In Cuerpos Plegables Víctor Pueyo adds an important volume to the scholarship on the early modern monster. The scientific and literary discourse of the period are, of course, populated with monsters of all sorts, reflecting a fascination that turns the monster into the figure par excellence of the Baroque. Notable studies abound on the topic, both contemporary and modern, such as Ambroise Paré's Des Monstres et prodiges (1573), Marie-Hélène Huet's Monstrous Imagination (1993), and Wonders and the Order of Nature (2001) by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, among others. Pueyo dedicates his study to the equally rich and partly neglected Spanish sphere, taking Foucault's analyses of power relations as a point of departure and bringing to light cases, both historical and literary, of conjoined twins, hermaphrodites, and other "excessive bodies." It isn't the excess itself that interests Pueyo so much as the way in which these subjects participate in dual structures of power characterized by Gilles Deleuze as "the fold." Accordingly, the book itself is structured symmetrically, with four chapters that can be read independently, but with the first two and last two forming connected pairs. Chapter 1 concerns bicephalic children and the theological, medical, and juridical problems presented by the possibility of two souls inhabiting a single body. Contemporary writers also concerned themselves with how these problems also bore on the body politic by analogy. That is, was the social order of the political corpus vertical and subordinate or could it be organized horizontally-an important question in the age of nascent capitalism. In the second chapter, catalogues of monsters inspired by the New World, imaginative literary texts, and even bestiaries disguised as modern medical texts provide examples of truly hybrid monsters, half-human, half-animal. The real-world translation of such beings, Pueyo observes, is the mestizo body of the Americas. Chapter 3 concerns two tendencies in the representation of hermaphrodites. In the first, a woman with masculine traits raises suspicions and later, by some strange happening, the male member is revealed, at which point she is examined and forced to change gender. The second tendency obtains with the perfect symmetry between sexual organs, resulting in the choice of use of one set of genitalia and the prohibition of the other, which obviously complicates concomitant marital and antisodomy laws. The topic of the fourth chapter might seem surprising at first, as it deals with mystical transportation of the body, especially of cloistered monks and nuns. These bodies double in space as a strategy to escape both their physical and ideological confines. While perhaps not normally thought of as monsters, mystics do, of course, challenge religious taxonomies in a similar fashion, and Pueyo's characterization of their experiences as a bilocation of their (now monstrous) bodies is compelling. REVIEWS 1527
