american-holocaust

162 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTrevealing fashions, they also quickly became a thing of the past. Spain ledthe way here as the fifteenth century was drawing to a close. Mantles ormantas for women became the approved attire, Hans Peter Duerr notes,and theycompletely enveloped the female figure, leaving only a small peephole. Blackbecame the colour of choice, the expression of the face froze into a mask,bodices had iron staves sewed into them, even the hint of a bosom wasshunned. Lead plates served to keep breasts flat and to impede their development.42In other parts of Europe "there was even a return to the medieval capsand chin bands," Duerr writes, "revealing nothing of the hair beneath."Behind this shift back to traditional Christian denial of the body and rejectionof things sexual, says loan P. Couliano, was the persistent ideologythatwoman is the blind instrument for seduction of nature, the symbol of temptation,sin, and evil. Besides her face, the principal baits of her allure are thesigns of her fertility, hips and breasts. The face, alas, must stay exposed, butit is possible for it to wear a rigid and manly expression. The neck can beenveloped in a high lace collar. As to the bosom, the treatment dealt it closelyresembles the traditional deformation of the feet of [Chinese] women, beingno less painful and unhealthy .... Natural femininity, overflowing, voluptuous,and sinful is categorized as unlawful. Henceforth only witches willdare to have wide hips, prominent breasts, conspicuous buttocks, long hair. 43Couliano's passing reference to witches in this context is worth pausingover, for it is precisely here that Christianity-and in particular the Christianitythat structured life, culture, and ideas at the time that Columbuswas making ready his plans to sail to Cathay-located the only properhome in the contemporary world for nudity and eroticism. Both of themajor texts on witchcraft produced at this time-Jakob Sprenger's famousMalleus Maleficarum in 1486, and Fray Martin de Castenega's Tratado delas Supersticiones y Hechicherias in 1529-observed that "all witchcraftcomes from carnal lust." Indeed, "the literature and imagery relating towitchcraft border on the pornographic," Couliano says: "the inhibitionsof an entire era of repression are poured into it. All possible and impossibleperversions are ascribed to witches and their fiendish partners"-"perversions"both heterosexual and homosexual, for as Jeffrey Burton Russellhas observed, one "commonplace" allegation that appears "again and again"in witchcraft trials was the charge of sodomy. 44The ritualized gatherings of witches in Europe during this time wereknown as "synagogues," and later as "sabbats"-both terms, of course,