J. Lo's got ancestors.
Even Wikipedia will tell you “The French have traditionally been relaxed with nudity and toplessness in entertainment”. And while it’s a statement that seems more instinctual than sourced, I recently came across a rare and strange little book that has quite a lot to add to the colourful (or better yet, pale and pasty) history of topless women.
It’s a book roughly translated to “Cancer, Or Covering the Breasts” published in 1635, written by a canon of Theology from Cambrai named Jean Polman (whose only other claim to fame, a book called the Breviarium Theologicum (1650), was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books).
The “Cancer” in the title tips you off that this isn’t just your typical condemnation of female nudity. It’s a nitty gritty portrayal of nudity as disease. Polman spends the better part of the book attacking exposed breasts and nipples (“du seine et des tetins” are now two new French words in my limited vocabulary, repeated feverishly and to almost poetic proportions per paragraph). He’s blunt: from the very first paragraph he argues that cancer in women is most likely to be breast cancer, and that breast cancer is caused by exposing the breasts to the air, that the air just “clings to the udders”. And as David Kunzle writes in Fashion and Fetishism: “With aid of repeated puns on the word for cancer (chancre) and the cut-out of a dress-neck (echancrure), he equates the horrible…cancer of the flesh with…the cancer of fashionable nudity”.
