This is a beautiful book. It is also a technical one. Miles begins by summarizing her thesis with respect to Italian Catholic culture and art: in 1350, the maternal breast, usually a single nursing breast, functioned as an abstract and idealized religious symbol that was painted and promulgated by male artists and clerics; by 1750, the breasts, often appearing exposed together now, had been rendered more realistic, as they became medicalized by male doctors and sexualized by male pornographers. In 1350, naked breasts and bodies were fairly common in religious art. By 1750, they were forbidden. The ability of the breast to carry religious meaning was no more. What happened?

The power and genius of the book reside in Miles's ability to answer this question by moving back and forth between two different poles: an aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and religious sensitivity to the paradoxes of the erotic-spiritual symbols; and the gritty, sometimes gruesome, details of social history and embodied experience that gave these symbols so much of their draw, poignancy, and angst. And so we meet Melanie Klein on the “good” and “bad” breast (the breast as the psyche's first object relation) right beside Augustine's reflections on the anxieties of breastfeeding. We encounter some stunning reflections on the inseparability of sexual arousal and religious piety in Catholic art in the same pages that we confront the common horrors of death by childbirth and breast cancer: the former, the common lot for married women, who seldom saw their forties until the nineteenth century; the latter, known as the “nun's disease,” associated with female celibacy. Similarly, we are taught that the breast symbolized God's nourishment of the individual Christian, the Church, and the universe itself, but we are also reminded that the breast could carry these meanings because, in an age without refrigeration in which a dry breast could spell death to a baby, the bounty of the breast was by no means guaranteed.

Then there are those more ironic moments when the gravitas of the subject is eclipsed by a smile or a grin. In one, Miles observes that Gabriel Fallope claimed to have discovered the clitoris in 1559, “though,” she wryly adds, “it seems highly likely that women had discovered it many centuries before!” (101). In another, she explains how a critic of Michelangelo's Last Judgment claimed this now famous work of art turned Rome's holiest shrine into a “public bath.” Clothes were added to the ceiling's naked figures within five years of the painting's completion. Miles does not add the ironic twist to this story for nearly a hundred pages: the critic was none other than Pietro Aretino, the “divine Aretino” widely considered to be the father of modern pornography. In another one-liner, Miles quotes the noble Rousseau on books “one can only read with one hand” (126).

This latter tease appears at the beginning of one of the many historical nuggets Miles excavates for the reader. Here she discusses the birth of pornography, mostly around Paris, in the age of Enlightenment and the complex manners in which the pornographers used depictions of sex, never through the subjectivities of the women, not simply to arouse male buyers, but also to criticize and goad both crown and church—sex as social and religious criticism. There was also a conscious and explicit linkage in the Enlightenment between philosophical thought and sexual arousal. Miles had already treated another, well-known linkage, that between sex and the mystical life as evident in what she calls the “inclusive tradition” of Christian theology stemming back to Augustine and, through him, to Plato. Within this inclusive erotic theology, the earlier paintings of exposed breasts, of the Virgin and the saints, “require that we reevaluate the common modern assumption that ‘erotic’ and ‘religious’ images are opposite and opposing. The effectiveness of religious or erotic images . . . depends on arousal,” she had written (14). Hence Bernini's famous The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645) and Mary Magdalene's popularity, which Miles reads as stemming from her loving Christ “erotically and spiritually” (71). But here, in the Enlightenment, she now observes authors who explicitly linked sexual liberation and free thinking, philosophizing and masturbating: “A little-known by-product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the awareness that pleasures of the flesh, experienced with attentiveness, produce insight. . . . in effect, early modern pornographers insisted that sex is food for thought” (128).

On a much darker note, we are reminded in the book that men attempt to control and subdue women in cultural activities, just as infants they once attempted, often in vain, to control the benefits and retractions of the good and bad breast. Hence the birth of modernity saw men taking control of women's reproductive abilities and sexualities through pornography, through the suppression of midwives and their ability to practice medicine, and through the murder of some thirty thousand to sixty thousand victims, mostly women, as “witches” over a three-hundred-year period. Tellingly, well into the modern period it was normal for a male doctor never to see or touch the genitals of a female patient, but he was required to see and touch the breasts of wet nurses, which needed to be examined and controlled by the state and medical authorities. This, Miles notes, was a “pivotal moment” in the secularization of the breast.

Miles also discusses two material inventions that played major roles in this same secularization: the practice of medical dissection and the invention of the printing press. The dissection of corpses began at end of the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth, accurate medical illustrations of the breast were appearing. The invention of the printing press made it very difficult to censor and control erotic images. The press also helped create, through woodcuts and pamphlets, various public mentalities that would have been impossible before, including the broad scapegoating of witches, which we learn was weakest in Catholic countries and strongest in Protestant areas (there were around twenty-six thousand deaths in Germany, four in Ireland).

Miles closes by emphasizing that she is not out to glorify the religious breast or the secular erotic breast, for both are “mastered” by male culture. Rather, she asks if it is possible “to revision a symbolic breast owned by women, a breast capable of functioning as a symbol of a woman's subjectivity” (138). This ideal, this hope to see all breasts as beautiful, as conscious subjectivities or “complex delights” signaling a wealth of experience, personhood, and desire she calls the “subjective breast,” which she in turn links to the inclusive tradition of Christian theology that understands eros and spirit as bonded in the “spiritual body.” Her reflections thus end on a note of hope and a gesture toward a more erotic and mystical future.