‘The Beautifying Part of Physic’: Women’s Cosmetic Practices in Early Modern England

Abstract

Investigations into female cosmetic practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have used their critics for evidence: satirical treatments of face painting in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster; Thomas Tuke’s rancorous A Discourse Against Painting , printed in 1616; Richard Haydocke#x2019;s ‘Discourse of the Artificiall Beauty of Women’ (his addition to his translation of A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Painting , again printed only once, in 1598); John Bulwer’s ethnographic Anthropometamorphosis (1650, 1653), and Phillip Stubbes’s somewhat more often reprinted The Anatomie of Abuses (1583, 1584, 1585, 1595). With these resources at hand, scholars have detailed how women who painted were derided for being vain, deceptive, seductive and akin to prostitutes, and how anxieties about paint were aligned with more general apprehensions about female power. 1 Scholars have also shown how these debates affected women. Kim F. Hall argues that the language of whiteness in the discourse of face painting commodifies women and signifies racial and cultural difference between them. 2 Frances Dolan contends that anti-cosmetic satire contrives to delimit all female art, while Patricia Phillippy illustrates how female writers and painters had to challenge this anti-painting tradition with their entry into print and visual art. 3

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