“Informative.”
— The New York Review of Books
“Exceptional.”
— Today’s Books
“Throughout history [eunuchs] have had numerous important and complicated roles … the sacred “kingships” of Ancient Egypt, the religious hijras in India, and the celebrated castrati of Italian opera. Weaving together politics, law, medicine, music anthropology, theology, literary and social history, and art, Scholz offers a remarkable chronicle of the torment and the passions of these individuals and their realtionships with androgyny, homosexuality, transvestitism, and transsexuality.”
— Library Journal
“Historian and academician Piotr Scholz’s Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History is a fascinating, informative, insightful study of eunuchs and castrated men throughout human history. Thoroughly researched and wide-ranging, Eunuchs and Castrati covers the role of eunuchs in such diverse lands and eras as Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Byzantine Empire, China, Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, and 17th and 18th-century Italian opera. Especially recommended to students of gender studies and cultural history, Eunuchs and Castrati is an impressive book written to dispel commonly held myths and draw readers into a fascinating, if somewhat disturbing human phenomenon. The excellent English translation also includes a new epilogue by Shelley L. Frisch about eunuchs in the twentieth century.”
— Midwest Book Review