Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England by Alanna Skuse

Author:Alanna Skuse
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781137487544
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/version4

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6

‘Cannot You Use a Loving Violence?’: Cancer Surgery

In fury Quintianus ordered them to torture her by crushing her breasts, and when she had suffered in this way for many hours, he finally ordered that her breasts be cut off. ‘Impious, cruel, odious tyrant!’ Agatha cried. ‘How could you do this? Are you not ashamed to take from a woman what your own mother gave you to suck? No matter: I have other breasts you cannot harm, breasts that give spiritual nourishment to all my senses, and them I dedicated long, long ago to God’.1

Saint Agatha, an early Christian martyr, was popularly believed to have had her breasts removed as a method of torture. The young Christian, living in ancient Sicily around 231 AD, had caught the eye of the ‘idolatrous’ governor Quintianus, who, angered by her rejection of his sexual advances, had her arrested for her faith and imprisoned in the house of Aphrodisia, a prostitute who attempted to persuade Agatha to welcome Quintianus’s attentions.2 Finding that she remained unmoved, Quintianus ordered Agatha to be tortured by having her breasts mutilated and cut off. Then, infuriated by the composure with which Agatha bore this punishment, he had her thrown into a dungeon and left to die. Quintianus’s final revenge, however, was futile, since Saint Peter appeared to the stricken Christian and restored her breasts. She died after later being rolled on hot coals, an avowed martyr of the faith.

Agatha’s story struck a chord in early modern society. She appeared everywhere from Greek and Latin martyrologies to classical poetry and the works of the early Baroque artists, who depicted her undergoing torture or serenely carrying her severed breasts on a platter (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).3 Her story was recounted at length in the influential medieval martyrology The Golden Legend, a text that was ‘without doubt one of the most widely disseminated books through Europe from ... 1266 until the end of the Middle Ages’.4 Most intriguingly, she was, argues Liana de Girolama Cheney, at the centre of resurgence in ‘porno-violent hagiography’ near the end of the fifteenth century which continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was ‘augmented by the writings of anatomical science and medical texts’.5

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