What stories have been told about the female body that inform ideas of gender and sex, and what new stories might we tell instead? These are the questions K. confronts in her ambitious investigation of four female body parts – breast, clitoris, hymen and womb. She contends that these are key sites for understanding how female bodies were textualised, interpreted and regulated through medical, religious and literary discourse in classical, late antique and early Christian writing. Building on her earlier critique of T. Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [1990], K. draws on a wide range of evidence to examine the history of sexed bodies, medical discourse, classical reception and gender theory. Immaculate Forms contributes to long-standing scholarship on ancient medicine and gender, aligning with foundational works such as her own Hippocrates’ Woman [1980], R. Flemming’s Medicine and the Making of Roman Women [2000] and A.E. Hanson’s 2007 article ‘The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health’ (in: B. MacLachlan and J. Fletcher [edd.], Virginity Revisited). Framing the body as contingent and constructed, K. makes welcome gestures towards trans and non-binary experiences, offering a timely engagement with contemporary identity debates, though these gestures are not always fully developed in the historical analysis.
K.’s command of Renaissance literature is particularly strong and consistently demonstrated throughout the book. Her close readings of anatomical diagrams, treatises and moral debates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are nuanced and well contextualised. These examples often feel more richly layered and textually anchored. That emphasis does, at times, draw attention to the relative thinness of her treatment of antiquity. While she references key classical authors (e.g. Galen, Soranus, Hippocratic texts), her use of classical sources tends to be selective, and not always in dialogue with current scholarship on ancient medicine, gender or bodily experience. At times, this emphasis risks overshadowing her engagement with antiquity, making this imbalance feel like the classical material is a backdrop rather than a co-equal component.
In the first chapter, ‘Procuring a Good Breast’, K. explores the ambiguity of breast imagery in the Roman world, shifting meanings of breasts and breast milk across medical, cultural and symbolic contexts. K. draws on her earlier work on gynaecology, highlighting how ancient medicine framed milk as a morally charged bodily excretion. Arguing for the elusiveness of the breast and its resistance to binary thinking (p. 65), medical and religious discourses often reinforced each other in the early modern period. However, K. misses an opportunity to engage with classical visual representations of exposed breasts – such as those on Amazons and ‘barbarians’ – as sites of cultural anxiety (B. Cohen, ‘Divesting the Female Breast of Clothes in Classical Sculpture’, in: A.O. Koloski-Ostrow and C.L. Lyons [edd.], Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology [1997]).
While K.’s broad chronological sweep offers valuable insights, the brevity of her examples in this chapter often limits analytical depth. When making the point about the value and cost of wet nursing, K. uses the 13 bce wet-nursing contract from Roman Egypt, which records the details of hiring a wet nurse to feed an enslaved foundling (BGU 117). To support her claim that girls were more likely to be ‘left on the rubbish heap’ (p. 57), she cites the well-known papyrus P.Oxy. 744, ‘If it is a male child, let it live; if it is a female, expose it’ (trans. B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt). However, K. does not sufficiently engage with the economic, legal or social realities of exposure and enslaved infant care. Scholars have long cautioned against reading P.Oxy. 744 as representative of Roman norms, emphasising its specific Egyptian context and the role of legal status and household structure in exposure decisions (J. Evans Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire [2002]). Additionally, enslaved girls often held long-term value as wet nurses, reproductive labourers or domestic workers, retained not despite their gender, but because of it (M. Carroll, Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World [2018]). K.’s omission of this scholarship flattens and generalises an otherwise meaningful discussion on the commodification of lactating bodies.
The second chapter, ‘Finding the Clitoris’, continues this interrogation of body legibility by focusing on how the clitoris was named, described and erased in medical and anatomical texts. K. effectively shows how naming does not equate to knowing and how visibility can itself serve to reinforce marginalisation. Her framing of the clitoris as a body part that disrupts binary thinking fits well within the book’s broader aims.
The third chapter, ‘The Disappearing Hymen’, examines the hymen as a cultural and medical construct. She argues that the hymen has never been anatomically stable nor universally acknowledged in classical medicine, pointing out that there is no word in Greek or Latin for the hymen as a distinct membrane. Instead, ancient and early modern authors described signs of virginity more broadly through references to bleeding, tightness or physical resistance, all of which were read through cultural expectation rather than anatomical observation. K. returns to her core argument that body parts are not simply ‘discovered’ but constructed through discourse. K. uses the hymen as a particularly striking example of a body part invented to serve moral and legal ends.
In the final chapter, ‘Existing for the Sake of the Womb’, K. successfully reveals how the womb has long served as a projective surface for social, moral and medical anxieties about women. Her discussion of its symbolic instability is compelling, especially in showing how ancient and early modern medicine pathologised female bodies as unruly and needing control.
There is limited engagement with the enslaved and lower status bodies. The enslaved body in classical texts is often mentioned as a category, but rarely explored as a lived, shaped or violated body. This creates a tension: while K. wants to destabilise binary and normative readings of the body, she does not fully reckon with how those bodies were already differentiated and exploited through enslavement. This absence ultimately weakens the feminist framework K. puts forward; by not fully engaging with how enslaved bodies, particularly those of women and children, were medically managed, sexually exploited or materially circulated, the book risks treating bodily categories, especially those from the Graeco-Roman context, as abstract or symbolic rather than embedded in systems of violence and power.
While K. engages with trans experience, most notably in her discussion of L. Erickson-Schroth’s Trans Bodies, Trans Selves [2014] and the changing language around menstruation and pregnancy, these reflections remain confined to contemporary discourse. They are not meaningfully integrated into her analysis of ancient or early modern material, where trans or non-binary scholarship might have helped reframe accounts of sexed anatomy (J. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child [2018]). Her readings of classical and early modern anatomists rely on historical discourse analysis rather than trans-informed methodologies, which she ultimately highlights in the conclusion. This leaves the inclusive possibilities of her framework underdeveloped in the historical sections of the book.
For those looking for a contribution to scholarship on embodied experiences, therapeutic practices or the lived sensory realities of ancient bodies, this book is less satisfying. K. rarely engages with material culture, pharmacological recipes or tactile interventions, even when they would meaningfully complicate or expand her analysis, suggesting an implicit deprioritisation of these dimensions. As a result, the book occasionally falls short in addressing how bodies were not only imagined but also physically acted upon and experienced.
The strength of Immaculate Forms lies in its contribution to scholarship on the interplay between language, image and authority, raising important questions about how female bodies are named, imagined, debated and visualised across time. While it is accessible and engaging for a broader audience interested in the cultural history of the female body, its limited engagement with key areas of current feminist, classical and trans scholarship makes it less satisfying for specialists in ancient medicine, classical reception or critical gender studies.
