Shaming Faces in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Shaming Faces in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Emily Cock and Patricia Skinner Department of History, University of Winchester, SO 22 4 NR, UK. Correspondence to: emily. cock@winchester. ac. uk The Project Effaced from History is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project that explores facial difference from antiquity to the present day. The project is currently conducted by Professor Patricia Skinner and Dr Emily Cock at the University of Winchester; collaborators in this early stage include Dr Suzannah Biernoff (Birkbeck), Professor Mark Bradley (Nottingham), Professor David H. Jones (Exeter) and Professor David Turner (Swansea). It is hoped that attention to the historically-specific cultural work of facial disfigurement in different periods will facilitate understanding of the construction of normative physical states, and historicise contemporary research around the determination of, and interventions into, the non-normative human face. Effaced will consider the social understanding and patient experiences of variant causes of facial difference, which may include scarring, aging, disease, accident, self-infliction, punishment, and congenital factors. Key themes of the project include: 1. Documentation Who were disfigured in the past? Collections and collations of accounts of and by disfigured people. 2. Identity Politics Queering the face: reading texts from a disfigured perspective. 3. Faking, Fixing, Facing Up Strategies to ‘pass’, cosmetic interventions, surgery as and for disfigurement. Shame-faced? Adultery, Disfigurement and Stigma Carved in Stone Part of the Effaced project explores the gender dynamics of facial difference, and a new piece of work just underway will examine iconographic sources for the apparently deliberate disfiguring of women's faces. A particularly striking example of these occurs in the medieval cathedral of Wells in Somerset. Here in the North transept (E on the plan below) a series of carved capitals dating to the mid-13 th century includes, on the corner of the transept meeting the nave, the depiction of a woman with a bandage across her face (figure 1). Moses Figure 1 Figure 2 Women Metal detectorists found this curious item in the fields of East Sussex. Dated 'late medieval to early modern', it raises questions about prosthesis that the project will be looking to answer. Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Why is she here? What does the bandage represent? In his 1899 description of the cathedral and its fabric, the Rev. Percy Dearmer suggests that all of the carvings on this western side of the transept are part of a series of 'representations of the toothache'. I'd like to suggest instead that 'bandage woman' in fact represents immoderate sexuality shamed and displayed for ridicule. Head covered and face bandaged, she shares her column with another female face, hair loose and luxuriant, and nose apparently disfigured (it appears to be slit) (figure 3). Across the arched space, Moses sits, pointing at his tablet of laws, and staring straight across at 'nose woman' (figure 4). Further work on these and contemporary capitals will be necessary to say for sure what is happening here, but toothache? I don't think so! 4. Gazing and Staring The visual consumption of people with facial difference, past and present. 5. Changing Places Documenting, deconstructing and defusing prejudice. Shaming Early Modern Plastic Surgery Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s (1545– 1599) publication of De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (Venice: 1597) should have marked a turning point in facial surgery. In this text, he detailed how the nose, ear or lip could be reconstructed using a skin flap taken from the arm (figure 5). Though his technique had been copied from the Sicilian Branca family, and can be traced back to sixth-century BCE India, Tagliacozzi became synonymous in Europe with skin flaps, and more specifically with the controversial reconstruction of the nose. After Tagliacozzi’s death, a spurious rumour arose that his body was exhumed after the nuns of the adjoining convent complained of bloodcurdling screams from his tormented soul. Moreover, histories of plastic surgery state that his procedure disappeared from medical knowledge for the following two centuries, though popular jokes about Tagliacozzi’s false noses remained. My research has revealed that knowledge of Tagliacozzi’s procedure did not simply disappear from medical circles, but neither were surgeons willing to use it. Sergeant Surgeon Charles Bernard thought it, “a most surprising thing to consider, that few or none should have since attempted to imitate so worthy and excellent a Pattern [as Tagliacozzi’s], especially in an Age wherein so many deplorable and scandalous Objects do every day seem either to beg or command our Assistance” (sigs. Aa 2 v– 3 r). It has also shed light on why his reconstruction of the nose was the most prominent procedure, and why this should be such a controversial intervention into disfigurement. In order to account for rhinoplasty’s stigmatization, I examined its association with the pox (syphilis) and the shame associated with that disease. An absent nose became ubiquitous short-hand for lewdness: as Ned Ward put it in A Legacy for the Ladies (1705), the patient’s pox would “lead ‘em by the Nose into publick Shame and Derision” (sig. M 4 v). Providing a poxed patient with a new nose was therefore cast as the ultimate means of enabling the sexually deviant to pass for healthy and respectable. I also traced the popular shaming narrative around Tagliacozzi that suggested he would purchase the skin required for his graft from a servant or slave’s arse, as most famously recorded in Samuel Butler’s great comic-epic, Hudibras (1662– 1663): So learned Taliacotius from The brawny part of porter’s bum, Cut supplemental noses which Would last as long as parent breech, But when the date of nock was out, Off dropped the sympathetic snout. (I. i. 279– 284) This discourse provides an as yet unexamined archive through which to understand early modern England’s relationship with the idea of human transplantation, and the shameful commodification of living human bodies. Figure 5 Figure 3 Figure 4 Acknowledgements This project has been funded by Wellcome Trust Seed Award no 107780 References Charles Bernard, in William Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London: 1697). Samuel Butler. Hudibras, Parts I and II and Selected Other Writings, ed. John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Emily Cock. ‘Shaming the “Sympathetic Snout”: Representations of Plastic Surgery in the Early Eighteenth Century’. The Authenticity of the Emotions in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. David Lemmings, Robert Phiddian, Heather Kerr (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming December 2015). Emily Cock. ‘“Lead[ing] ‘em by the Nose into publick Shame and Derision”: Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Alexander Read, and the Lost History of Plastic Surgery, 1600– 1800’. Social History of Medicine 28: 1 (2015), 1– 21. Percy Dearmer. Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells (London: Bell. 1899). Gaspare Tagliacozzi. De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (Venice: 1597). Edward Ward and Thomas Brown. A Legacy for the Ladies: Or, Characters of the Women of the Age (London: 1705). Further information at: https: //effacedblog. wordpress. com/