Alanna Skuse, Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England. Altered Bodies and Contexts of Identity

Abstract

For researchers interested in social and cultural constructions of difference in the past, embodiment has become a central category of analysis. Alanna Skuse’s study is a welcome contribution to this growing field. She focuses on medical interventions which led to permanent, radical alterations to the body, such as amputation, mastectomy, castration or facial surgery. Skuse is particularly interested in the phenomenological experiences of people who lived through these operations and the subsequent processes of adapting to a substantially changed body, including their sometimes newly acquired protheses or orthoses. What happened to these people after surgery was completed? How did they view themselves, their bodies and the body parts they lost or exchanged? What can views on radically altered forms of embodiment tell us about early modern understanding of personhood, self and identity? Based on different genres and a range of source material from the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as medical treatises, newspapers and periodicals, satirical writing, pamphlets, ethnographic writing, miracle accounts, life writing and classical literary works, Skuse approaches several social themes and cultural discourses prevalent in early modern England, using the ‘material circumstances of bodily difference’ (p. 3) as her lens. She shows that by focussing on radically altered bodies, it is possible to uncover the epistemological value that was ascribed to various forms of bodily difference in early modern England. Moreover, she maps out fears, uncertainties, social anxieties and prejudice that were realised in and through these forms of embodiment and the debates they engendered.