Will Fisher's Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture begins with a reexamination of Ambroise Paré's description of hermaphrodites and Michel de Montaigne's famous account of Marie/Germaine. By drawing attention to how Paré recommends the assignment of sexual identity not just through inspection of the genitals but also of the face, hair, voice, and actions and to Montaigne's observation that Marie had a beard even before she leaped a ditch to became Germaine, Fisher cuts to the heart of his argument: that gender identity in early modern England is formed not only on the basis of genitalia but also through typically secondary sexual characteristics, such as beards and hair, and gendered things merely associated with bodies, such as handkerchiefs and codpieces. These are, for Fisher, prostheses, parts of the body constituted by two contradictory qualities: an addition to the body that is nevertheless integral to the whole, reconstituting it, and a part of the body that is also “detachable, ancillary, and dispensable” (27).

Thus, the first chapter takes William Shakespeare's Othello as its focal point and argues that the handkerchief is an addition that reforms the leaky and watery female body; hinged on this prosthesis, female chastity, however, is dangerously unstable, for the handkerchief could be passed from hand to hand. Chapter 2 argues that the codpiece fashioned a version of masculinity that was both reproductive and penetrative, but, again, rendered vulnerable by transferability. Chapter 3 argues that the beard, too, is prosthetic. While the beard signified masculinity, as distinct from femininity and boyhood, it had constantly to be put on or taken off so that it materialized masculinity according to cultural norms. Fisher's analysis of representations of bearded women deserves to become better known, as he considers here a remarkable turn in the discourses of early modern maternity. The final chapter looks at how hair could signify political identity and how John Milton's Samson Agonistes, in particular, engages seventeenth-century debates about hair.

Fisher's study should surely inspire others to test the notion of prosthetic identity against other materials of early modern life. Those future studies, however, might want to rework Fisher's methodology, which makes the book less astute than it might be in its analysis of femininity. This is clearly not the result of a disinterest in feminism, for Fisher's work is informed by the work of many feminist literary critics and theorists. But the book's very wide-ranging use of evidence (conduct books, sermons, polemics, paintings, and drama) makes all the more striking the almost complete absence of evidence produced by early modern women. The fissures in the book's claims about “English literature and culture” appear when, for instance, the first chapter mentions the possibility that women might have a different understanding of the handkerchief than men because such small, domestic items could be taken to be under women's control, unlike the rest of their property. Indeed: if women have a different relationship to property, including literary property, than men do, and if women have a different degree of control over their bodies, men and women will likely have a different notion of the utility of constructing gender identity through the prosthesis. But do they? And how did women imagine those relationships, for women and for men? The volume is not prepared to answer the question—understandable given that one volume cannot accomplish everything. But making an argument on the ambitious scale that this volume attempts and then not exploring how women align themselves with (or possibly against) the prosthesis misses the opportunity to create a theory aware of its own gendered materials and limits.

In addition, Fisher circumvents some of the complexity around the one-sex model of physiology he relies on, an elision that again misses the opportunity to nuance femininity. While this book is critical of a narrow focus on genital physiology as the ground of gender identity, and Fisher is clear that he does not regard the prosthesis as a “compensatory mechanism that secured gender in the absence of corporal difference” (13), he does basically accept the one-sex model of physiology; the prosthesis is added to or removed from a body that is or could become male. A footnote acknowledges that Galenic medicine was “contested” (173 n. 19), but Fisher does not allow into his work the rather considerable critique of Thomas Laqueur's scholarship, a critique driven in no small degree by a concern to make visible the specificities and possibilities of the female body. Janet Adelman acknowledges the appeal of Laqueur's approach, especially to critics of early modern England's transvestite theater, but she is critical of literary critics who treat the one-sex body as the hegemonic model of physiology. She argues that this is historically inaccurate—in part because Montaigne's and Paré's accounts “testify to the strangeness of the remote, not to a currently ruling notion of sexual homology” (“Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,” in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell [Urbana, IL, and Chicago, 1999], 23–52, quote on 29)—and that relying on this framework can have the unnecessary and ahistorical effect of reinforcing the view of the female body only as lack. Adelman, as well as Valerie Traub, Michael Stolberg, Gianna Pomata, Wendy Churchill, and Katherine Park and Robert A. Nye, among others, have variously drawn attention to representations of physiological difference (in reference to the clitoris, the skeleton, and menstruation), to medical practices that instantiated sexual difference, and to patterns of analogical thought in order to contend that the female body was not always identical or inferior to the male body. How then would coping with alternative models of physiology and the debates of scholars about them reconfigure the materializing of gender? In broaching complexities in the history of medicine, the possibilities inherent in the admirable interdisciplinarity of Fisher's work would be more fully realized. The book is ambitious, and if it does not quite lives up to its billing—it is better at accounting for men than women—it is a truly provocative and pioneering intervention in thinking about gender in early modern England.