Bowdlerisation

Bowdlerisation (countable and uncountable, plural Bowdlerisations)

1. Alternative letter-case form of bowdlerisation.
   • 1891, “Nairne, Carolina Oliphant, Baroness”, in Chambers’s Encyclopædia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, volume VII (Maltebrun to Pearson), London, Edinburgh: William & Robert Chambers, Limited; Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott Company, page 377, column 2:

     Her eighty-seven songs appeared first under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Bogan of Bogan’ or ‘B.B.’ in The Scottish Minstrel (1821–24), and posthumously as Lays from Strathearn. Not a few of them are mere Bowdlerisations of ‘indelicate’ favourites; but four at least live, and shall live, with the airs to which they are wedded—the exquisite ‘Land o’ the Leal’ (c. 1798), and ‘Caller Herrin’,’ ‘The Laird o’ Cockpen,’ and ‘The Auld House.’

   • 1924 February 23, J D Symon, “Books of the Day”, in The Illustrated London News, London: The Illustrated London News and Sketch, Ltd., page 321, column 1:

     In “The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth” (The Bodley Head; 16s.), Mr. Chamberlin deals very faithfully with a scandal that has nothing to do with sixteenth-century gossip about the Queen’s morals. It is a purely academic outrage: Froude’s Bowdlerisations of Gloriana’s good things, which the historian paraphrased loosely when he should have transcribed them accurately.

   • 1955, Phyllis Bentley, “Post-war”, in Noble in Reason, Bath: Cedric Chivers Ltd, published 1972, →ISBN, page 159:

     We began to debunk, with the aid of such Bowdlerisations of Freud as now trickled though, human motive, and learned to diagnose our mental discomforts as repressions and inhibitions—an accomplishment which gave me a good deal of relief.

   • 1965 September 17, Otto Wolfgang, “Christianity Did Not Arise in Palestine”, in The Freethinker, volume LXXXV, number 38, London: G. W. Foote and Company, page 299, column 1:

     There does not, up to now, exist any Talmud edition free from frequent blunders of copyists or from interpolations, Bowdlerisations and misunderstandings.

   • 1990 November, B. Dolan, C. Evans, “The Bowdlerisation of psychiatry”, in The British Journal of Psychiatry, volume 157, London: The Royal College of Psychiatrists, →ISSN, page 936, column 2:

     Tomas Bowdler, MD (1754–1825), published his Family Shakespeare in 1818. It was an “expurgated edition”. He went on, perhaps less influentially, to remove all sexual references from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lewis and his colleagues suggest a similar semantic purification of the psychiatric literature, but their Bowdlerisations are neither consistent nor a profitable solution.

   • 2012, Ruth Ramsden, chapter 9, in Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot, London: Cutting Edge Press, →ISBN, page 137:

     Simply on aesthetic grounds I can almost applaud the Victorians’ fig obsessed Bowdlerisation of Greek and Roman statuary.

   • 2019 May/June, Charles Darwent, “The nakedness of the nude”, in Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology, volume 30, number 3, London: Clear Media Ltd, →ISSN, page 29:

     Perhaps the most famous Bowdlerisation of nudity in art took place just 40 years after Titian had painted his freshly-cropped goddess, when Daniele da Volterra was ordered by Pope Pius IV to cover the naked genitals of figures in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, 1535–41, on a wall of the Sistine chapel, in wisps of painted cloth.