ABSTRACT
Hippocrates seems to attribute to passionate love the power of transforming women into men; where he sayes, that in the citty Abdera, Phäethusa, being stricken with the love of Pytheus and not being able to enjoy him for a long time, by reason of his absence, she became a man […] and grew hairy all over her body, had a man’s voyce and a long beard on her chin […]2
Jacques Ferrand (1623)
As for the authority of Hippocrates. It followeth not that all those women whose voyces turne strong or have beards and grow hairy do presently also change their parts of generation, neither doth Hippocrates say so, but plainly the contrary: for he addeth, ‘when we had tried all meanes we could not bring down her courses, but she perished’ wherefore her parts of generation remained those of a Woman, although her bodye grew mannish and hairie […]3
Helkiah Crooke (1615)
I
Any theatre-historical survey of early modern corporality must take into consideration the works of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. Beliefs based on Classical anatomy dominated discourses pertaining to the human body in the middle ages, laid the foundations for the exponential increase in evisceration that took place in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century and continued to hold a degree
1 Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), p. 333. 2 Ferrand, Jacques, De la Maladie de L’Amour (Paris, 1623). This quotation is
from the translation by Edmund Chilmead, published under the title Erotomania (Oxford, 1640), p. 12.
