BULWER, John

Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform'd: or The Artificiall Changling...

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William Hunt London, 1653. Small quarto, with the extra engraved allegorical frontispiece and explanatory leaf (the latter laid down and restored at corners), engraved portrait from a later printing (without engraver's signature of W. Faithorne in caption), complete with the inserted leaf of illustrations between S2 and S3; with very numerous woodcut illustrations throughout; a few spots but generally a fine copy in nineteenth-century dark blue crushed morocco, ornately gilt, all edges gilt. One of the earliest studies of body mutilation and decoration. This edition of 1653 is the first illustrated edition; the edition of 1650 was smaller and did not include any of the astonishing illustrations. This is an exceptionally interesting book, and very rare in anything approaching decent condition.

The book is based on both fact and fantasy: it belongs in the tradition exemplified by Botero's Relationi Universali (in the illustrated editions of 1618 and 1622) by including the weird and wonderful creatures that might be expected to be found in a new world, while for its "fact" it is based on travellers' tales, including specifically those of Mandeville. The extraordinary scope of the work is apparent from the cited list of historians, philosophers, poets and anatomists from whom Bulwer has drawn his evidence. The resulting work provides an unusual slant on early voyage accounts of the new world and is a pioneering work of comparative anthropology.

Bulwer held that tattooing and other forms of "mutilation" were a debasement of the figure made in God's image, but this high moral position does not prevent his evident delight at the possibilities of alteration and adornment. His work is structured anatomically: the head, hair, face, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, nose, ears, and so on. He discusses the practices of all nations, the more exotic the better, and is unrelenting in his descriptions of the often grotesque means by which we decorate ourselves. His accounts of tattooing, scarring, circumcisions, binding, lip- and ear-piercing, nail enhancements, are complemented by discussions of eunuchs, women and their maladies, the application of cosmetics, deformities, tooth-rites, breast-feeding, children and monstrosities.

Bulwer's reaction to his subject was typically European. In 1519 the Spanish under Cortez had encountered tattooing for the first time in Mexico and immediately typified it as the work of the devil. However the first real exposure to body art in Europe did not come until the exhibition of Dampier's Giolo (the "Painted Prince" taken back from the East Indies) in 1691. Tattooing remained exotic and unadopted in Europe for at least a century however: it was not until approximately the period of Cook's first voyage that the tradition of naval men being tattooed became established.

As well as descriptions of the most exotic and foreign examples imaginable, Bulwer is also happy to quote examples from closer to home, like to take one almost at random the Irish soldier named Francis Battalia who publicly ate large plates full of stone and gravel and then shook his body violently, making the stones rustle from the depths of his stomach.

'The subject and abundant illustrations... make it a desideratum in any collection of curiosa, for it describes and illustrates every conceivable alteration of the human body by man's design or by nature and is of equal interest to the anthropologist and the student of human credulity...' (Pforzheimer).
Pforzheimer, 115; Wellcome, I, 270; Wing, B5461.

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