A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance by Edith Snook;

Author:Edith Snook;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6.2 Woodcut illustrating “The perfite woman” from Thomas Hill, The Contemplation of Mankinde (1571), op. p. 148. This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Women with extremely hot testicles (or ovaries), Hill reasons, not only grow facial hair but are also excessively prone to “coeating,” or copulating (OED): “suche women which are found to have these [testicles] hoter than the common sort, have also somewhat of the refiered matter … [which] draweth with it the moisture, of which in them [women] are engendred the thinne and small heares of the Bearde: and thys especiallye verified in them, which use often and verye much coeating.”76 “Out of these creatures,” Hill continues,

doe heares spring, yea they sometimes appeare on their Jawes: but properly these appeare about the mouth, where the more heate doth abounde: and such a woman … is named of all men bearded: here conceive … that the like woman founde, is judged to be verie luxurious through hir hote, and moyste qualitie: of which the lyke creature seene, is not onely noted strong of nature, but to be of a frowte courage, and manly in hir factes.77

Hill’s concluding synopsis on beards includes a succinct analysis of women and facial hair: “The woman bearded, to be leacherous. The women having no bearde at all, to be honest conditioned.”78

Despite their evoking concern about sex, gender, and erotic transgressions, bearded women were both depicted and displayed in Renaissance England, apparently evoking a mixture of fearful hostility and anxious curiosity. Most images of bearded women, like that of the bearded Venus gracing the Italian and French editions of Vincenzo Cartari’s collection of classical myths, were of foreign provenance, but Catholic legends of bearded female saints—St. Paula of Avila, Spain, and St. Wilgefortis or Uncumber, who reputedly unencumbered wives of their unwanted husbands—may have remained familiar to English readers after the Reformation. Witches were also frequently depicted as bearded, as are the weird (or wayward) sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Banquo tells them, “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (lines 3.45–7).79 Some women with beards were displayed as attractions in late seventeenth-century England. John Evelyn reports in his diary entry for September 15, 1657 going to see “the hairy Maid, or Woman who twenty years before I had also seene when a child … [S]he had … a most prolix beard, & mustachios.”80 Evelyn describes the lady’s having a hairless breast, being married with one child, and playing well on the harpsichord. In his edition of the diary, William Bray concludes that the woman Evelyn viewed was Barbara van Beck, an image of whom appears in the 1824 edition of Rev. J. Granger’s Biographical History of England as Barbara Urselin/Urselerin, wife to one Michael van Beck (Figure 6.3). In that illustration, a girlish but hirsute Barbara plays the virginals, a musical instrument considered particularly appropriate for young maidens. In his commentary, Granger compares her appearance to that of “a monkey.

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