Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood
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You don't need to be enthusiastic about this thesis -- or even to be male -- to find Castration terrific reading. It is entirely characteristic of its author, at once polemical and reasonable, historically detailedand wildly imaginative. I found it endlessly informative and compulsively readable.
This isn't USA Today-style speculation about trends and people. Taylor's ideas are so well-reasoned that the reader is gladly seduced into following each argument as far as it goes. Taylor's uxtaposition of history, culture, and psychology, along with his comfort about sexuality, breaks new ground here. By examining sexuality in its historical context, crucial for understanding other civilizations, he makes the arbitrariness of our own erotic beliefs startlingly visible. Taylor has written a thoroughly engaging and witty account of the history and misconceptions of castration Castration provides a useful, original, lively, and long overdue look at one of mankind;s most essential physical and cultural components.
Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. Castration is a lively history of the meaning, function, and act of castration from its place in the early church to its secular reinvention in the Renaissance as a spiritualized form of masculinity in its 20th century position at the core of psychoanalysis.
Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Customers who bought this item also bought. Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains, and Body Guys. From Publishers Weekly Early in this absorbing treatise on the changing nature of manhood in Western culture, English professor Taylor remarks, "This is a specter that has haunted men for centuries: Routledge; 1 edition October 27, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.
Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. A provocative and somewhat misleading title, as work deals firstly with theater of Thomas Middleton, but also with entire history of notion of castration - removal of testes, not penis- from Mesopotamian cultural practices to Renaissance musical habits and more.
Gary Taylor is Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, and a specialist of the lesser known but highly prolific Middleton - best known for the classic "The Roaring Girl".
- Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood - Gary Taylor - Google Книги.
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A great scholarly work. Don't be put off by the title.
I found it a rather useless book. Didn't catch what it was rellay trying to portray.
Not worth bothering with. This is bound to sound peculiar to those in the twentieth century raised on Freud, or more recently those who have followed the follies of John and Lorena Bobbitt, but before Freud, castration always meant removal of the testicles, never removal of the penis. It was reproduction that was important then, and the "stones" were what mattered.
Now that we have reproduced entirely enough, the "scepter" is more important. Sex for pleasure is now more vital than sex for reproduction. Eunuchs, just like oxen, were useful. They guarded the harems, for one job, but power in the bedchamber within some societies became legal or military power. A eunuch had no testicles, but had enough genitalia left to play games in the harem.
Jesus spoke highly of eunuchs, and Taylor makes the case that he was speaking literally. Augustine, however, insisted that Jesus's words were an allegory to promote priestly celibacy. Taylor is a Shakespearean scholar the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare , and in a show of scholarly breadth cites plenty of the Bard, but cites also other Elizabethan playwrights as well as Tori Amos and Christina Aguilera.
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If you wish to read something for entertainment's sake, then this book will suffice. Written by an English Professor, this book lacks the sort of critical thought those of us in the science deptartments want for. Purportedly an 'Abbreviated History Of Western Manhood,' it is rather an exercise in academic arcana - an attempt to think of something through its opposite or, in this case, its abuse. One is hardly compelled to reconsider ideas about what manhood means. There is nothing in Taylor's "treatise" to support such nonsense as, "This is a specter that has haunted men for centuries: In whose misandrist manifesto?
The concept "Western Man" is, after all, just that - a concept. There is no such unified and homogeneous group and no such "specter" has haunted it for so long. That men should cringe at the word castration is less a mystery than than why women should fear rape. In short, Taylor's analysis of the history and purposes of castration sheds less light on the "cultural construct of masculinity" than on the sadistic sexual abuse and humiliation with which males can be threatened and subjugated.
That some of his readers find him witty or funny at times is only because Taylor's treatment of his subject is often sophmoric. In my view, today's attitudes toward manhood and males are best understood in terms of our lacking moral sympathies toward them. Taylor's book is no exception. We are not a generation influenced by Freud so much as by feminism.
Thus, the historical abuse and mutilation of women is a subject deadly serious and pertinent to us while the sexual abuse and humiliation of men is treated like something that never happened - that is, something we've misconstured, or, in Tayor's case, given a fictional reinterpretation, mocked and trivalized.
Taylor's ignorant belief not first person, of course about the sexual prowess of eunuchs is one case in point. Another case in point is Tayor's view that for most of western history castration was a mark of power and divinity and, as the ultimate abrogation of sexual desire, had wide spread currency among Christian metaphysicians. Taylor is arguing anecdotally to his own foregone conclusions.
The 17th-century Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina gives the earliest medical description of the operation, which involved removing the testicles by compression or excision. I wish that Taylor had told more about how the operations, especially self-castrations, were done, and what sort of survival rate or complications there were. As animals became domesticated, farmers learned that there were advantages to castrating bulls, for instance, to make pliable, working oxen.
Farmers never made the Freudian confusion and cut off the penises of their animals; that would have served no useful purpose. It would not have been long before people began to wonder about the advantages of keeping men who had been castrated the corresponding operation on women was much too difficult to consider. Clearly, testicles were more important to Renaissance artists than were penises. The customer is always right.
Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood
So the statue was taken away again, and David was given a couple of extra inches where it counts. Sex for pleasure is now more vital than sex for reproduction. Eunuchs, like oxen, were useful. Importantly, it must have been realized that eunuchs were capable of desire, of erections, of orgasm, and even of ejaculation, but any semen produced contained no sperm. Diddling within the harem would have meant little, since there could be no issue.
The Romans and Ottomans used eunuchs for centuries but eventually introduced the sensible precaution of importing rather than manufacturing them, so that the eunuchs might have been angry at their castrators but could not take revenge on them.
"Taylor has written a thoroughly engaging and witty account of the history and misconceptions of castration Castration provides a useful, original, lively, and. Early in this absorbing treatise on the changing nature of manhood in Western culture, English professor Taylor remarks, "This is a specter that has haunted men.
Being a eunuch, whatever its disadvantages, had its perks. Playing games in the harem was one.
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Another was that only socially dominant men could maintain eunuchs, and so the eunuch was often rewarded with money or power. In some dynasties, eunuchs were the real power, and some had full control of the state. Power in the bedchamber became power in law and power over the military. Abelard, following his castration, was an important figure in the medieval Christian church.
These eunuchs were not defective men but improved ones, in the view of their societies. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. So to Augustine, this could be nothing but allegory; Jesus was obviously speaking of priestly celibacy. Paul stressed a circumcision of the heart rather than actual surgery; Augustine stressed a eunuchism for priests that had nothing to do with surgery either.
Taylor makes the case that Jesus was not speaking allegorically at all.
The clear condemnation of reproduction taken figuratively by Augustine has been taken literally by sects like the Shakers, but castration has been taken literally by plenty of others, such as the Skoptsky in Russia, who may have been actively self-castrating for Jesus until around