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Cultural and Social History
The Journal of the Social History Society
ISSN: 1478-0038 (Print) 1478-0046 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfcs20
The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and
Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and
Society
Kim M. Phillips
To cite this article: Kim M. Phillips (2018): The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and
Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society, Cultural and Social History, DOI:
10.1080/14780038.2018.1427341
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2018.1427341
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CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2018.1427341
The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Young Women’s
Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society
Kim M.Phillips
Discipline of History, School of Humanities, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
ABSTRACT
Many medical texts of the European Middle Ages included advice
to young women on breast reduction. These recipes and techniques
have not often been discussed by medieval historians, whose interest
in meanings of women’s breasts has concentrated mostly on religious
or nutritive associations. Highlighting late medieval English texts and
culture, this article summarises medical advice on repressing breast
growth, notes some ancient and earlier medieval precedents and
argues the recipes responded not only to aesthetic preferences but
also to beliefs that bust size and texture signied sexual experience.
Arguing that breasts were legible esh, in which an observer could
read a young woman’s honour, it contends that breast suppression
not only met idealised beauty standards but also protected sexual
reputations.
Introduction
Breast modication is a preoccupation of the modern West. Medical and pharmaceutical
techniques abound and for a decade breast enlargement has been the most often performed
cosmetic surgical procedure in the United States, augmentations outnumbering reductions
seven to one.1 Moreover, use of bras has for a century been a normalised feature of post-pu-
bescent women’s lives.2 As girls move into their teenage years and their bodies change, they
are subject to incessant surveillance and pressured to transform themselves in accordance
with social expectations. Even if most women do not, in fact, seek cosmetic medical inter-
vention, all are aware of the ideal and their own status relative to it.
However, these are not exactly new phenomena. Adolescent girls and young women
have long borne the burdens of social surveillance and body control. Breast modication,
specically, has a longer history than we might imagine, and a more complex one. If we
concentrate on the later medieval period in particular, we nd that many medical treatises
included cosmetic breast advice to young unmarried women. In contrast with present norms,
that advice was always on ways to reduce and rm, never to enlarge. These recipes, although
noticed briey by some historians of medieval beauty and cosmetics, have not been dis-
cussed in detail.
3
Concentrating on late medieval England, my purpose is to note the content
© 2018 The Social History Society
KEYWORDS
Body; sexuality; medicine;
young women; adolescence
CONTACT Kim M. Phillips km.phillips@auckland.ac.nz
2 K. M. PHILLIPS
of several such recipes, trace inuences from ancient and earlier medieval medical literature
and ask why pubescent maidens may have been advised to suppress mammary growth. I
will propose that motivations went beyond aesthetic preferences, and highlighted concerns
about sexual reputation. As I will argue, breasts were legible esh, in which an observer
could read a young woman’s honour.
Scholarship on medieval meanings of women’s breasts tends towards a couple of chief
lines of argument. One is that the breast was not primarily gured as erotic, but rather as
sacred and nurturing. That thesis relies strongly on art-historical interpretations of the
Madonna lactans, the Virgin Mary as nursing mother. Margaret Miles, while alert to the
many-layered meanings of breasts at any given historical moment, nonetheless argues for
deep trends over a longue durée: ‘In 1350, the breast was a religious symbol; by 1750, the
breast was eroticized and medicalized’.4 Marilyn Yalom is similarly cognisant of medieval
breasts’ many meanings, yet nds them primarily maternal and sacred.
5
The view that breasts
were chiey nutritive is supported by Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset.
6
The second
line of scholarly argument concerns the role of mammae in signifying sex dierences. Breasts,
it is argued, had little role in distinguishing female from male in the humoral model that
highlighted male and female ‘complexions’: hot and dry humours (blood and choler) pre-
vailed in the male, and cold and wet ones (phlegm and melancholy) in the female. The
greatest authority in this eld, Joan Cadden, nds that ‘[i]n contrast to modern expectations,
mammae are not often mentioned in the context of sexual dierentiation’.7 There is, more-
over, little place for women’s breasts in Thomas Laqueur’s paradigmatic ‘one-sex’ model,
which argues for the pre-modern dominance of Galenic medicine in which the female body
is merely an inferior, because colder, version of the male, and the bodies of both sexes are
anatomically homologous.8
These foundational studies have the virtue of encouraging scholars to confront the his-
torically-constructed body, and to realise that past perceptions of women’s breasts may have
been radically dierent from present preoccupations with the erotic. They have inspired
subsequent authors to read medieval body descriptions in insightful new ways. For one,
James A. Schultz nds Cadden’s statement helpful to his argument that in Middle High
German literature male and female lovers are not strictly demarcated in their physical attrib-
utes; rather, courtly lovers fall in love precisely because their bodies are anatomically alike
and marked by noble status more than by sex dierence.9 Robert Rouse, reading the erotic
deshabillé of Triamoure in the Middle English Sir Launfal, nds support in Jacquart and
Thomasset and Yalom in arguing the exposed breasts of the heroine are not in themselves
erotic; instead, the tale’s sexualised imagery centres on the sensation and concept of heat.
10
While these readings enhance understanding of medieval bodies and sexualities, they
may have the eect of underplaying breasts in readings of women, the erotic and sex dier-
ence. We have not always been fully attentive to breasts’ meanings at dierent life cycle
stages. The breasts of virgins, mothers, wet nurses and older women were viewed quite
dierently from one another. This article focuses on virgins, or maidens – young unmarried
women, in their teens or early twenties – in fourteenth- and fteenth-century England,
though comparative evidence from other Western European contexts will lend support.
While its main source base is medical, supplemented by a range of other literary, legal, visual
and material sources, its avowed subject is young medieval women – specically, their bod-
ies, and the expectations in which they were enmeshed.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 3
Cosmetic treatments for the suppression or reduction of breasts are found in three types
of Middle English or multi-lingual medical treatise: herbals, works on surgery and ‘leech-
books’ or remedy or ‘receipt’ books (receptaria). While the treatments are not universal, neither
are they rare, occurring in around one-third of the works here sampled.11 I have examined
32 herbals, surgeries and remedy books (31 edited volumes, and one unedited manuscript),
all or partly composed in Middle English, from the fourteenth and fteenth centuries. Breast
reduction or suppression recipes aimed at maidens or at women aiming to attain maiden-like
breasts appear in ten of the texts, though the majority of the works contain recipes dealing
with swollen breasts in general. Some of the items lacking advice on breast reduction were
aimed specically at men, such as the Middle English abridged version of Gilbertus Anglicus’s
Compendium medicinae and Caxton’s Governayle of Helthe, so the omission there is unsur-
prising. More unexpectedly, they do not usually feature in works on gynaecology and obstet-
rics, such as the Middle English texts based on Trotula and others.12 Sources chiey in the
Middle English vernacular, sometimes mixed with Latin, are my main focus, given their
potential to reach a wider readership than Latin originals on which they were often based.
Production of vernacular medical works exploded in the late Middle Ages: the database eVK
lists only three manuscripts from the thirteenth (though Anglo-Norman works were then
more common), 200 from the fourteenth and nearly 8,000 from the fteenth century, sig-
nalling a surge in late medieval English appetite for medical and scientic information.
13
The
books’ readerships and wider discourse communities were doubtless heterogeneous, rang-
ing from university-trained physicians, to professional leeches, barbers, apothecaries, lay
practitioners, clergymen and not least laywomen who utilised herbals and remedy books
within their homes.14 It is well known that John Crophill, a Suolk baili, compiled his own
remedy book, while Robert Reynes, a Norfolk church reeve, included recipes in his common-
place book; the gentry Paston family, including its women, tended their own ailments and
those of others, and Robert Thornton, a Yorkshire gentleman, added the copy of the Liber
de diversis medicinis cited below to the romances and religious texts in his household mis-
cellany.15 Moreover, the recipes that concern us are pragmatic and laconic. The surgical texts
aside, they recommend commonplace ingredients and simple methods. The recipes were
written down because they were meant to be used.
Although they often appear in the midst of recipes to treat breast ailments, from abscesses
to engorgement to cancer, those addressed to maidens are primarily cosmetic. Interweaving
of medical and cosmetic treatments is common in medieval medical handbooks, which
included recipes for hair dyes and depilatories, tooth and skin whiteners, freckle removers
and the like. While one also nds plentiful cures for breasts swollen or enlarged by pregnancy
or lactation, those are not my subject, and can be distinguished from recipes directed at
virgins. I summarise procedures in broad chronological order.
‘The First Corpus Compendium’ (c. 1320–30), a trilingual recipe book in MS Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College 388, includes treatments for diverse breast complaints in Latin, Anglo-
Norman and Middle English. In order to prevent maidens’ busts from growing large, it
instructs, ‘At the time that they grow, castrate a piglet and anoint the right breast with the
blood of the right testicle and the left breast with [the blood of] the left [testicle]’ [Item ut
mamille pusille sunt et ne amplius crescant: In tempore quo crescant porciculum fac castrare et
de sanguine dexteri testiculi unges mamillam dexteram et de sinistro sinistram mamillam].16
More common were the remedies commended by oft-copied late fourteenth-century herbal
Agnus Castus, which advised use of cicuta (water hemlock), a ‘cold and dry’ herb. ‘The virtue
4 K. M. PHILLIPS
of this herb is that it stops maidens’ breasts from growing too large. Also, if the juice of this
herb [is] drunk it destroys the great lust of lechery’ [Þe vertu of þis herbe. is þat it stoppyth
maydnes pappys fro gret waxyng. Also ƺef þe jous of þis herbe drownkyn it distroyƺeth þe grete
lust of lecherye.]17 The similarly popular Middle English Macer Floridus, a fteenth-century
translation of the Latin Macer Floridus de Viribus Herbarum, notes among the uses of hemlock
that ‘Anaxilaus says that if a maid anoint her breasts with hemlock juice when rst they begin
to grow large and swollen, they shall afterwards remain small’ [Amasilaus seiþ þat if a maide
a-noynte his tetis with hemlok iuus rst when þey begynne to waxe grete and bolne, þey shulle
after stonde stil smalle].18
The Middle English translation of Lanfrank of Milan’s Chirurgia magna (c. 1296, ME trans-
lation c. 1420), goes into greater detail, recommending ingredients included (as we shall
see) in breast-reduction treatments since antiquity:
Also, it may happen to maidens that their breasts become larger than is reasonable, and you
should help them in this manner. Take stones that men whet knives on, and rub these two stones
together in vinegar for a long time, till the vinegar becomes thick, and heat it and anoint the
breasts with it, and then bind them. This medicine prevents them from growing, and makes
them become little until they come to their own proper shape.
Also, take cumin and make powder from it, and mix it with honey and vinegar, and it works
more strongly if you mix it with Armenian bole19 and terra sigillata20; grind them and temper
them with vinegar, and make a plaster thereof and let it lie thereon for three days, and then you
shall wash it with cold water. And a woman should be careful that she have no such medicine, if
[she wishes that] her breasts to grow more [in the future]. [Also it bifalliþ to maidenes þat her tetis
bicomeþ more þan þei schulde be bi resoun, & þou schlt helpe hem in þis maner. Take stonys þat men
whettiþ knyues on, & frote þese ij stones togidere in vinegre longe, til þe vinegre bicome þicke þerof,
& make it hoot & anoynte þer wiþ hir tetis, & þan binde hem Þis medicyn defendiþ þat þei schulen
not wexe, & make hem bicome litil til þei come to her owne propre schap.
Also take comyn & make poudre þerof, & medle it wiþ hony & vinegre; and it worchiþ þe more strongli
if þou medle þerwiþ bole armoniac & terra sigillata; grinde hem & tempere hem wiþ vinegre, & make a
plastre þerof & lete it lie þeron .iij daies, & þan þou schalt waische it wiþ coold water. And a womman
be war herof þat sche haue no sich medicyn, if hir brest schal wexe ony more].21
Likewise, the fteenth-century Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia
Magna has several suggestions:
And so that the breasts grow not too large in young maidens, make sure they are not touched
or rubbed, but that they are constrained very tightly, and that they are anointed with cold water
and vinegar. And if clay or the earth of the grinding stone were dissolved therein, that would be
benecial. And if alum were added, and oak-apples and pomegranate skin, [the mixture] would
be stronger. And according to Galen as mentioned above (that Rhazes follows), if powdered
cumin were taken and mixed with water and with vinegar, and bound thereon for three days,
and plastered for another three with lily root, with honey and with vinegar, in binding and
in doing that three times in a month, it would help greatly [And þat the pappes waxe not ouer
mykel in ƺonge maydenes, be þai not touchede ne froted, but be þai holden wel streite, and be þai
enoyntede with colde water and with vynegre. And if þere were claye dissoluede þeryn or þe erthe of
þe gryndyng stone, it were gode. And if þere were put alume þerto and galles and psidia, it were þe
stronger. And after Galien, vbi supra (þat Rasis takeþ), if powdred comyn be taken and medlede with
water and with vynegre, and bynde it þeron by þre dayes, and plastre it by oþer þre wiþ the rote of
lilye, with hony and with vynegre, in byndynge and in doynge þat thries in a monthe, it helpeþ hiely].22
The Practica Phisicalia (c. 1425–50) ascribed to John of Burgundy, is terser. ‘In order to hold
breasts in so that they do not grow, temper the powder of hemlock seed with vinegar and
anoint the breasts many times with it’ [For to hold pappis in on sted þat þei grow not. Temper
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 5
þe pouder of kexsede with eysyll and a-noynt ofte tymes þe pappis þer-with.]23 The combination
of hemlock seed and vinegar recurs in Medical Society of London Leechbook (c. 1440). ‘For to
make breasts small: stamp the seed of hemlock with vinegar and anoint them with it often.
Another: mix the powder of incense with vinegar and anoint them with it and they shall
grow small’ [or to make tetis small stamp þe sede of hembloke with vynegre and þ’ with enoynt
hem oft. Anoþ’ medle þe poudre o encens wt vynegre and enoynt hem þ’ with ד þei shall wax
small].24 Liber de diversis medicinis, surviving in at least twenty manuscripts but best known
from the mid-fteenth-century Thornton Manuscript, varied the script. ‘If a woman lifts her
breasts together with juice from the very beginning, they will always be small, hard and
upstanding. The juice of henbane the same. (Marginal gloss: To make maidens’ breasts hard
and for the clustering of breasts). Take asafoetida and aromatica and other great elixers, and
wax and oil, as seems reasonable. Apply to the breasts. This ointment rms and softens
[smoothes?] breasts’. [Si mulier vnexerit mammas suas cum succo sicute a principio, semper
erunt parue dure & stantes. Succus iusquiamiadi idem. (Marginal gloss: To mak maydyns pappis
harde & for clusteryng of pappes). Tak asafetida & aromatica, and aþer elik mekill, & wax & oyl,
as reson gyes. Welle al samen. This oynement makes hardness of pappes & softnes.]25 A f-
teenth-century receptarium in British Library, MS Additional 34,111 includes treatment for
‘a woman that would have breasts like a maiden’s: Take green hemlock and stamp it with
vinegar and make a plaster and lay it on the breasts, and they shall become like those of a
maiden and without milk’ [woman þat wille haue teten as were of a mayden. Tak þe grene
homelok and stamp wiþ eysille and make an emplastre and lege vpon þe tetes, and þei shalle
bien as it were of a mayden and wiþ oute melk].26 An unedited remedy book of the later f-
teenth century, now Manchester, John Rylands English MS 404, includes recipes for breast
reduction in the midst of a section on women’s health. Its ingredients and purpose are similar
to the foregoing item. ‘For to make a woman’s breasts small stamp the seed of hemlock with
vinegar and therewith anoint them often. For to make breasts hard. Anoint them often with
the juice of mint. For to make breasts small. Meddle the powder of incense with vinegar and
anoint them therewith’. [or to make a womanys tetis smale stampe þe sede of hemlok wt
vynegre and þer wt a noyne hem ofte. or make tet(es) harde. Anoynt hem ofte wt þe jus of
myntes. or to make tetis smale Medil þe pouder of encens wt vynegre & noynt hem þer wt.]27
While the latter recipes may have been intended for post-partum women drying o milk,
they could also have been used for maidens quelling bust growth.
English herbals and remedy books add some distinctive ingredients to their recipes, but
in most respects are indebted to older continental texts in Latin, which in turn draw deeply
on Arabic, early medieval and ancient precedents. The Middle English versions of Lanfrank’s
and Chauliac’s Surgeries, for example, draw on their Latin originals, while furthermore Henri
de Mondeville (c. 1260–1316), ‘father of French surgery’, paid the subject attention. In addi-
tion to listing typical treatments such as hemlock, vinegar, terra sigillata and henbane,
Mondeville commented on women seeking help from a surgeon and the use of tight under-
garments (about which, more below). His recommendations include value-judgements: large
breasts are said to be ‘unsightly’ or ‘indecent’ in their volume [grossitie indecenti ... indeoen-
tiam].28 Small, rm, unmarked breasts were an ancient ideal too, and physicians and phar-
macologists devised treatments that later showed up in medieval texts. Pliny the Elder (23-79
CE) cited Anaxilaus (who we have already seen mentioned in Macer Floridus) when he asso-
ciated hemlock with breast suppression in his Natural History, while the Greek authority
Dioscorides (c. 40-c. 90 CE) listed the herb Epimedion and powder of Naxian whetstones
6 K. M. PHILLIPS
(whetstones from the island of Naxos) for the same purpose.29 Galen (c. 129–216 CE), the
greatest medical authority in the premodern European tradition, had a couple of such recipes
in On Simple Medicines, a standard text in medieval university curricula. He recommended
Ostracites – petried oyster shells – along with the shavings of Naxian whetstones as ben-
ecial in suppressing breasts of virgins and boys’ testicles. Elsewhere, he argues for applica-
tion of bats’ blood to virgins’ breasts for the same purpose.
30
Paulus Ægineta (Paul of Aegina),
the inuential seventh-century Byzantine author, repeated Galen’s advice in his vast medical
compendium, assuring its transmission not only within Christian but also Islamic texts.31 For
the West, Monica H. Green has noted three breast reduction recipes in certain twelfth-century
copies of the Latin works De passionibus mulierum and De aegritudinum curatione.32
The recipes display a certain logic. In many cases, the ingredients were perceived to have
cooling and tightening properties; this accounts for repeated mention of hemlock and vin-
egar, for instance. Similarly, ostracites, as Galen explains, are dessicative, astringent and
pungent, while the Naxian whetstones have a refrigerant eect. Avoidance of rubbing or
touching also helped avert heating. The idea that female puberty could be associated with
increased humoral heat rather than its decrease indicates a fundamental dissonance in pre-
modern physiological thinking. Learned texts explained menstruation in terms of women’s
decit of heat, but their silence on breasts makes it dicult to see how they might t pubertal
growth within theories of the gendered body.
33
By the mid-seventeenth century, in contrast,
Peter Chamberlen in The Midwifes Practice more clearly connected female puberty with
burgeoning heat: ‘usually Maids begin to bloom at the second seaven yeares [fourteen], the
heat then beginning to gather strength and to burst forth, as the Sun in his brightnesse, and
to rule in the body, sometimes, nay often, making the body become very unruly’. Heat
expands veins and blood vessels, raising ‘motions and commotions of the humours’. ‘Maidens
paps begin to swell, and they to think upon … &s [sic] for want wherof some pine away, and
dwinder into Consumptions, others more vigorously rage, aected with the Furor uteri [uter-
ine fury], using all wayes to be satised’.34
The recipes raise several potential questions for historians of medicine and the body. My
intention here is to concentrate on cultural and social aspects in asking why young medieval
women were encouraged to keep their breasts small and rm. It is clear, for example from
Lanfrank and Mondeville, that there was a perceived proper and decent size for maiden’s
breasts, and it was worth striving to prevent their early maturation. The presence of the
recipes in diverse medical genres, but particularly in vernacular herbals and remedy books
produced for pragmatic purposes, indicates they had real-world utility and were used by
those involved in the medieval equivalent of primary health care.
The most obvious explanation is that the recipes met an aesthetic preference. Slight, high
breasts were the clear favourite of every author and artist depicting the ideal. The convention
of itemising beautiful girls’ features from head to toe would often mention breasts, as in
versication guides by Matthew of Vendôme and Georey of Vinsauf.35 Matthew’s feminine
archetype has ‘rm but dainty breasts’, while Georey’s paragon lets ‘her breast, the image
of snow, show side by side its twin virginal gems’.36 ‘The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale’ has the
favoured gure, with breasts under ne linen like ‘apples of paradise’.37 When Chaucer’s
Troilus takes Criseyde in his arms he is enraptured by ‘Her snowy throat, her breasts round
and little’.
38
When Elizabeth of York died in 1503 Henry VII considered courting Joan, recently
widowed 27-year-old Queen of Naples. He sent ambassadors with a detailed list of features
to inspect, including ‘[t]o marke hir brests and pappes whether they be bigge or smale’. It is
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 7
not clear which were Henry’s preference, but the answer that Joan’s were somewhat great
and full seems detrimental to her other attractions. Because trussed up high in the fashion
of her country, they ‘caused her grace to seem much the fuller and her neck to be the shorter’,
displeasing attributes in an age celebrating slim torsos and long necks.39
Somewhat earlier, Gilbert of Hoyland’s (d. c.1172) sermons on the Song of Songs included
some of the most impassioned breast descriptions in medieval literature, however much
they were deployed metaphorically. His imagery centres on their symbolism of nourishment,
sweetness and consolation – thus transferable to a male spiritual counsellor – yet secular
moments intrude. The youthful bosom is praised: ‘Other breasts feed; these intoxicate. Rightly
then her breasts are like fawns, because they are not bruised by crabbed age’. The milk-lled
breasts of the fertile bride are also extolled, but as representative of ‘excellence’ (which ‘suits
an infant’) in contrast with the maiden’s dainty ‘beauty’ (which ‘suits a lover’).40 Sermon 31
employs woman’s breasts as metaphoric of abbatial speech: ‘let not the breasts of his words
be sloppy or tumble out in disorder’. Deprecating women who constrain ‘overgrown and
abby’ bosoms with undergarments, he celebrates the virginal gure. ‘Beautiful indeed are
breasts which are slightly prominent and are moderately distended; neither raised too much
nor level with the bosom, as if pressed back but not pressed down, gently restrained but
not hanging loose’.41
Among late medieval visual sources, the petite ideal is similarly dominant, even normative.
Kenneth Clark, in his disdainful appraisal of the female ‘Gothic nude’, found her pert breasts
‘distressingly small’.42 Ladies adorning the margins of The Taymouth Hours (c. 1330–40) feature
little or no bust curvature (Figure 1) and the same may be said of such celebrated English
manuscripts as The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320–40) and the The Romance of Alexander in Bodley
264 (1338–44).43 Among nude images of women, depictions of Bathsheba observed by King
David represent a late medieval erotic ideal. Many such miniatures exist in fteenth-century
books of hours, most famously in such high-status productions as Jean Bourdichon’s works
Figure 1.Detail of a bas-de-page scene of a lady shooting an arrow at a rabbit. The Taymouth Hours, British
Library MS Yates Thompson 13, folio 68v. Origin: South-East England, c. 1325–40. Digital image courtesy
of the British Library’s Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. http://www.bl.uk/
catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=56619.
8 K. M. PHILLIPS
for French royalty (notably, LA, John Paul Getty Museum MS 79r, c. 1498–9), where Bathsheba’s
delicate breasts are clearly displayed (Figure 2).44 These examples represent not exceptions
but rather ubiquitous imagery. They continued to hold sway into the sixteenth century. Hans
Baldung’s Seven Ages of Woman, 1544 portrays the perfect breasts of the maiden, third from
left, and their gradual enlargement and slackening with the passage of life (Figure 3). Images
of the Virgin Mary nursing Jesus – the famous Madonna lactans theme found in late medieval
art – employ several tactics for resolving problems of how to depict breasts that are at once
virginal and lactating and to subdue their erotic appeal. Only one bare breast is displayed,
and it is larger than the usual erotic ideal. Moreover, the Virgin’s body is not portrayed in a
state of enticing dishevelment. Her exposed breast is permitted to protrude from her gar-
ments as an awkward appendage, while the covered breast remains at.45 The bare breast’s
utilitarian purpose is highlighted by the Christ Child’s eager suckling and pulling hands,
gestures which distort the rm roundness of the ideal shape. Mary’s virginal status is declared
by other features, such as her bare neck, owing hair and youthful face (Figures 4 and 5).
The layered nature of such imagery contrasts with the depiction of an ordinary breastfeeding
woman, who is veiled and wimpled in the style conventional to married women, while her
prominent conical breast squirts milk (Figure 6).
Figure 2.Jean Bourdichon, ‘Bathsheba Bathing’, leaf from The Hours of Louis XII, John Paul G etty Museum
MS 79r. Origin: Tours, France, c. 1498–99. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/220354/jean-bourdichon-leaf-from-the-hours-of-louis-xii-
french-1498-1499/.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 9
English paradigms of the desired woman are typical of their time. Iberians praised the
type in literary texts and prescribed cosmetic means to achieve it.46 The French were enthu-
siastic and creative. The heroine of the romance Aucassin et Nicolette has ‘small rm breasts
[that] lifted the bodice of her dress as they might have been two walnuts’.47 Eustace
Deschamps jauntily adopted the voice of a maiden delighting in her own attributes: ‘Am I,
am I, am I lovely?/ My breasts are rm, and they are high,/ slim arms and ngers, by the by,/
and my small waist is very ne:/ tell me if I’m lovely’.48 Larger breasts were never remarked
upon favourably except in potential wet nurses. Aldobrandino of Siena (c. 1256) drew on
long traditions in recommending nurses whose breasts were full and not too soft, though
not overly large because those might give the baby a camus nose.49 In fact, it was not until
the seventeenth century, as is clear from Yalom’s survey, that fuller busts regularly received
favour. Up to c.1600, small or medium was the usual preference and rmness and high
placement were aesthetically compulsory.
Yet there are clues – scattered, suggestive and cumulatively compelling – that more was
at stake than quest for archetypal beauty. Large and loose breasts, I argue, signalled sexual
experience, and therefore could be damaging to a maiden’s reputation. Impregnation was
believed to have an almost immediate eect upon the breasts. Bust changes observed in
Figure 3. Hans Baldung, The Seven Ages of Woman, Germany 1544. Public Domain. https://upload.
wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Hans_Baldung_-_The_Seven_Ages_of_Woman_-_WGA01191.
jpg.
10 K. M. PHILLIPS
maidens might therefore be taken to be indicative of the early stages of pregnancy, and thus
of sexual corruption. The alleged suddenness of physical changes is expressed in a commen-
tary on the thirteenth-century Secretis mulierum (Women’s Secrets): ‘There are still other
ways to tell if a virgin has been corrupted. If a girl’s breasts point downward, this is a sign
that she has been corrupted, because at the moment of impregnation the menses move
upwards to the breasts and the added weight causes them to sag’.50 The twelfth-century
story of the scandalous Nun of Watton includes descriptions of the breast changes experi-
enced by the pregnant nun (and their reversal upon her miraculous loss of her foetus), as
does the thirteenth-century Letter on Virginity, which describes the miseries of heavy, drag-
ging, milk-gorged breasts during pregnancy.51 It seems to have been a common mispercep-
tion that milk-ow from breasts could occur even in the early stages of pregnancy. Thomas
of Cantimpré in his encyclopaedic De Natura Rerum nds a distinct dierence between the
breasts of virgins and of mothers, to the extent that each merits a dierent name. The breasts
of virgins are termed mammae or mamillae, while those of mothers are called ubera because
of their abundance (ubertas) of milk.52
Further examples suggest belief in breast changes following deoration even in the
absence of pregnancy. Intriguing testimony is provided in a case concerning alleged male
impotence in the York Consistory Court, 1432–34, between Katherine Barlay and husband
William Barton.53 Under medieval canon law, impotence constituted grounds for annulment,
so proving non-consummation could aid a litigant. In Barlay vs Barton, William defended
himself against impotence charges. Having conrmed that William’s penis and testicles
appeared to be adequate for conjugal coupling (following inspection by both men and
women deponents), female witnesses turned their attention to Katherine’s body. Katherine
Figure 4.Virgin and Child, Queen Mary Psalter, British Library Royal 2B VII, fol. 150. Origin: London/
Westminster or East Anglia, 1310–20. Digital image courtesy of the British Library’s Creative Commons
CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/
ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=52940.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 11
refused to submit to hymeneal examination, so her breasts were examined instead. Bronach
Kane summarises her ndings from the depositions of the women witnesses:
Finding red marks, in English ‘sulekornes’, on Katherine’s breasts, the women judged her to be
corrupt and known carnally on many occasions. Several of the women also described the marks
on Katherine’s breasts as ‘kirnells’ … [Alice Barton] stated that the markings and ‘soft and broken’
appearance of Katherine’s breasts proved her corruption. Had Katherine remained a virgin,
her breasts would have appeared ‘whole and healthy’. Similarly Joan, wife of John Rycherson,
testied that ‘if the aforesaid Katherine had been a virgin, the certain marks that are present
on women’s breasts, called “kirnells” in English, would have appeared round and whole at the
time of this palpation.’
Furthermore, Joan, wife of Robert Ireby, testied that ‘the other markings present on
[Katherine’s] breasts, commonly known as “le kirnell” through which sign virginity is able to
be proved most truthfully, just as it is commonly said and reputed amongst women, was
soft, broken and separated into many parts, which would have been strong, rm and whole
if the said Katherine had been a virgin’.54
As Kane argues, the case ‘provides evidence of popular perceptions of dierences between
the body of a virgin and that of a sexually experienced woman’.
55
She insists that precedence
is given to the breasts’ signs of virginity loss rather than pregnancy as such. The witnesses
state observable dierences between the breasts of virgins and non-virgins. While size is
Figure 5. Virgin and Child, The Dunois Hours, British Library MS Yates Thompson 3, fol. 27v. Origin:
Paris, c. 1440–1450. Digital image courtesy of the British Library’s Creative Commons CC0 1.0
Universal Public Domain Dedication. https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.
ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5825.
12 K. M. PHILLIPS
not directly mentioned, the red marks or ‘sulekornes’ might be stretch marks, suggesting
rapid breast growth. ‘Kirnells’ are noted in contemporary medical texts as part of breast
structure: for example, breasts ‘are formed and made out of many veins and arteries, and
are soft, white, kirnelly, and spongy’ [ben y-schapen and y-maad of manye veynes and arteries,
and of neische whit kirnelly and spongeous].56 The 1545 The Birth of Mankind includes ana-
tomical tables from Vesalius’s De Fabrica (1543). One shows a female torso with open abdo-
men and ayed breast, the area marked ‘D’ showing ‘Kernels and fatness spread abroad
everywhere on the kernelly body’.57 Damaged ‘kirnells’ might then signal wider corruption.
Katherine’s breasts’ texture and appearance are diagnostic of sexual experience, and evidence
of their growth and slackening may be inferred by presence of ‘sulkornes’ and dispersed or
broken ‘kirnells’.
To cite other examples, in his chronicle, Matthew Paris tells of how in the early thir-
teenth-century Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, ordered breasts of nuns to be pressed
by inspectors during visitations ‘in the manner of physic, [so that] it could be found out
whether there was any [sexual] corruption among them’.58 Three centuries later, following
failure to consummate marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540, Henry VIII complained to Thomas
Cromwell that having felt her breasts and belly he was convinced she was no maid. If she
had been a virgin on arrival in England, he was sure she was no longer.59 If breast growth
and other changes are indicative of sexual activity, it is plausible that maidens and their
caregivers would seek medical advice to slow or prevent busts from loosening and burgeon-
ing, to protect honour.
Sex was widely thought to have a ‘corrupting’ eect upon the female body, with diverse
eects not only on the breasts. The fteenth-century midwifery text The Knowing of Woman’s
Kind in Childing chides that a maiden should not engage in sexual relations before age fteen
lest she become barren, develop bad breath, or ‘be lavy [loose, uncontrollable] of heere
Figure 6.‘Lac’, Historiated initial featuring a woman milking a goat and a mother nursing a child. James le
Palmer, Omne Bonum, British Library, Royal 6 E VII f. 404. Origin: South-East England, c. 1360–1375. Digital
image courtesy of the British Library’s Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=32072.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 13
body’; in other words, wanton.60 The thirteenth-century Secretis mulierum argued the best
virginity test was to examine a girl’s urine, as a virgin has clear, white, sparkling urine, while
a lustful (though not yet deowered) woman’s is golden, clear and heavy, and ‘corrupted
women have a muddy urine’.61 Middle English herbals including A Treatise of Diverse Herbs
suggested burning burdock seed; the smoke from the burning seed would make all nearby
deowered women urinate, while virgins would remain continent.62 The theme has ancient
precedents. Classicist Helen King remarks upon Ancient Greek metaphors where ripeness
was a ‘eeting instant’, and unmarried deowered girls are ‘rotted fruit’, ‘corrupted’ or ‘gone
o’; virginity loss could also be signalled by other changes such as the deepening of a girl’s
voice.63
Premodern sources thus suggest widespread beliefs regarding physical impact of sex on
a woman’s body even in the absence of pregnancy. Behind them lies a long tradition regard
-
ing correspondence between uterus and breasts, present in medical texts since the
Hippocratic treatises. It was a premodern truism that breasts were governed by the womb.
As Helen King contends, in Hippocratic anatomy ‘the womb and breasts are very closely
connected’: thus breast milk is converted menstrual blood, diverted to the breasts post-
conception via a uniquely female vein (kiveris vena) discussed in ancient, Arabic and Latin
medieval works.64 An anatomical text copied by a London surgeon in 1392, now in Wellcome
MS 564, is conventional in asserting that ‘many channels come to women’s breasts, from the
womb, bringing menstrual blood to them, which is turned through digestion from the red
colour unto white, that it be like the breasts in colour’.65 Excessive menstruation could be
remedied through cupping breasts to draw surplus blood, while miscarriage was signalled
by sudden thinning of breast tissue. Moreover, nursing mothers and wet nurses should
abstain from sex, as intercourse stirs the blood, making milk putrid – a theory developed in
ancient and Arabic literature and picked up by medievals including Aldobrandino of Siena.
66
Conversely, when a couple struggled to conceive, Avicenna and others advised stroking
breasts during intercourse to provoke a woman’s seminal ux which would ow to the womb,
views later quoted by Christian authors including Bernard of Gordon, John of Gaddesden
and Michael Savonarola.67 We can extrapolate from these principles an explanation of coitus’s
perceived aect upon breasts, even in absence of conception. As the woman both emitted
and received semen during satisfying sex, which would ow into her womb, such ux may
have impacted upon the breasts given their perceived venous connection.
Material and visual sources on undergarments take the interpretation further. Although
many believe the bra is a late nineteenth-century invention, readers attentive to medieval
literature have noticed remarks about bindings and ‘breastbags’ or ‘titsacks’ (tuttenseck). We
saw references in Gilbert of Hoyland’s sermons on the S ong of Songs, which decried women
who deceitfully tie and compress bosoms.
68
Jean de Meun in Le Roman de la Rose and Eustace
Deschamps also described young women’s encasement of breasts to enhance impressions
of tinyness and tautness.69 From Germany, Konrad Stolle’s Chronicle bewails late fteenth-cen-
tury fashion shirts that ‘had bags in which [women] put the breasts, that did not exist before’.
70
A verse writer from c.1400 makes clear such tuttenseck were hardly a novelty, and hints at
wearers’ motivations: ‘Many a woman makes two bags for the breasts/ with them she roams
the streets,/ so that all the guys look at her,/ and see what beautiful breasts she has got;/ But
whose breasts are too large,/ makes tight pouches,/ so it is not told in the city,/ that she has
such big breasts’.71 People would gossip in the street about a maiden with large breasts
because they signalled she had been up to something.
14 K. M. PHILLIPS
In 2008–9 remnants including underclothes were found during an excavation at Lengberg
Castle in Austria. Four garments that were clearly a kind of bra were radiocarbon-dated to
the late fourteenth or fteenth-century. They garnered wide popular interest, due to the
apparently ‘modern’ appearance of some remnants and their challenge to assumptions that
bras with shaped cups were unknown before the late nineteenth century.72 Clothing histo-
rians have suggested that these textual and material sources demonstrate medieval women’s
common practice of bra-wearing.
73
I submit, moreoever, that the bras conrm larger breasts
were perceived not only as unattractive but indeed disgraceful because physical laxity sug-
gested its moral equivalent. Sartorial restraint of breasts was the material accompaniment
to their medical repression.
Conclusion
Helen King states that the ‘Western medical tradition constructed female puberty and vir-
ginity as problems and proposed solutions for them … [Historical medical concerns] reveal
a deep unease about the proper management of puberty in girls’.74 Medieval pressures on
maidens to keep breasts from developing exemplify the belief that female puberty is prob-
lematic and needs careful stewardship. It is remarkable how these intrinsically blameless
glands are repeatedly coded as troublesome. Although medieval priorities were somewhat
dierent from those of the modern West, the two cultures have in common a compulsion
to read women’s bodies for marks of character and cultural value, and to prescribe techniques
where reality falls short of epitome.
This article has sought to rethink premodern understanding of the nature and function
of women’s bodies. We have seen that in addition to baring religious and nutritive meanings,
medieval breasts carried a highly erotic message so long as they resembled the awless
breasts of virgins. The existence and circulation of recipes for bust improvement illuminate
late medieval notions of feminine beauty, and detail the cosmetic work required to produce
an idealised body. Moreover, in unmarried maidens, prominent and loose breasts signied
wantonness, prompting recipes for suppression and underclothes to keep them in check.
Breasts were perceived as active female organs whose size, shape, structure and utility were
directly related to sexual activity as well as fertility. They played a dynamic role in drawing
upon humours created through intercourse and pregnancy and responded to treatments
intended to alter their appearance. Breasts played a signicant role in the distinctive medieval
cultural and social framework that valorised female virginity for aesthetic, religious and
familial reasons; as such, they were too important to be left alone.
Notes
1. American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2015 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report, available at
https://d2wirczt3b6wjm.cloudfront.net/News/Statistics/2015/plastic-surgery-statistics-full-
report-2015.pdf, pp. 5, 7. In 2015 in the US, 279,143 breast augmentations were performed
on women compared with 40,650 women’s breast reductions, although 24,661 patients also
sought to have implants removed. In addition, breast lifts comprised 99,614 procedures.
2. Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau, Uplift: The Bra in America (Philadelphia, 2002).
3. The recipes are noted in M. Monserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘La cura del cos feminí i la medicina
medieval de tradició llatina: Els tractas “De ornatu” I “De decorationibus mulierum” atribuïts a
Arnau de Vilanova, “Tròtula” de mestre Joan, I “Flos del tresor de beutat” atribuït a Manuel Díeç
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 15
de Calatayud’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University de Barcelona, 1996), pp. 242, 310, 375–6;
Montserrat Cabré, ‘From a Master to a Laywoman: A Feminine Manual of Self-Help,’ DYNAMIS.
Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. His. Illus., 20 (2000), p. 384; Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity,
Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC, 2003), p. 268, note 131; Laurence
Moulinier-Brogi, ‘Esthétique et soins du corps dans les traités médicaux latins à la n du Moyen
Âge,’ Médiévales: Langues, Textes, Histoire, 46 (Spring 2004), pp. 6, 7–8. Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing:
A Cultural History of Healthy Living, trans. Jane Dewhurst (Cambridge, 2008) p. 137; Rebecca
Lynn Winer, ‘Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon
and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,’ Journal of Medieval History, 34 (2008), pp. 176–7. Fuller
discussion in Claudio da Soller, ‘The Beautiful Woman in Medieval Iberia: Rhetoric, Cosmetics,
and Evolution’, unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Missouri-Columbia, 1995, which
cites Iberian literary and medical texts praising small, rm, white breasts sometimes likened
to pomegranates or apples, pp. 2, 14, 18, 31, 44–6, 52, 54, 62–3, 73–4, 99; large or sagging
breasts are among attributes of ugliness, pp. 3, 26, 48–9, 66. Soller notes the conventional
nature of such standards, pp. 7, 68, 69, 70, 127, 133, 136, 145, 147. Marilyn Yalom, A History of
the Breast (New York, 1997), pp. 69, 163, briey mentions premodern cosmetic treatments from
the sixteenth century and later.
4. Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley, 2008),
passim but especially pp. 35–53, quote at p. ix.
5. Yalom, History of the Breast, pp. 36–54.
6. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, translated
by Matthew Adamson (Princeton, 1988), p. 11.
7. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Dierence in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture
(Cambridge, 1993), p. 180.
8. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990),
especially pp. 25–62.
9. James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago,
2006), pp. 26–47.
10. Robert Allen Rouse, ‘“Some Like it Hot”: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat’, in Amanda Hopkins
and Cory James Rushton, eds, The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2007),
pp. 71–81. I thank Dr Rouse for sending me a copy of his essay.
11. In identifying suitable sources, my chief aids have been George R. Keiser, ed., A Manual of the
Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, vol. 10, Works of Science and Information (New Haven,
1998), pp. 3641–58 and 3818–47, supplemented by more recent publications mentioned in
George Keiser, ‘Scientic, Medical, and Utilitarian Prose,’ in A. S. G. Edwards, (ed.), A Companion
to Middle English Prose (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 231–47, with the addition of a remedy book since
published (Francisco Alonso Almeida (ed.), A Middle English Remedy Book: Edited from Glasgow
University Library MS Hunter 185, Middle English Texts vol. 50 (Heidelberg, 2014). Specialist
works on particular subjects listed by Keiser, e.g. on rosemary, betony, gathering herbs,
synonyma, phlebotomy, the eye, uses of eagles and urine and vernacular prose prologues,
are excluded as not relevant Another helpful bibliography that covers many relevant sources
is in Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientic Writing in Late Medieval
English (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 241–46. These studies update older authorities such as Rossell
Hope Robbins, ‘Medical Manuscripts in Middle English’, Speculum, 45, 3 (1970), pp. 393–415.
A manuscript source (see note 27 below) was added slightly to extend the range beyond
published works, but a survey of the vast manuscript sources on medicine in Middle English
is not my purpose. Manuscript sources are catalogued among others in eVK2: Linda E. Voigts
and Patricia D. Kurtz (compilers), Scientic and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An
Electronic Reference, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 2014), http://cctr1.umkc, edu/search. In addition to
consulting full editions/ copies of the 32 sources, I found useful the digital versions in Irma
Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäk inen (compilers), Middle English Medical Texts, CD ROM
(Amsterdam, 2005).
12. M. R. Hallaert (ed.), The Sekenesse of Wymmen: A Middle English Treatise on Diseases in Women,
Scripta 8 (Brussels, 1982) (an edition of the gynaecological chapters of Gilbertus Anglicus’s
16 K. M. PHILLIPS
Compendium medicinae, drawn from Trotula minor and Roger Baron’s Practica medicinae,
which were left out of the Middle English translation of Gilbert’s text and instead circulated
independently); Monica H. Green (ed.), ‘The Nature of Wommen’, in Monica H. Green,
‘Obstetrical and Gynecological Texts in Middle English’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 14 (1992),
pp. 84–88; Alexandra Barratt (ed.), The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing: A Middle English
Version Derived from the Trotula and Other Sources (Turnhout, 2001); Monica H. Green and Linne
R. Mooney (eds), ‘The Sickness of Women’, in M. Teresa Tavormina (ed.), Sex, Aging, and Death in
a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.62, Its Texts, Language, and
Scribe (Tempe, AZ, 2006), pp. 455–568 (an edition of an expanded version of the Sekenesse of
Wymmen, replacing the older edition by Beryl Rowland). Selections from these and other texts
are in Alexandra Barratt, (ed.), Women’s Writing in Middle English (London, 1992), pp. 27–39. See
the denitive studies by Green, notably ‘Obstetrical and Gynecological Texts’; ‘A Handlist of Latin
and Vernacular Manuscripts of of the So-Called Trotula Texts: Part II, The Vernacular Translations
and Latin Re-Writings’, Scriptorium, 51 (1997), pp. 84–9, and Making Women’s Medicine Masculine:
The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford, 2008), pp. 183–96. I am grateful
to Professor Green for her advice.
13. See remarks in Païvi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen, ‘Vernacularisation of Scientic and Medical
Writing in its Sociohistorical Context’, in Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientic
Writing, pp. 9, 11.
14. Pahta and Taavitsainen, ‘Vernacularisation’, pp. 15–7; also in the same volume, Claire Jones,
‘Discourse Communities and Medical Texts’, pp. 26–30.
15. Lois Jean Ayoub (ed.), John Crophill's Books: An Edition of British Library MS Harley 1735, unpublished
PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1994; Cameron Louis (ed.), The Commonplace Book of
Robert Reynes of Acle: An Edition of Tanner Ms. 407 (New York, 1980); Elaine E. Whittaker, ‘Reading
the Paston Letters Medically’, English Language Notes, 31, 1 (1993), pp. 19–27; Derek S. Brewer
and A. E. B. Owen (eds), The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS.91) (London, 1977).
16. ‘The First Corpus Compendium’, in Tony Hunt (ed.) with the collaboration of Michael Benskin,
Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Languages of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century,
Medium Ævum Monographs, new series XXI (Oxford, 2001), item 349 (p. 119). Translations are
mine unless otherwise stated.
17. Gösta Brodin (ed.), Agnus Castus: A Middle English Herbal Reconstructed from Various Manuscripts
(Uppsala, 1950), p. 140. With regard to Middle English, note that while ‘pappis’ and ‘tetis’ could
refer to nipples, in these recipes the concern seems to be with the whole breast. ‘Brest’ most
commonly refers to the chest area, including respiratory system, though is sometimes also
used of breasts.
18. G. Frisk (ed.), A Middle English Translation of ‘Macer Floridus de Viribus Herbarum’, (Uppsala,
1949), 23a.26, item IV (p. 133). The section on hemlock also notes its use in suppressing lechery.
19. A type of clay or medicinal earth containing iron oxide.
20. Sealed earth; a medicinal clay from the Isle of Lemnos.
21. Robert von Fleischacker (ed.), Lanfrank's Science of Cirurgie, EETS, o.s. 102 (London, 1892), III.iii.5
(p. 268). The editor notes, ‘the [Middle English] translator has omitted the following passage:
Caueat etiam illa quae non vult suas ingrossare mamillas; ne illas tangat vel tangi permittat’
[Be aware, also, that anyone who does not wish enlargement of their breasts not allow them
to touch or be touched].
22. Margaret S. Ogden (ed.), The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, EETS, os, 265 (London, 1971), Bk 6,
ch. 5, lines 7–18 (p. 499).
23. H. Schöer (ed.), ‘Practica Phisicalia Magistri Johannis de Burgundia’,Beiträge zur mittelenglischen
Medizinliteratur,Sächsische Forschungsinstitute in Leipzig, Forschungsinstitut für neuere Philologie.
III. Anglistische Abteilung,Heft I (1919), f. 105a (p. 246). The ascription to John of Burgundy is
spurious.
24. Warren R. Dawson (ed.), A Leechbook, or Collection of Medical Recipes of the Fifteenth Century
(London, 1934), items 901–2 (pp. 278–9).
25. Margaret Sinclair Ogden (ed.), The ‘Liber de Diversis Medicinis’ in the Thornton Manuscript (MS.
Lincoln Cathedral A. 5. 2) EETS os, 207 (London, 1938), p. 27.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 17
26. W. L. Braekman (ed.), ‘A Collection of Medicinal Recipes and Charms’, in Studies on Alchemy, Diet,
Medecine [sic] and Prognostication in Middle English, Scripta 22 (Brussels, 1986), item 13 (p. 128).
27. Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS English 404, fols. 19r–v. A digital reproduction is
available at http://johannes.library.manchester.ac.uk:8181/luna/servlet/view/search?sort=
Image_Number%2CImage_Sequence_Number%2CPage%2CImage_Title&q=%22english+
MS+404%22&QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA&pgs=50&res=1&cic=Man4MedievalVC~4~4.
28. Henri de Mondeville, Die Chirurgie des Heinrich von Mondeville (Hermondaville), nach Berliner,
Erfurter und Pariser Codices zum ersten Male, ed. Julius Pagel (Berlin, 1892), Tract. III. Doctr. I cap.
13 (p. 404). For a modern French translation see E. Nicaise, Dr. Saint-Lager, and F. Chavannes,
trans., Chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, chirurgien de Philippe le Bel, Roi de France composée
de 1306 à 1320 (Paris, 1893), Doct. 1, chap. XIII (pp. 589–90).
29. Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols, ed. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1956), vol.
7, book XXV.xcv (pp. 244–7). Pliny seems a little sceptical about the treatment, although he
does credit hemlock as an ingredient for drying o lactating women. Pedanius Dioscorides
of Anazarbus, De materia medica, trans. Lily Y. Beck, (Olms-Weidmann, 2005), IV:19 and V:149
(pp. 258–9 and 397). For the strong inuence of Dioscorides, Pliny, and Galen, via Arabic texts, on
medieval herbals, see Martti Mäkinen, ‘Herbal Recipes and Recipes in Herbals – Intertextuality
in Early English Medical Writing’ in Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientic Writing,
pp. 149–52.
30. Galen, Claudii Galeni De Simplicium Medicamentorum Facultatibus Libri XI, ed. Theodorico
Gerardo Gaudano (Lyon, 1561), Lib. 9.2.17 and 10.1.1 (pp. 580 and 630).
31. The Seven Books of Paulus Ægineta, Translated from the Greek. With a Commentary Embracing a
Complete View of the Knowledge Possessed by the Greeks, Roman, and Arabians on All Subjects
Connected with Medicine and Surgery, trans. Francis Adams, 3 vols (London, 1847), vol. 3, Book
VII, Sect. iii (pp. 25, 221).
32. Monica H. Green, ‘The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease
through the Early Middle Ages’, unpublished PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1985, p. 268
and p. 302 note 47.
33. On menstruation and heat decit, Cadden, Meanings of Sex Dierence, pp. 173–6; Bettina
Bildhauer, ‘The Secrets of Women (c. 1300): A Medieval Perspective on Menstruation’, in Andrew
Shail and Gillian Howie (eds.), Menstruation: A Cultural History (New York, 2005), pp. 68–9. On
female puberty as an age of declining heat, Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women
and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003), p. 24.
34. Peter Chamberlen, Dr. Chamberlain's midwifes practice: or, a guide for women in that high concern
of conception, breeding, and nursing children [etc] (London, 1665), Chapter XXVI:3 (pp. 68–9).
35. D. S. Brewer, ‘The Ideal of Feminine Beauty in Medieval Literature, Especially “Harley Lyrics”,
Chaucer, and Some Elizabethans’, Modern Language Review, 50, 3 (1955), pp. 257–69.
36. Matthew of Vendôme, The Art of Versication, trans. Aubrey E. Galyon (Ames, 1980), I: 56
(p. 43); Poetria Nova of Georey of Vinsauf, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto, 1967), Book III,
lines 590–2 (p. 37).
37. G. L. Brook (ed.), The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2,253 (Manchester,
1948), p. 38, lines 58–60.
38. Georey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn
(Oxford, 1987), Book III, line 1250 (p. 530).
39. Instructions Given by King Henry the Seventh, to His Embassadors, when he intended to marry the
young Queen of NAPLES: Together with the Answers of the Embassadors (London, 1761), Article
XVI (pp. 13–4). Article XV also comments that her breasts are ‘fully and somewhat bygge’, to the
detriment of the appearance of her neck. Henry decided not to pursue the match for reasons
unknown. I am indebted to Charlotte Stanford for this reference and for comments by Henry
VIII referenced in note 58 below.
40. Gilbert of Hoyland, Sermon 27, ‘Rapturous Feast and the Milk of Babes’, in Lawrence C. Braceland,
SJ (trans.), Sermons on the Song of Songs, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI, 1979), p. 335. See also Sermon
28, ‘The Incense of Prayer’, p. 341.
18 K. M. PHILLIPS
41. Gilbert of Hoyland, Sermon 31, ‘Milk for Babes’, pp. 377–79. See Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty
in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, 2002), p. 11.
42. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, 1984), p. 21.
43. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13; London, British Library, Additional MS 42130;
Oxford, Bodley MS 264, fols. 3r–208r.
44. Thomas Kren, ‘Looking at Louis XII’s Bathsheba’, in Thomas Kren and Mark Evans (eds.), A
Masterpiece Reconstructed: The Hours of Louis XII (Los Angeles, 2005), pp. 43–61; Diane Wolfthal,
‘Sin or Sexual Pleasure: A Little Known Nude Bather in a Flemish Book of Hours’, in Sherry C. M.
Lindquist (ed.), The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Farnham, 2012), pp. 283–5.
45. Miles, Complex Delight, p. 45.
46. Soller, ‘The Beautiful Woman in Medieval Iberia’, see references cited in note 3, above.
47. Aucassin and Nicolette and Other Tales, trans. Pauline Matarosso (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 35.
48. Eustache Deschamps, ‘Sui je, sui je, sui je belle?’ in S elected Poems, ed. Ian S. Laurie and Deborah
M. Sinnreich-Levi, trans. David Curzon and Jerey Fiskin (New York, 2003), pp. 102–4.
49. Aldobrandino of Siena, Le Régime du Corps de Maitre Aldebrandin de Sienne, Texte Français du
XIIIe Siécle, ed. Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin (Paris, 1911), p.77.
50. Helen Rodnite Lemay (trans.), Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De
secretis mulierum with Commentaries (Albany, NY, 1992), Chapter 10, Commentary B (p. 129).
51. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Nun of Watton, trans. John Boswell in The Kindness of Strangers: The
Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago,
1988), pp. 452–8; ‘Hali Meiðhad (A Letter on Virginity)’, in Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-
Browne (eds.), Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and
Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1990), pp. 30–2.
52. Thomas Cantimpratensis, Liber de Natura Rerum, ed. H. Boese (Berlin, 1973), I:46 (pp. 48–9).
I am grateful to Jessica Thomas for alerting me to this passage.
53. This section is indebted to the summary and excerpts provided in Bronach Kane, Impotence and
Virginity in the Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Court of York ( York, 2008). The case is York, Borthwick
Institute, Cause Paper F. 175.
54. Kane, Impotence and Virginity, p. 27.
55. Kane, Impotence and Virginity, p. 26.
56. Richard Grothe (ed.), Le MS. Wellcome 564: Deux Traites de Chirurgie en Moyen-Anglais,
unpublished PhD dissertation, 2 vols, University of Montreal, 1982, vol. 1, I.ii.9 (p. 96).
57. Thomas Reynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, the Woman’s Book Newly Set forth,
Corrected, and Augmented, ed. Elaine Hobby (Farnham, 2009), pp. 83–4. Edition of 1560,
originally published 1540.
58. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series 57, 7 vols (1872–83), vol. 5, p. 227.
Kane, Impotence and Virginity, p. 28 and p. 37 n. 110, cites the passage and provides translation.
59. Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Early Modern England
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 164.
60. Barrett, Knowing, lines 249–258, pp. 57–9, at line 257 p. 59. In the Commentary Barrett glosses
‘lauy’ as ‘Probably a form of the uncommon word lavei … MED glosses it as “?Noisy ?unruly”;
the illustrative quotation suggests it means “boisterous” or “uncontrollable”’.
61. Lemay, trans., Women’s Secrets, Chapter X, (p. 128). This follows comment that virginity is
indicated by ‘shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men
and the acts of men’. The trouble is that such a performance of virginity can be feigned by
‘clever’ women, which is why it’s better to examine the urine. See also Chapter IX (pp. 126–7).
62. A tretys of diverse herbis, ed. R. M. Garrett in ‘Middle English Rimed Medical Treatise’, Anglia, 34
(1911), pp. 164–83, lines 704–17 (p. 182).
63. Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (London,
2004), pp. 77 and 56.
64. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London, 1998), p.
34. For medieval sources, Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, pp. 34, 42–3, 52, 72.
65. Grothe, ed., Le MS. Wellcome 564, vol. 1, I.ii.9 (p. 97).
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 19
66. Aldobrandino, Régime du Corps, p.77; also Reynalde, Birth of Mankind, book 3, ch 2 (p. 160).
For general background, Ole Jørgen Benedictow, ‘On the Origin and Spread of the Notion
that Breast-Feeding Women Should Abstain from Sexual Intercourse’, Scandinavian Journal of
History, 17, 1 (1992), pp. 65–76.
67. Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, pp. 123, 125, 131, 132, 133.
68. Gilbert of Hoyland, Sermon 31, ‘Milk for Babes’, pp. 377–9.
69. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. Frances Horgan
(Oxford, 1994), lines 13296–9 (p. 205); Deschamps, ‘Dame, aiez pité de tettine!’ in Laurie et al.
(eds and trans), Selected Poems, pp. 202–4.
70. Konrad Stolle, Memoriale thrüringisch-erfurtische Chronik, ed. Richard Thiele (Halle, 1900), p. 456.
71. Anton Schönbach, Meister Rennaus: satirisches Gedicht aus dem vierzehnten Jahrhundert (Vienna,
1873), lines 55–62; also quoted in Katrin Kania, Kleidung im Mittelalter: Materialen – Konstruktion
– Nähtechnik. Ein Handbuch (Cologne, 2010), p. 132. Translated by Beatrix Nutz in ‘Medieval
Lingerie from Lengberg Castle, East Tyrol’, http://www.uibk.ac.at/urgeschichte/projekte_
forschung/textilien-lengberg/medieval-lingerie-from-lengberg-castle-east-tyrol.html.
72. Beatrix Nutz, ‘Bras in the 15th Century: A Preliminary Report’, in Johanna Banck-Burgess and
Carla Nübold (eds), NESAT XI: The North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles XI 10–13
May 2011 in Esslingen am Neckar (Rahden/ Westf., 2013), p. 225, note 5. The nds were widely
reported; see for example http://www.historyextra.com/lingerie.
73. Isis Sturtewagen, blogging at ‘Medieval Silkwork’, compiles visual sources depicting women in
slips with tight tted bustlines, suggesting that medieval women’s preference was for a garment
more like a petticoat with a tight bustline than a bra as such, http://www.medievalsilkwork.
com/2012/08/15th-century-bra-found-at-schloss.html.
74. King, Disease of Virgins, p. 141.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to conference audiences in Leeds, York, Auckland and Wellington for their feedback, to
Barry Reay and John Bevan-Smith for comments and suggestions and Monica H. Green, Robert Rouse,
Charlotte Stanford and Jessica Thomas for sharing references.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Kim M. Phillips is associate professor of History at the University of Auckland. In addition to research
interests in medieval travel writing and cross-cultural encounter, she has longstanding interests in the
histories of young women, gender, and sexualities. Her publications include Medieval Maidens: Young
Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003), (with Barry Reay) Sex Before Sexuality:
A Premodern History (Cambridge, 2011), and (as editor) A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages
(London, 2013).
