Where does domestic violence happen, and to whom? Ariane Balizet, in her study of blood and the domestic in early modern culture, complicates the answers to these questions in surprising and useful ways. She turns our eye toward domestic violence as a system that connects multiple histories: of the home, of religion, of blood, and of the stage. Blood might be the perfect example of an overdetermined signifier, in that it has so many valences, as it can refer to, among other things, physical health, sexuality, bloodline, class affiliation, and Eucharistic substance. Balizet’s overall project is to explore how those changing languages of blood appear on the stage as markers of domestic trouble.

One particularly creative thing this book does is consistently include male fears and vulnerability within the calculus of early modern gender identities. While women were most obviously forced to suffer because of various rhetorics of blood, men also were exposed to violence and anxiety. Balizet’s chapters are each focused on one group — “The Bleeding Bride,” “The Bleeding Husband,” “The Bleeding Child,” and “The Bleeding Patient” — but throughout she emphasizes that the drama of the period always shows how domestic violence includes violence against everyone in the domestic network.

All of the chapters work in standard historicist structure: first some cultural context, then some close readings. In the first chapter, Balizet’s historical section discusses marriage and the various contracts that established its existence, and how those things shift after the Reformation. Reformation theology, Balizet argues, privileges “public performance of solemnization” over the private performance of sex. She links the deemphasizing of consummation as the primary marker of marriage with Protestant desacralizing of the Mass — “Like the Eucharist, marriage was now bloodless” (30) — so that what it means for a bride to bleed changes and becomes contested in new ways in post-Reformation England. She takes that change into the plays, with the overarching idea that a recurring stage prop, the bloody handkerchief, should be understood in terms of its potential dangers across a network. I find the close readings here particularly enlightening, especially of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello; not just here but throughout the book, things take off when Balizet turns to the plays. Thisbe’s bloody mantle and Desdemona’s strawberry-spotted handkerchief activate memories or imaginings of bleeding in the context of pledges of fidelity, and involve a violence that circulates, showing “early modern marriage as a dangerous place for both bride and groom” (45). All of early modern domesticity — and Balizet carefully shows how domesticity extends outside of a physical home — exposes men to the danger of blood loss.

The subsequent chapters — focusing on husbands, children, and patients — continue exploring the interplay of bleeding and domesticity. At times the historical sections tread well-trodden ground, as in the discussion of how the household and the state were considered analogously, or how Stoic and anti-Stoic viewpoints differed on the proper reactions to the death of a child. Balizet provides clear and serviceable recaps of research on these matters. Her readings of plays, however, break new ground, showing the intricate and surprising ways that dramatists draw on blood narratives within those well-known contexts. So the domestic tragedies Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women demonstrate the remarkable claim that blood is “the most basic principle of domestic tragedy, equivalent to the crown and other symbols of power in orthodox tragedy, money in city comedy, or the process of marriage in festive comedy” (88). Turning to children, Balizet astutely reads scenes from The Spanish Tragedy, Henry VI, and Titus Andronicus, noting the connection between bleeding sons with paternal recognition and bleeding daughters with male shame and the perceived loss of “ownership over female bodies,” which precipitates a “surprising move from paternal grief to masculine contest” (113, 115). In her final chapter, Balizet brings in a contrasting play from Spain in order to accentuate some of the distinctive ways that the early modern English connected blood and domesticity. This monograph lives up to its title: it will be of value to anyone interested in domesticity, blood, and early modern drama.