While the old, narrow feudal structure was receding in favour of scientific and geographical openness, the need for order and control took the semblance of an obsession for clear binary oppositions steadying reality, which saw terms such as inclusion, identity, male and national as opposed to exclusion, alterity, female and foreign (Mucci 2009: 5). The patriarchal model in which the world-picture described by the Great Chain of Being was collocated was based on a series of correspondences in which the recognised subjects were kings, males and fathers, placed in a corollary hierarchical order in which state, household and family served as the only repositories of control against utter chaos and dreadful change. Women’s marginality and alterity, based on their soft, penetrable, formless nature and their uterine transformations, were seen as dangerous features in a world preoccupied with keeping borders and stability in the face of social anxiety about the collapsing patriarchal order. Female bodies were permeable maps with blurred edges, jeopardised by the instability derived from wanton sexuality and blameful yearning and only kept intact if placed into an ordered structure of marriage, motherhood or religious chastity.