Bearded women in early modern England

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-28

  Johnston, Mark Albert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 60950584910     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2007.0004     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Various other London livery companies and fraternities enforced similar proscriptions among their memberships. See, for example, Lincoln's Inn, The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn: The Black Books, 5 vols. (London: Lincoln's Inn, 1897-1968), 1:259, 328
2. For a more sustained reading of the ways in which the early modern English beard was economically informed, see Mark Albert Johnston, "Playing with the Beard: Courtly and Commercial Economies in Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias and John Lyly's Midas," ELH 72, 1 (Spring 2005): 79-103
3. Frederick W. Fairholt, introduction to "The Ballad of the Beard," in Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume: From the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Fairholt, vol. 27.2 of Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, ed. Percy Society, 30 vols. (London: Percy Society by C. Richards, 1849), pp. 121-4, 121-2
4. See also Anthony Arlidge, Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple (London: Giles de la Mare, 2000). I am grateful to Smith for both of these references
5. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2d edn., 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1:437-75, III.i.43. Subsequent references to this play will be from this edition unless otherwise noted and will appear parenthetically in the text and notes by act, scene, and line number
6. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (London and Cambridge MA: Belknap, 1978), p. 36
7. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Guy de la Bédoyè re (Dorchester: Dorset Press, 1994), p. 114. Evelyn also documents in his diary on 22 August 1667 the appearance of one Anna Wilde, a bearded hermaphrodite, as a popular attraction in London, but I have chosen to exclude this and other reports of bearded hermaphrodites from this discussion precisely because issues of gender seem to be at stake
8. For Evelyn's discussion of Wilde, see Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 513. For further discussion of how beard growth signaled gender status, see my "(Mis)Taken Masculinity: Prosthetic Absence in Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and Bartholmew Fair," ELR (forthcoming)
9. Altick, p. 35. The continued popularity of the bearded woman as a sideshow spectacle is documented well into the twentieth century. For a brief modern history of the phenomenon, see Allan Peterkin, One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001), esp. pp. 97-111
10. Will Fisher remarks: "[T]he number and variety of compensatory elements included in the painting might ultimately be seen as a testament to the power of the beard - an indication of the massive cultural work which must be done in order to offset it" ("The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England," RenQ 54, 1 [Spring 2001]: 155-87, 171)
11. Evelyn, Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern (London: Benjamin] Tooke, 1697), p. 277
12. G. H. Wilson's commentary continues: "If I conjecture right she is that very hairy girl mentioned by my celebrated friend Bartoline, and appears to me not to differ from her whom Borelli describes by the name Barba; who he believed, improved if not procured that hairiness by art. But whether she is the same that the famous Vitrilius saw at Rome and Milan, I dare not affirm; for he hath no where mentioned this countryman of his that I know of (G. H. Wilson, Wonderful Characters: Comprising Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Most Remarkable Persons, of Every Age and Nation. . . [London: J. Barr, 1842], p. 153). By ostensibly referring to the bearded woman as Barba, Borelli exposes how her name is etymologically informed, while his charge that her hairiness is a product of art rather than nature demonstrates a resistance to the idea that even nature could produce such an anomaly. I was regrettably unable to locate any of the sources G. H. Wilson cites here
13. Henry Wilson and James Caulfield, The Book of Wonderful Characters: Memoirs and Anecdotes of Remarkable and Eccentric Persons in All Ages and Countries (London: John Camden Hotten, n.d. [1869?]), p. 386. Urselin looks more than five years older in the 1658 portrait than she does in the 1653 portrait, but the earlier depiction is likely infantilized, perhaps due to her lacking offspring at that time
14. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: A View of the People of the Whole World (London: William Hunt, 1654), p. 215
15. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 8 vols. (London: George Bell, 1900), 8:174. Wheatley's note adds: "[T]his was probably the woman described in Wonderful Characters as Barbara Urslerin, the hairy-faced woman. She was born at Ausburg in 1629, which gives us exactly the age Pepys mentions."
16. and Louisville KY: Morton and Griswold, 1854
17. In his monumental work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (2 vols., 3d edn., revised and enlarged [London: Macmillan, 1936] vol. 2, part 4, p. 259n3), Sir James George Frazer notes that "in Cyprus there was a bearded and masculine image of Venus (probably Astarte) in female attire."
18. Rev. S. Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 3d edn., 16 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant,
19. Sir Thomas More, A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More Knyghte (London: J. Rastell, 1529), sig. L2v
20. Carole Levin asserts that St. Uncumber had a cult following that "was well developed by the fourteenth century," with a number of images attesting to her popularity, including "a statue of her in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster," but during the Reformation in England, "shrines to St. Uncumber were despoiled" including images of her in St. Paul's in 1538 ("St. Frideswide and St. Uncumber: Changing Images of Female Saints in Renaissance England," in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Bruke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson [Syracuse NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000], pp. 223-37, 228, 229). Levin's assessment that the "cult of the bearded woman saint that spread through Western Europe is at least suggestive of the female response to the potential power of male anger at a woman's wish for autonomy" is particularly relevant to my own argument (p. 226)
21. There is a large body of work attesting to the relative freedom enjoyed by early modern widows. See, for example, Joan Larsen Klein, ed., Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640 (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), especially pp. 43-4, 50-1, and 121-2
22. Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), especially p. 125
23. Alexander Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures of Tumors and Vlcers . . . (London: Francis Constable, 1635), p. 253
24. In his discussion of the inscrutability of the witches in Macbeth, Sylvan Barnet asserts that "[t]hey have the traditional petty malice (and beards) of witches," suggesting that witches were routinely bearded, though he offers no further explanation of this assumption ("Introduction" to The Tragedy of Macbeth, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Barnet et al. [New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta: Harcourt, 1972], pp. 1227-32, 1229)
25. Carol F. Karlsen has discovered that many of the women accused of being witches in New England were either widows or unmarried women who had inherited or expected to inherit property and thereby posed a challenge to male economic control [The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England [New York and London: Norton, 1987], esp. pp. 77-116)