The works of William Shakespeare often look back from the early modern period upon the sensibilities of the medieval world, illuminating similar anxieties about culture, identity, ethnicity, and gender. In his plays, taboo subjects of medieval literature and history are given centre stage, acted out for an early modern audience coming to grips with its own fraught place in history. Shakespeare's dramas (Antony and Cleopatra perhaps more explicitly and completely than any other) feature numerous instances of emasculation, yet these are seldom considered in corporeal terms. Recent scholarship on early modern castration shares a number of curious features: the majority of the discussion takes place in relation to a very select number of Shakespearean sources, and the references are invariably contextualized through psycho-analytic theories of phallic lack. Through the new historicist and cultural materialist turn of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century academia, Shakespeare has become recognized as the spokesperson for Western sensibility in general, not just a historical time and place in particular – and the deep-seated fear of effeminization or castration that is extracted from his work does indeed often appear more modern than early modern. The anachronistic moves that have been made in these studies can be conceptualized through three specific types of ‘cuts’: a temporal cut that removes Shakespeare's plays from their contemporary contexts; a textual cut that removes drama from its social functions; and finally an often horrifying and graphically illustrated corporeal cut found in early modern medical compendia.

Castration is a topic that both repels and interests, provoking profound feelings of horror and intrigue. Castrates have filled many roles: musician, singer, clergyman, historian, inventor, warrior, general, and advisor. The modern world has been shaped greatly by the influence of castrates, but most people have little to no concept of a castrate's life, especially when the common belief is that in the modern period all forms of castration have disappeared. Castrates tend to be the butt of humorous anecdotes, the victims of vicious invective, and the focus of righteous indignation and pity. Modern popular depictions of castrates and castration often attempt to present them humorously, thereby nullifying the horror of castration. However, as the articles in this volume attest, modern scholars are developing an interest in the factual experiences of castration and the information these facts can provide about the past. Castration can shed light on past mores, thought, and culture and is being studied by a diverse range of academic disciplines, such as gender, history, medicine, and music, but one field which has yet to undertake a study of castration is archaeology.

Archaeology has much to offer the study of castration. History shows that numerous castrates existed at varying times and in widely diverse areas of the world; archaeology may substantiate their existence and numbers, confirming historical accounts and elucidating further the cultures in which they existed.