature in English

2010

ABSTRACT

THE MAKING OF THE MONSTROUS: FEMALE NAVIGATION OF THE
GALENIC HUMORAL MODEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

By'
Brittany Lynn West
This thesis will focus on the way the female subject was
discursively produced within the Galenic-humoral model. There has recently
been a move by literary and historical theorists to view this model one in which
the subject may have the ability to fashion him/herself through moderation and
self-control. In his recent work Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England,
Michael Schoenfeldt writes: “I stress the empowerment that Galenic psychology
and ethics bestowed on the individual.” Working in a different direction than
those who have claimed the Galenic model to be one of repression, Schoenfeldt,
“emphasizes rather that self-control authorizes individuality” (11). The arguments
he makes are convincing, and it is easy to see that the discourse of the humors
instilled a need for balance in almost all aspects of early modern life. Yet, I will
that this is not true of all subjects, and move to show that women’s physical
bodies and place in the discourse of balance excluded them from the realm of
self-fashioning through moderation or self-control. This created a situation in
which women had to search for alternative ways to ﬁnd the agency to fashion the

self.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

MONSTROUS EXCLUSION .................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 2

WOMEN AS PREY TO PASSIONS/EXCESS ............................................. 7
CHAPTER 3

FASTING AND FEASTING .................................................................. 11
CHAPTER 4

BODILY SOURCES OF ANXIETY AND INSECURITY ................................ 18
CHAPTER 5

WOMAN AS THE UNKNOWABLE ACTOR ................................................ 25
CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: MONSTROSITY AND FLUIDITY ....................................... 3O
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................. 32

iii

l. Monstrous Exclusion: The Galenic Model of Self-control

In their introduction to Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture,
Emerging Subjects, Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callagan
discuss the way that female subjects are formed, and the essays in the work deal
with “the production of gendered subjects” (1). These theorists assert that the
Renaissance was a time in which the subject emerged, creating more emphasis
on the individual and interiority. However, with this shift came new methods of
controlling these individual subjects: “hence, just as the subject emerged as an
increasingly bounded private self, various social mechanisms arose which also
compelled its subjection" (4). Looking at the discourse of the passions and self-
control, Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars often refer to the period as one
in which the subject was born, during which interiority and self-fashioning
became possible, creating a situation wherein the subject could be produced
through new and interesting cultural shifts. According to literary critics such as
Michael Schoenfeldt, the period is one in which the body and its workings were
tied to a discourse of desire and of'appetites that did indeed discursively produce
a subject. Much of these ideas are formed around the work of Galen, a Roman
physician and philosopher of Greek origin. Galen asserted that bodily
temperature and composition affected the emotions, or passions of the soul
(Schoenfeldt 9). The physical body was tied to psychological inwardness,
creating subjects that were fashioned partially through physical make up and

bodily realities.

The Galenic model of humors was one in which, ideally, the subject would
maintain a balance of the humors in order that the emotions would stay in

equilibrium. In his essay “Strange Alteration,” Timothy Hampton asserts:

For Galen, every organ has its own innate character, and the stomach is a
producer of heat, which transforms substances by ‘cooking’ or ‘concocting’ them.
This in turn leads to an emphasis on the maintenance of heat, through which
alteration occurs. Those parts of a given food which are not altered sufﬁciently
are taken into the spleen as black bile and later circulated to help thicken the
blood as needed. The parts which have been cooked adequately become yellow
bile (‘thin, added a comma? moist and ﬂuid’), and are carried all over the body.
Those which are overcooked (‘having been roasted to an excessive degree’) are
considered ‘abnormal’ and are often described as ‘corrosive’ to the body. The
key to health thus becomes maintenance of the proper level of heat in the body,
in this way alteration is not excessive and the movement of the humors does not
get out of balance. (276-277).

If one had too much of a certain humor, he/she could feel melancholy,
sanguine, phlegmatic, or choleric. The passions, or emotions such as lust, love,
and anger, were seen as a result of an imbalance in the humors. The Galenic
system was also closely tied to food, as what one took into the body was seen as
determining its humoral composition. Such a model encouraged moderation and
balance, eschewing overindulgence as dangerous and threatening. A gluttonous
subject was a monstrous and immoral one; self-control through physical and
emotional temperance created a moral and responsible subject. Added a space
While scholars originally saw the Galenic system as an oppressive and
overbearing model wherein subjects were all seen as ﬂat, their emotions or
passions as a simple result of bodily composition, in recent years, more and is
there a period in here somewhere? more theorists are coming to view the model

as one in which the subject could fashion an individual self through moderation.

One point of this investigation is to examine the way in which the Galenic
model intersects with ideas about fashioning the subject. In Reading the Early
Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, early modern
theorists Gail Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson anthologize a
collection of works that examine the shifting paradigm of bodily emotion and

desire, as well as the production of the subject:

Indeed, early modern psychology only partially shares the priority
we place on inwardness, alongside very different conceptions of
emotions as physical, environmental, and external
phenomena...late Renaissance neurophilosophy revised Galenic
models of emotions, refashioning the more volatile Galenic body
into an arena of self-possession, volition, and executive control.
(15-16)

The early modern period was one in which the subject’s psychology was not
seen wholly as a product of the mind. The body, and the way it was believed to
operate under the Galenic system, was thought to have a large inﬂuence over
the subject’s emotional and physical state. As Hampton says, “in pre-modern
medicine, the generation and balance of humors binds the regimes of what we
call physiology and psychology” (277). Critics are using the Galenic system to
understand the body, sexuality, and desire because it is a model that ties
together the mind and body in a way that reﬂects the discourse of the
Renaissance period and provides a paradigm through which the subject is
produced. The arguments of theorists such as Michael Schoenfeldt assert that
the Galenic system allows the subject the agency through restraint. I will argue
that although this may be true for some subjects, it does not necessarily apply to

those who were gendered female.

I move to show that the female body itself, along with its reproductive and
sexual processes, was not understood, creating a situation in which women had
more complex responses to injunctions of morality and self-control. In some
ways, the Galenic model relegated them to the borders of a discourse of
moderation, often making them appear monstrous. Valerie Traub, in her article
“Gendering Mortality in Early Modern Anatomies,” points out that charting a
knowable body was certainly the focus of anatomists such as Vesalius. However
the gendered body’s inability to be completely knowable led to anxiety: "In their
defensive construction of two apprehensible genders, anatomical illustrations
function in the way Kristeva describes the mechanism of abjection: because
certain unconscious anxieties, of which gender becomes the sign, are never
completely excluded, no ﬁxed boundary is secured, no stability of signiﬁcation is
attained” (46). In other words, the quest to know the body is that which contains
the anxieties that have produced this need to know in the ﬁrst place. The
differences between the female and male bodies were uncertain, and many
doctors and anatomists worked to make them concrete, safely stowed in a
knowable system of signiﬁcation. I will later examine this anxiety, especially
about the virginal female body. In her work Hymenuetics, Marie Loughlin asserts
that “this body and its unique hymeneal membrane are the object of anxious
scrutiny and intense debate (29). Thus this bodily difference is key and should

not be ignored or bracketedadd a period

In his book Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, Michael

Schoenfeldt highlights the agency that the Galenic humoral system afforded to

the early modern subject, and while people were not necessarily thinking or
acting consistently according to the Galenic model, the importance he placed on
balance and body-soul connections were generally understood and known.
Schoenfeldt’s argument claims that, because the Galenic system depended on
self-control though moderation, the system could actually grant agency: “I stress
the empowerment that Galenic psychology and ethics bestowed on the
individual.” Working in a different direction than those who have claimed the
Galenic model to be one of repression, Schoenfeldt, "emphasizes is emphasizes
supposed to be in the quote? rather that self-control authorizes individuality” (11).
The arguments he makes are convincing, especially his assertion in relation to
self-fashioning through resistance, and it is easy to see that the discourse of the

humors instilled a need for balance in almost all aspects of early modern life.

Yet by making his focus the universal subject, Schoenfeldt may
unintentionally elide those subjects who were seen as less capable of self-
control. Those who indulged too liberally in their appetites, or became gluttonous,
were a danger to the equilibrium of the entire system. Some feminist critics have
asserted that this gluttonous subject was often female. Liz Herbert McAvoy and
Theresa Walters investigate the ways that gluttonous subjects are viewed and
produced, claiming that a system of the moderated subject relies on the other, or
outsider. McAvoy notes, “monstrosities...are always lurking in the shadows, at
the border of selfhood and perpetually threatening to render the ‘faire and
excellent’ subject a ‘fowle and indecent...Monster”’ shoul this be a tripple (4).

The problem with the idea of agency in such a system is the problem of the

monstrous exclusion. Schoenfeldt risks ignoring those subjects without the
ability to practice self-control: those subjects rendered monstrous. This
monstrosity was a result of the inability to control one’s emotions, passions, or

bodily ﬂow.

Schoenfeldt points out that the precarious humoral balance was reliant on
what the body took in and excreted. Sickness, physical and spiritual, was caused

by the improper balance of diet:

Under this regime, illness is not the product of an infection without
but rather is the result of an internal imbalance of the humoral ﬂuid.
Although this account of behavior appears at once deeply
materialist and incorrigibly deterrninist, in actual practice it was
possible to manipulate the humoral ﬂuids through diet and
evacuation (3).

While this excerpt allots the ability to fashion the self to the individual through
control of inner and outer bodily ﬂow fragment When Schoenfeldt continues
however. he points out that speciﬁc individuals had different compositions, with
different bodily issues. The bodily ﬂow of any individual will determine the

foods/actions that need to be applied in order to maintain health and balance.

The choleric man, for example, is angry because he has too much choler.
He needs to purge this excess, and/or assimilate substances that are cold
and wet to counterbalance the hot and dry qualities of excess choler...(3)

Yet, the female body was hidden and unexplained in comparison to men’s
regulated and controlled bodies. There was more to be dealt with than the four
humors. In a system where the controlled inner and outer ﬂow of bodily ﬂuids
determined monstrosity, women’s bodies had unexplained monthly cycles and a

reproductive system that bred anxiety in the Galenic discourse. Their bodies

were made monstrous because they were the “other.” I will set out to show that
writers such as Thomas Write and Richard Bancroft wrote about women in ways
that suggested they might be incapable of self-control, that women sometimes
fashioned monstrous bodies in ways that circumvented the Galenic system that
rendered them helpless and devoid of agency, and that the female body, and the
anxiety it produced, is one overarching reason that women were exiled to the

boundaries of a discourse of equilibrium.
ll. Women as Prey to Passions/Excess

Thomas Wright sees equilibrium as being a result of controlled passions.
In The Passions of the Mind in General, Thomas Wright focuses on the passions
and how they are best moderated. Wright attempts to make a place for women
by suggesting that they can actually be the most transcendent subjects by
ﬁghting against their baser natures to control their passions and achieve self-
control, stating that, “more prized which is worse inclined and best mortiﬁed” (Is
something missing here? (120). This kind of women is placed on a moral
pedestal. Conversely, in Thomas Bancroft’s The Glutton’s Feaver, woman is
gluttony, she is the monstrous personiﬁed. As the source of all sins, gluttony
reigns in hell, “Here Gluttony, enrag'd for want of food, / Eates Enuies vipers,
while the monster tires” (92-93). Through these two works, a case can be made
that women constituted the borders of the Galenic system through a belief in their
inherent lack of self-control; they became either transcendent or monstrous

subjects; they inhabited the “the border of selfhood.”

In the introductory chapter of his work, Schoenfeldt cites Levinus Lemnius
on women and their lack of self-control: “women are subject to all passions and
perturbations...a woman enraged is beside? herself and hath not control over her
self, so that she cannot rule her passions or bridle her disturbed affections, or
stand against them with force of reason and judgment... For a woman’s mind is

I”

not as strong as a man s (36). Lemnius continues to explain that women’s lack
of self-control is due to their natural body composition, telling his reader that their
lack of reason is inherent to the female body. While Schoenfeldt clearly
disagrees with the view that women are unable to practice self-control, these
assertions, since they illustrate how women were discursively produced in early
modern England, have large import for his thesis. He claims that the Galenic

model is not as repressive as has been claimed in the past; instead he views it

as a tool for self-fashioning through self-control and moderation.

However, if women were discursively produced as subjects without
recourse to self-control, where do they ﬁt into Schoenfeldt’s assertion? Almost
immediately after recognizing the “asserted inferiority of women,” and
acknowledging that the discourse of inwardness is “frequently gendered, ”
Schoenfeldt moves on to elide these differences, and speak of self-fashioning in
general, without noting the important implications of the gendering of such
discourse. The work as a whole focuses on the works of men: “I could not ﬁnd an
example of a woman writer practicing the philosophically rigorous and literarily
intense engagement with physiological inwardness that marks the four canonical

male writers under examination” (38). This in itself should be a red ﬂag. Why

aren’t women using the model to write? While looking at the universal subject is
productive and innovative for Schoenfeldt, perhaps the place of women, and the
monstrous, requires inquiry. It is necessary to examine women’s explicit and
inherent disqualiﬁcation from the Galenic system, their methods of living outside
such a system, and the ways they coped and avoided the limitations that the
discourse of sexuality and gender would attempt to place on their corporeal

differences.

Steeped in the discourse and common beliefs of the day, Thomas Wright’s
The Passions of the Mind in General works to illustrate the ways that women are
both included and excluded from the discourse of moderation; they are made to
inhabit its borders. While he tries to make a place for women and speak to a
universal subject, the language in his work is invariably gendered: he personiﬁes
the passions as female, and women ﬁnd themselves again on the borders of his
discourse and selfhood. The irony is that the place that Wright attempts to make
for women is the very place that renders the Galenic model one of repression,
one that ﬁnds them existing on the edges. Wright ﬁrst acknowledges that the
discourse of inwardness ? hold women to be inconstant, and easily swayed by
passions. He quotes many common witticisms and proverbs, clearly illustrating
that women are assumed to be incapable of self-control. One shows the reader

that women are believed to be the ultimate example of inconstancy:

What is lighter than smoke? The ﬂame,
Than ﬂame? The wind,

Than wind? a woman, more

Than her nothing I ﬁnd (119).

Wrnd and ﬂame are both intemperate and volatile elements. Wrnd blows hot and
cold, while a single ﬂame can be easily extinguished or grow into an enormous
ﬁre. By comparing women to these elements, Wright highlights the common view
that women were unpredictable and shifting. Yet, while Wright seems to believe
that these common beliefs hold some truth, he wants to move beyond the
common assumptions that women ﬁe shift in tense? completely without self-
control. He does this by creating a situation in which women represent not only
the worst, but also the best subject in the realm of inwardness. Women are
personiﬁed as swayable passion, but also as the reigning queen of self—control:
reason. While this may seem to be a progressive move to include women, it

actually creates a situation in which women constitute the borders of the self.

Wright’s model personiﬁes all of the parts of the mind and spirit that work
together to harness and control the passions. All of these parts: the soul, the
passions, the senses, and reason, are referred to as “she;” they are all
personiﬁed as female. While this may seem to place women in the discourse of
the passions in a way that allots them self-control, it is misleading. The soul is
female because it can be swayed by the passions, the senses because they are
bodily and often seductive, and the passions because they are the very emotions
that move the soul, and women are more likely to indulge in them. However, it
seems extremely strange that reason is seen as female. After all, women are

usually painted as inherently irrational.

1O

The fact that reason is personiﬁed as female reveals the complexity
behind women’s existence on the borders. For Wright, reason is the “Queen”
that must rule over the passions, and harness them for good. It is placed on a
pedestal. This is one border of self-control, the perfect and complete
management of the passions, and, indeed, this may be a place that is almost
impossible to inhabit. Yet if women are to ﬁnd a place, it must be on this
pedestal—like border. They are considered the best possible, product of such a
system: “Yea, if they be ill inclined and refrain those affections, questionless the
greater is their commendation, for the husbandman deserveth more praise if he
manure well a thorny soil than fertile ﬁeld, so that women ought to be more
prized which is worse inclined and best mortiﬁed” (120). In other words, women
who are able to surpass their inherent lack of self-control, and become the
“prized” self mentioned here, are the best possible example of self-control
because they must work harder than men to attain such an accomplishment.
Woman constitute the worst and best possibilities in the discourse of inwardness,
they inhabit the borders/the edges of this language of selfhood, which in some

ways reproduces the angel/whore dichotomy.

Ill. Fasting and Feasting

"O gluttony, it is to thee we owe our griefsl"

Geoffrey Chaucer

Some theorists do work to examine those subjects who constitute the

border. In their book Consuming Narratives, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa

11

Walters write about the ways that women are rendered monstrous. They explore
the way in which appetites shape the subject: “when the body is conceived of as
a cultural locus of meaning, discourses of race, class, sexuality, motherhood,
spirituality, and the nation may also be mapped onto the body as a function of its
appetites” (3). Their work notes that while some critics see potential for self-
fashioning in the Galenic model, that this was not necessarily possible for
women, as, “the female body in particular is rendered monstrous though its
association with excessive appetite” (9). For McAvoy and Walters, this
monstrosity is what indeed constitutes the normative subject as its other. The
monstrous, in its potential for danger and excess, allows the moderated citizen
his normality, and the right to consider himself included within the borders of the
Galenic discourse. The idea of appetites is also very clearly tied back to food.
The Galenic model was, in the beginning, mainly a way to decide what should be
eaten to control the inner humors. While in the early modern period, the Galenic
model becomes a way to look at balance and moderation in all areas of life, it is

still very closely tied to the material food one eats:

Food, therefore, becomes a primary means by which the external world is
ingested and controlled. If it is not controlled, the food becomes the
controlling factor by means of this same internalization, whether in the
ingestion of the host in medieval times or in the overindulgent banqueting
represented in the Stuart court masque in the early modern period. Such
an ingestion of the external becomes synonymous with empowerment
and, like the externalizing and re—internalizing of the dangerous monstrous
appetites examined earlier, is crucial to the formation of an individuated
but social ‘self (6).

Food then, and the physical appetite for food, has a very real tie to the way the

subject shapes him or herself. Excessive consumption of food, which

12

represented not only a lack of control of the appetite for food, but a tendency to
overindulge in many ways, was a danger to a system, and a self, that depended
upon moderation. It could lead to the subjects rendering as gluttonous, and

subsequently, as monstrous.

This is exactly what happens to the female subject in Thomas Bancroft’s
The Glutton’s Feaver. Woman is personiﬁed as the sin of gluttony Should this
read, The sin of gluttony is personiﬁed as woman, which is shown to be a
monster. Moreover, gluttony is presented as the sin that leads to all other sins
and brings the soul into communion with the Devil and into hell. Woman then, as
the embodiment of gluttony, threatens to mire the entire moral system by
corrupting moderation with her gluttonous ways, and by tempting and
manipulating men into hell. Published in 1633, The Glutton’s Feaver is the story
of a gluttonous man who falls asleep on a pleasant sunny day and wakes to ﬁnd
himself in hell. Once in hell, he learns that his gluttonous ways have placed him
there. He is surrounded with other gluttons, but this is not enough for hell, where
Gluttony, personiﬁed as a female demon, needs more souls to devour. “Here
Gluttony, enrag'd for want of food, / Eates Enuies vipers, while the monster tires /

On her owne heart; here in a freshing ﬂood” (92-4).

The female personiﬁcation of gluttony is also seductive, manipulative and
inconstant. She lures men with earthly pleasure, disguising the consequences of
the souls indulgence until it is too late. Not only does she ensnare souls into the
sin of gluttony, she leads them down the path to complete moral wreckage. It is

important to note that it is gluttony, the sin of overindulgence, which leads the

13

soul into other forms of sin. While the other sins the speaker identiﬁes: lust, envy,
and wrath, are portrayed as male, they are presented in a chain reaction in which
Gluttony is the beginning. Gluttony devours Envy, while Lust drowns in Envy’s
wreckage while Wrath requires Lust’s blood. Gluttony instigates the entire chain
of deadly sins. This illustrates just how dangerous the monstrous female appetite
could be to morality and balance. Moreover, her monstrosity is more dangerous
because she is female. Her seductive female form draws the soul in, changing

just as soon as she has successfully ensnared her prey:

Damn'd hagge, that all in mischiefe hast out gone,
Whose very breath infects all vitall aire!
Seuen-headed monster, that to senslesse stone
Dost turne the heart, and sinke it in despaire,
To th'vgliest shape transform'st the creature faire!
How haue l troden all thy ﬂowery, sweet,
But cursed paths, that in this dungeon meet! (232-238)

On Earth, Gluttony is a “creature fair,” and her paths are “ﬂowery, sweet.” Yet
once in hell, Gluttony shows herself to be a “hagge” and reveals herself as a

“Seuen—headed monster.”

The female then has two models to follow, either she can be placed
on a heavenly pedestal in having succeeded against all odds to control herself,
or she can be rendered monstrous through her appetite. Women were closely
associated with appetite and considered prone to inordinate passions, the very
things that transformed the self into the monster. Women could use this

discursively produced monstrosity as means to gain some control over their

14

spiritual and material selves. While women were not perhaps intentionally
thinking about the Galenic model, the discourse affected their daily lives. As
Caroline Bynum’s work will show, women did realize that manipulating their
bodies and bodily ﬂow could change the course of their discursive and material
lives. Bynam’s work, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, investigates the ways in which
women could fashion themselves by producing, spiritually and physically, a
monstrous self. By focusing on women’s relationships with food and their
physical bodies, she asserts that women had the ability to deploy the unusual
and grotesque in order to control their circumstances. Bynum explores the ways
that women found agency through food, despite their supposed inherent inability
to practice moderation and self-control. By rendering their own bodies holy, or
monstrous, or even both, women were able to take some control of their own
discursive and material selves, Bynum illustrates this through the story of
Lidwina, a woman who becomes a spiritual ﬁgure, and is able to defy authority
through her fasting and food refusal. Working from the borders of self-hood,
they? Lidwina? could create spaces in which they could fashion selves and lives
outside social norms. Bynum focuses mainly on the ways that women use food to
construct the self. However, they do not do this through moderation, but in other
ways. Many women fasted, rejecting moderation and the Galenic model in favor

ofabsﬁnence.

Through abstaining from food, women were able to lift themselves up from
a system so steeped in ideas of bodily equilibrium, changing the ways their

bodies functioned both discursively and materially. Many of these women

15

became decimated; their bodies stopped producing ﬂuids; they halted the
Galenic ﬂow of their bodies and even rejected the body as the source of the soul
or self: “One strain in medieval moral teaching thus associated fasting with a kind
of practical (not philosophical) dualism. According to this strain, abstinence was
the rejection of body. Moreover, there is some reason to argue that women were
more drawn to fasting than men because women were especially associated with
the evils of the body, which needed to be punished or expatiated.” Moreover
fasting was not only to reject moderation, and to fashion the self, but actually an
“effective way of manipulating the environment in a world in which food was a
woman’s primary resource” (217-218). As Bynum shows through medieval
women’s stories, monstrosity through fasting was a way of changing one’s

circumstances.

This is most evident through the story of Lidwina. According to Bynum,
Lidwana was an extremely spiritual woman of power who lived in the ﬁfteenth
century. Lidwina wished to expel her physical attractiveness, and to reject the
role society imagined for her, and through rendering her body monstrous, was
able to do so: “we also learn that Lidwina was upset to discover that she was
pretty, she threatened to pray for a deformity when plans were broached for her
marriage...”(125). Lidwina understood then, from a young age, that the body, and
what could be done with it, was a determinate for the life she would live in the
future. She was eventually in a skating accident, which left her paralyzed and
deformed. Her hagiographers reported that her body “putreﬁed so that great

pieces fell ofl” and her body eventually gave off “bits of skin, bone, and

16

entrails”(125). These pieces of her body, which gave off a “sweet odor,” were
considered holy. Lidwina embraced her deformity, embellishing and molding
herself to it. As a result, people saw her as a kind of spiritual leader; they came to
her to receive healing and spiritual council. Lidwina was able to not only escape
a life of marriage through rendering her body monstrously holy; she was able to
gain power to bypass religious priests. When a priest came to give her
communion, the only food she would eat, Lidwina challenged him, saying that the
host he brought her was not consecrated. In retaliation the priest refused to allow
her communion. Christ himself came to Lidwina and gave her the Eucharist with
drops of holy blood upon it. Lidwina was able to deploy monstrosity in a way that
gave her a life as a single woman, a public charitable ﬁgure, and someone with a

voice to question even the authority of men.

Lidwina is one of many women in Bynum’s research, but her story
contains common factors that are found in many of the accounts of fasting
women. The ﬁrst is the refusal or inability to eat, to use fasting to control one’s
social circumstances. Bynum tells the reader that, “by means of food, women
controlled themselves and their ...bodily functions, sensations, fertility, and
sexuality” (193). Indeed, by refusing to consume food, women could stop their
menstrual ﬂow and fertility, controlling their body physically, and through this,
their social functions. For many women, fasting led to visions, which Bynum
asserts that women often had at times when domestic chores needed done.
These women rendered their bodies monstrous because they were placed

outside the normal spaces of selfhood. They halted the ﬂow of the elements

17

within their bodies; many were reported to stop exuding ﬂuids whatsoever,
including sweat and tears. Sometimes they would heal the sick by sucking the
oozing puss from their wounds. These women were no longer considered ﬁt to
perform normal social functions. Certainly a body that is falling apart, that sheds
its entrails, that emits no ﬂuids, and ingests pus is grotesque, but it is also
allowed a certain agency. These women were placed outside society, made to
exist on its borders, but from this position, they were able to fashion themselves
as they choose, even if to some, they appeared monstrous. However, it seems
that one must move past this appearance of monstrosity and ask why women
were rendered monstrous, and move to discover what differences women
possessed that made them outsiders to the prevailing discourse of appetite and

consumption.

IV. Bodily Sources of Anxiety and Insecurity

“The passive condition of Womankind is subject unto more diseases and other
sortes and natures then men are: and especially in regarde of that part (the

womb) from whence this disease which we speak of doth arise.”

- Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse Called the Suffocation of the Mother.

If Women were excluded from the Galenic model, one must question why.
Why was it that writers like Wright and Bancroft saw women as consumptive
beings incapable of self-control? l have stated before exclusion was due to the
reproductive system and the way it effectively rendered women different than

men. But more than the anxiety caused by the reproductive system itself,

18

menses etc, was men’s inability to make said system knowable. If men could not
place markers of concrete knowledge on the female body, then they had no way
to know exactly how the female body worked, and women had the ability to “fake
it:” or to pretend to be or act out the signs of virginity and faithfulness. From the
hiddeness of women’s unseen genitals to the mysteries of virginity and childbirth,
women were unknown entities. They and their inner processes were unknowable
and unquantiﬁable; they become seen as dangerous because their bodies were
not something that could be made into a concretely identiﬁable entity. This
anxiety came at a time when the body itself was becoming a knowable object.
Valerie Traub tells us that anatomists such as Estienne and Vesalius were
working to chart the female body partly due to anxiety, and that “fraught with
instability and incoherence, early modern anatomies...remind us that the limits of
knowledge are also lodged within constructions of a gendered body. Anxiety
about the relation between gender and matter, matter and knowledge...remain
palpably discernible to the reader who turns their pages.” The instability of the
gendered body created a situation, as Loughlin will show with the hymen, in
which anatomists attempted to make the female body a concretely knowable

object.

Women’s bodies, and by association women, were considered
unpredictable, unstable. Women were excluded from the Galenic model because
of bodily differences that became discursive realities. Several theorists have
written about the anxiety and fear that engulfed men‘s views of women. Much of

the reproductive workings of women were largely misunderstood, and historians

19

and literary critics have worked to explore just how unknown women’s bodies
truly were. The Galenic system was not simply concerned with what went into the
body as food, but also with what came out of it as waste. The female body was
decidedly different as it included ﬂows and processes foreign to the male body. It
can be clearly seen through the works of the early modern period that there was
a strong male ambition to make the female body, with its sexual and reproductive

processes, concretely ascertainable and knowable.

The anatomy of the female body, with its complex and intricate
reproductive system, was a great source of anxiety to men in the Renaissance.
In her work Hymenuetics, Marie H. Loughlin studies the male obsession with the
hymen, and the need to make virginity a knowable reality: “Because the social
position (i.e., natural position) of the adult Renaissance female is as a married
woman, anatomical and physiological discourse treat the virginal body with a
great deal of thinly disguised anxiety” (28). She (the female?) explores the
transitional roles that women played in their movement from virgin to reproducing
wife and seems to point to the hymen as a kind of knowable site between this
transition: “yet although English Renaissance culture is wholly involved in
constructing the virginal body as transitional, as naturally and physiologically
intended for marriage, the anatomical search for the hymen also seeks to create

a ﬁxed and absolute body that can be deﬁned as virginal in and of itself’ (30).

The need to deﬁne the body as virginal, to place it in a concrete category,
was the impetus behind many of the studies Loughlin sites. Even those

anatomists who denied that the hymen was a deﬁnite factor in determining

20

virginity sought to ﬁnd a way to show that there was a way to effectively make
sure a woman was a virgin. Ambroise Pare, in an anatomical observation found
in The Workes of that famous Ambrose Parey, states that the hymen is certainly

amwh

In som virgins or maidens in the oriﬁce of the neck of the womb
there is found a certain tunicle of membrane called of antient
writers Hymen, which prohibitith the copulation of a man, and
causseth a woman to be barren; this tunicle is supposed by manie,
and they not of the common sort onely, but also learned
Physicians, to bee, as it were, the enclosure of the virginitie or
maidenhead. But I could never ﬁnde it in anie, seeking all ages
from three to twelv, of all that I had under my hands in the Hospital
of Paris (31).

Here, it is clearly evident that Pare believes the signiﬁcance placed on the hymen
to be a mistake. This mistake is one that Loughlin asserts he views as
dangerous, as the hymen should not be used to make accusations or as

evidence on which to base legal arguments.

The hymen however, is more than a body part. It represents a reality of
anxiety and fear surrounding women’s ability to lie or trick men concerning their
virginity. Even if the hymen itself is disputed as an anatomical reality, its
discursive reality is evident. Loughlin notes that while Pare asserts that the
hymen is not indicative of virginity, he cannot ignore its discursive signiﬁcance
and symbolic reality. There is still the need to be able to state whether or not a
woman is a virgin and to show what signs can indicate virginity. So while
denouncing the hymen as ﬁctional and specious, Pare cites other signs which

can reveal a woman’s virginity or lack there of. Loughlin illustrates Pare’s

21

acceptance of the hymen’s social function at the same time as she notes his

denial of its reality:

he constructs the virginal body as bearing other signs of innocence,
transforming the hymen into a physiologically normative narrowing
or ‘glewing together’ of the vagina, which frequently tears and
bleeds ‘at the ﬁrst time of copulation.’ The sign of virginity does not
disappear from the female body but is simply given a new structure
and position...Pare’s radical claims teeter between his
experimentally based refutation of the hymen’s existence as the
claustrum virginale and his culturally based acceptance of its
function (32).

Within the Galenic system, with its emphasis on ﬂow in and out of the body,
female virginity would be different than male. If the hymen was in place, a man
could be assured that no one else had entered. Female chastity was not only
more expected than male, it was a changing of the body, a penetration into the
body. The quest for knowledge to determine the status of female virginity is

concerned with this penetration, and its ability to be measured.

Moreover, it wasn’t simply virginity that caused anxiety; the female role in
sex was also confusing, and often rendered women monstrous. In her article
“Bloodsuckers: The Construction of Female Sexuality in Medieval Science and
F iction,” Bettina Bildhaur, writing about the medieval period, explains her

assertion that women were looked upon as a type of vampire:

According to medieval medicine, as synthesized in the Secrets of
Women, all women are considered to be vampiristic insofar as they
constantly suck out men’s ‘lifeblood’ (semen), with their vaginas
during intercourse. Semen, the male seed, is described as being a
specially processed kind of blood...Semen is far superior to its
female equivalent, menstrual blood...Women however, too cold to

22

produce this precious liquid themselves, must obtain it through sex
in order to gain strength, but as a result they leave men drained
and cause them to die prematurely... (105).

Sex with a woman than, could be considered sex with a kind of monster. The
woman is a tempting monster, but one that, given into too often, can kill.
Bildhaur, although writing about the Medieval period, argues, applicably to the
Renaissance, that the source of the fear of women was gluttonous and
unbalanced sexual desire. Indeed, she asserts that if a man is able to control his
partner’s desire, to direct her sexual instincts where he needs them, then the
danger is diffused. It is only when the male allows the female passion to reign

that he must fear for his life (106).

Bildhaur also suggests that it is the ﬂow of ﬂuids in and out of the body

that creates the fear of the female:

The choice of the term ‘sucking’ to describe how women drain
men’s vitality expresses the pull, the force, of female desire and her
greed and hunger for semen, and it correlates with the concept of
human beings as containers of ﬂuid....there is also a strong parallel
drawn between sexual intercourse and breast feeding. Milk, like
semen, was also thought to be processed blood (in this case
menstrual blood). Logically then, one might consider breast-feeding
as also being a comparable moment of dangerous bloodsucking
during which the mother is in danger of having her own life-blood
drained by the baby. In this scenario however, what we ﬁnd is that if
anyone is endangered,(add comma?) it is again the suckling baby
who is also considered to be threatened by the polluting
substances of the mother....it is the male, or male identiﬁed party
that is threatened.(106-107)

23

Women were feared to have too great a greed to safely intake, and their
uncontrolled nature made the substances, which they excreted, potentially

poisonous.

This anxiety came at a time when the body itself was becoming a
knowable object. Theorists like Hillary Nun and Johnathan Sawday have worked
to chart the phenomena and vivisection and the theatre of the anatomy. What I
would like to note is the focus on the female body parts that could not be known.
The hymen has already been mentioned above; Loughlin points out several
times that the hymen was usually a focus of the dissection of female bodies, and
that charting its location was a priority. The womb also received a large amount
of attention. Valerie Traub notes the way that anatomists often gendered the
female corpse by showing the womb in plates of vivisection. She notes that
Vesalius, in his drawings, works to classicize both the female and male body, yet
asserts that classic representations represent male power, as the female body:
“was represented...as naturally grotesque- permeable, transgressive, always in
need of enclosure and containment” (54). Estienne, on the other hand, eroticizes
women and focuses especially on the womb: “The ﬁrst plate depicts a pregnant
woman, her belly the visual center of the illustration. . .the second plate focuses
on the womb, with the woman’s legs spread wide, her vulva completely
exposed...other plates show the woman carrying within the womb a fetus or
twins” (81). The female body and the womb were exposed in an attempt to make
them knowable. In this attempt, the female body was “in need of enclosure and

containment.”

24

IV. Woman as the Unknowable Actor

Reﬂect on the whole history of women: do they not have to be ﬁrst of all and
above all actresses? Listen to physicians who have hypnotized women; ﬁnally,
love them- let yourself by “hypnotized by them”! What is always the end result?
That they “put on something” even when they take off everything.

Woman is so artistic.

-Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

One way in which the anxiety about women’s unknowable bodies was
exposed was through theater. The discourse of the day saw women as unable to
practice self-control over their passions and desires; it is natural that ideas, which
permeated culture and found their way into the works of anatomists and
philosophers, could also be found in plays. I have already explored the idea that
women have a more complex place in the Galenic humoral model, as the ideas
about balance and moderation that sprang from it intersected with common ideas
. about women’s inveterate passions and inconstant nature. This trend can be
clearly seen in the works of Wright and Bancroft, both of whom view moderation
as paramount while ﬁnding women intemperate. Both these writers viewed
women as easily swayed by the passions. Both Thomas Middleton’s The
Changeling and William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline explore the fear underlying
the uncertainty of women’s virginity due to the frail nature of female self-control.
Both playwrights explore the idea that women may have the ability to pretend to
be virgins. In both plays, the male characters search for a way to locate a
concrete knowledge of their partner’s virginity. For Alesmero, a potion in his

pharmacy will locate and produce signs of virginity; for Posthumus, a bracelet will

25

reveal all. In neither of these works does the woman’s word stand for her
virginity. In a Galenic humoral system where women are inconstant and unable
to practice self-control, their virginity must be quantiﬁable, as is the indented
effect of Alesmero’s potion to discover Beatrice’s true status: “(Quote?)give the
party you suspect some of glass M, which upon her that is a maid makes three
several affects” (44-5). Both men need assurance by some outside source that

produces a “truth” untainted by women’s unsteady passions.

Marjorie Garber in her article “The lnsincerity of Women,” searches for
the cause of this male mistrust in female honesty as regards sexuality. By
exploring Beatrice-Joanna’s sexuality in The Changeling, she illustrates the fact
that a man can never truly know women’s sexuality; in essence, every part of
female sexuality can be constructed within the female herself. In Middleton’s
work, a woman who is not a virgin is able to convince her future husband that
she is, simply by acting and producing the signs he expects to see. Beatrice,
having slept with the man she paid to kill her ﬁrst husband, discovers that
Alesmero plans to use a potion to discover whether or not she is a virgin before
he marries her: “’Give the party you suspect the quantity of a spoonful of water in
the glass M, which, upon her that is a maid, makes three several effects: ‘twill
make her incontinently gape, then fall into a sudden sneezing, last into a violent
laughing; else dull heavy and lumpish’” (4.1 .46-51). Knowing she will fail this test,
Beatrice takes some of the potion and gives it to her virginal servant. Discovering
the symptoms that ensue, laughing, blushing, and so forth, Beatrice simply

repeats them for Alesmero, ensuring that be believes her to be a virgin.

26

Garber uses the idea of orgasm to examine this concept. She sites the
famous scene in When Harry Met Sally in which Sally upsets Harry’s ﬁrm ideas

that he has pleasured every woman he has ever been with:

Harry: What are you saying, that they fake orgasm?

Sally: Most women at one time or another have faked it.

Harry: Well they haven’t faked it with me.

Sally: How do you know?

This question, “How do you know?” is paramount. This is exactly what Middleton
and Garber are pointing towards. How do you know? According to Garber and
Middleton, there may not be a way. Garber says this is because woman is an
actress. “The particular case of orgasm only serves to epitomize the power that
actors derive from this “female” capacity to withhold, to dissimulate, to test the
boundaries of the real” (365). What is truly striking is that in all of man’s attempts
to ﬁnd out the true status of woman, he is often fooled by the very thing he
believes will tell him the truth. Alesmero is fooled because he looks for the truth
in symptoms that can be acted out by anyone.

Shakespeare’s Cymbeline also deals with the issue of woman as a (add)
knowable being. While Posthumous originally trusts Imogen, he is deceived
because he places his trust in the material reality of lmogen’s bracelet and allows
himself to be persuaded by the ruling discourse on women’s sexuality. Due to his
willingness to believe that no woman can be trusted to speak truth, he does not
look to Imogen herself to discover her loyalty, but is instead tricked into acting as

if lies were reality. Loughilin identiﬁes lmogen’s transitional and uncertain status

as the root of anxiety:

27

However, if in The Faithful Shepherdess Clorin’s conﬂicted body
generates moments of stabilizing, symbolic deﬂoration, then in
Cymbeline, lmogen’s body can be seen to produce similar
moments, born out of similar anxieties. As that social and
anatomical anomaly, the virginal wife, Imogen exists throughout
most of the action as that transitional, liminal body that so disturbs
the sexual economy. . . (63).

In other words, Imogen is problematic because her sexual status ﬁts into no
deﬁned category. She is wife, yet she is also virgin. Posthumous’s exile results in
a situation in which their marriage remains unconsummated. An unconsummated
marriage leaves room for doubt and worry. lachimo is able to plant doubt in
Posthumous’s mind by pointing out the fragility of women’s self-control, “You may
wear her in title yours; but you know, strange fowl light upon neighboring ponds.
Your ring may be stolen too, so your brace of unprizable estimations, the one is
but grail and the other casual. A cunning thief or a ???? that way accomplished
courtier would hazard the winning both of ﬁrst and last” (1.4.72-76). lachimo is
easily able to create unease by reminding Posthumous that women’s promises
are “casual.” Moreover, lachimo places the ring on the same level as Imogen;
both are easily won and lost. Just as a ring is there for the stealing, so is Imogen.
The comparison suggests that woman has the same amount of will and
determination as the cold metal which Posthumous wears around his ﬁnger.
While Imogen later becomes represented by the bracelet, here she is already
placed on the level of object. This is not simply lachimo’s doing as Posthumous
also seems to equate Imogen with the ring. If she is faithful, the ring stays on his

ﬁnger, if not, the ring will be given to lachimo.

28

It is important to note that while both Alesmero and Posthumous have
different motivations for testing Beatrice and Imogen, both men submit their lady
to a test. Alesmero doubts Beatrice’s virginity, and therefore tests her; this is a
logical sequence. However, it is notable that when Posthumous enters into
contracts with lachimo to test Imogen, he seems to have complete faith in her
loyalty. However, he is very willing to allow her to be tested in order that her

status as a chaste and loyal woman may become public and quantiﬁable:

Posthumous: I embrace these conditions; let us have articles
betwixt us. Only, thus far you shall answer: if you make your
voyage upon her, and give me directly to understand you have
prevailed, I am no further your enemy; she is not worth our debate.
If she remain unseduced, you not making it appear otherwise, for
your ill opinion and th’assult you have made to her chastity, you
shall answer me with your sword.

lachimo: Your hand, a covenant. We will have these things set
down by lawful counsel, and straight away for Britain...l will fetch
my gold, and have our two wagers recorded.

Posthumous: Agreed. (1.4.127-13138).

This legal sounding contract is one in which lmogen’s status as a sexual being will be
established. While at this point in the work Posthumous does not doubt lmogen’s
loyalty, he does acknowledge lachimo’s wish to place Imogen in a concrete category. It
can be noted as well that this is an attempt to establish her deﬁnitive value by placing
her into a knowable space. Loughlin believes that this is perhaps the main purpose of
the bargain scene: “In the context of Imogen’s problematic body, this scene is less the
conﬁdent construction of woman as ‘the enabling of male discourse’ than it is a series of

fractured and provisional attempts to stabilize lmogen’s social and anatomical value”

29

(64). In other words, Imogen must become knowable before she can be correctly
placed in the world of male discourse. This bargain becomes a metaphorical search for
lmogen’s hymen or her status as a discursive female being. As Posthumous himself
points out, her value is everything or nothing; the scales will fall one way or the other
when her level of chastity is known. Imogen must be placed in a knowable category.

Indeed, the resolution of the play depends on her virginity.
V. Conclusion: Monstrosity and Fluidity

It seems that the Galenic humoral model of physical and spiritual health, in
its emphasis on moderation and self-control, often intersected with common
ideas about women to create a situation in which women lived a complex
relationship to complex injunctions against their passions and assumed nature.
Women’s unknowable bodies caused (add) an anxiety that kept them from
ﬁnding a place in a discursive system of balance. Rather, women found that it
must be manipulated. It seems that this model, necessarily and logically,
excluded women or relegated them to its borders. Some women, like the fasting
women written about by Caroline Bynum were able to deploy a conception of the
monstrous. By living in a way that some would consider grotesque or deformed,
and choosing to operate from the “border of selfhood,” some women found
themselves able to live outside discursive and social norms. While these cases
are certainly not representative of all, or even most women, they offer an
interesting and new way to look at ideas of the grotesque and the monstrous.

These women were able to combine the monstrous with the transcendent; by

30

experiencing or accepting a life on the borders, these women were able to

fashion a self and even to question authority.

The Galenic model, its focus on balance, (add) is not simply a model that
is either repressive or agency granting. The nuances of any discourse that
produces the subject are almost inﬁnite. Men may have been granted agency,
but largely, women were not. When looking at the production of the subject,
looking at the universal subject, as Michael Schoenfeldt does, might produce
new and interesting observations. However, we need to be careful that when
looking at a universal subject, we do not unintentionally elide real and discursive
differences. As Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan assert, “we believe that processes
of interpellation are variable and often at odds. Thus we strive...to delineate the
possibility of multiple agencies...” (5). The variables need to be taken into
account. While regulating the workings of the body could regulate the Galenic
humors, it is important then to note that the body itself is variable. The female
body, as a source of anxiety and fear, was not available for regulation and
moderation. Instead, women had to manipulate a system that afforded them little

agency or power.

31

Bibliography
Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic
Interjections. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2006. Print.
Bancroft, Thomas. The Gluttons Feaver. London: John Norton, 1633. Print.
Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985. Print.
Berry, Philippa. Of Chastity and Power. London: Rutledge, 1989. Print.
Bynum, Caroline. Fragmentation and Redemption. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
---. ElngFeast and Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
run .

Catherine of Sienna. The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Sienna. (add a space)
Trans. Algor Thorold. Vancouver: Eremitical Press, 2009. Print.

Eggert, Katherine. Showing Like a Queen. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2000.
Print.

Findlay, Alison. Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Fisher, VVIII. Maten'alizing Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Fissell, Mary. Vernacular Bodies. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2004.Print.

Garbor, Marjorie. “The insincerity of Woman.” Subject and Object in Renaissance
Culture. Ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 349-368. Print.

Gutierrez, Nancy. “Shall She Famish Then.”Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Print.

Hampton, Timothy. “Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from Galen
to Rabelais.” Ed. Gail Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Fond-VIﬁlson.
Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP. 2004: 272-294. Print.

Herbert, ??? Mcavoy, Liz and Teresa Walters. Consuming Narratives. Cardiff:
Wales UP, 2002. Print.

Kermode, Jenny and Garthine Walker. Women, Crime and the Courts in Earty
Modern England. London: UCL Press, 1994. Print.

32

Levy-Navarro, Elena. The Culture of Obesity in Earty and Late Modernity.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Loughlin, Marie. Hymenuetics. Lewisburg: Associated UP, 1997. Print.

McAvoy, Liz Herbert and Teresa Walters. Consuming Narratives. Cardiff: Wales
UP, 2002. Print.

Middleton, Thomas. The Changeling. London: Ernest Benn Ltd. 1964. Print.

Paster, Gail, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Eariy
Modern Passions. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP. 2004. Print.

Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2005. Print.

Traub, Valerie, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, eds. Feminist
Readings of Earty Modem Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1996. Print.

Traub, Valerie. “Gendering Mortality in Early Modern Anatomies.” Feminist
Readings of Early Modern Culture. Ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and
Dympna Callaghan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 44-92. Print.

Vandereycken, Walter and Ron Van Deth. From Fasting Saints to Anorexia Girls.
London: Athlone Press, 1994. Print.

Wright, Thomas and William Newbold. The Passions of the Mind in General. New
York: Garland Pub, 1986. Print.

33

4|
4
5
4
3
6
0
3
0
3
9
2
4|
3

 

WI!
A”
R."
8"
ll
L“
Y"
Pi"
S”,
R"
E”
V”
N”!
U"

I"

H

"
Pull
HI!

H