ABSTRACT
Only exceptionally do early modern mountebank images indicate that quacks concerned with dental care included women. In one such, a man operates on the scalp of a seated patient while a woman uses both hands to guide an instrument to his open mouth (Plate 40). Better known is a sixteenth-century woodcut interpreted by some as an ‘engraving [that] depicts a female toothdrawer bedecked with instruments and the teeth of former clients strung across her chest’, whose ‘lack of an interior setting as well as her dress and posture suggest that she performed her art in the open air’ (Plate 41).1 Although the right-hand figure clearly portrays a female tooth-drawer, this does not necessarily mean that the artist was representing a practising itinerant tooth-drawer of female gender. Rounded assessment of this tooth-drawer is only possible by taking into account the accompanying figure. Named by the integral verse as Agnan, he is the renowned actor Agnan Sarat, who contributed significantly to the development of the French professional stage when he signed the contract allowing his French touring troupe to become the first to act on the stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.
