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(Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous?

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Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

Abstract

To what extent were people with non-normative faces in medieval and early modern Europe considered disabled or monstrous, and under what conditions was or can the distinction be made? Owing to its forefront position on the body, the face plays a uniquely important role in social interaction and subject identification. Facial disfigurements are difficult to hide and evoke strong and usually negative responses from viewers and the individual or group affected. Examining cases in which the face is considered disabled—by the individual or onlookers—will clarify the definition and expected functions of the face and its components in this period. Our focus will be the relationship between visible facial difference and sexual transgression. Causing injury to the face was an acknowledged punishment for sexual offenders, such as adulterers and prostitutes, imposing a physical expression of their monstrous behavior. The detrimental effects of related diseases, lifestyle, and so on can also be read as the outward manifestations of inner corruption. Comparing examples from medieval and early modern Europe enables greater theoretical insight into the historical relationship between facial form and functionality, and their impairment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Erica Fudge, “The Human Face of Early Modern England,” Angelaki, 16: 1 (2011), 97–110.

  2. 2.

    Giorgio Agamben, “The Face,” Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 90.

  3. 3.

    Important medieval and early modern contributions include: David Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Umberto Eco, On Ugliness (London: Harvill Secker, 2007); Kevin Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference: the Materiality of the Monstrous,” in David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (eds), Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 19–38; Patricia Skinner, Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). More sustained work has focused on the modern era: Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance (New York: NYU Press, 2014); Suzannah Biernoff, Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2017).

  4. 4.

    Stephen Pattison, Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 15, citing Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind (London: Penguin, 1974). The date of the latter is suggestive of how under-theorized facial appearance has been until relatively recently.

  5. 5.

    Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, repr. 1990).

  6. 6.

    Ibid.; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  7. 7.

    Fred Davis, “Deviance Disavowal: The Management of Strained Interaction by the Visibly Handicapped,” Social Problems 9.2 (1961), 120–132.

  8. 8.

    Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 122; Caroline Demeule, “Réflexions psychanalytiques et éthiques sur les enjeux psychiques de la monstruosité faciale [Psychoanalytical and Ethical Thoughts about the Psychological Impacts of Facial Monstrosity],” Pratiques psychologiques, 16 (2010): 73–83, at 75. On gueules cassées see Marjorie Gehrhardt, The Men with Broken Faces: Gueules Cassées of the First World War (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015).

  9. 9.

    Skinner, Living with Disfigurement, 41–66, explores this issue.

  10. 10.

    UK Equality Act 2010: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents [accessed 31 January 2017]; Americans with Disabilities Act, Title II: https://www.ada.gov/regs2010/titleII_2010/titleII_2010_regulations.htm#a35149 [accessed 31 January 2017].

  11. 11.

    Medieval: Skinner, Living with Disfigurement, 67–101. An example of early modern legislation is the so-called “Coventry Act” issued under Charles II in England: Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 12, 1666–1675 (London, 1767–1830), 407, at British History Onlinehttp://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol12/p407 [accessed 23 January 2017]. Andrew N. Sharpe, “Foucault’s Monsters, the Abnormal Individual and the Challenge of English Law,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 20.3 (2007), 384–403, at 391. Neither he nor Foucault, with whose work on France he is comparing the English legal landscape, even considers the idea that the law might be used to protect those so designated.

  12. 12.

    Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Asa Simon Mittman, “The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the Marvels of the West,” in Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (eds), The Monstrous Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 97–112.

  13. 13.

    For example, Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages (London/New York: Routledge); Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (London/New York: Routledge, 2013); Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua Eyler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). A notable exception is David Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), which features several examples of disfiguring injury.

  14. 14.

    Emily Bowles, “Maternal Culpability in Fetal Defects: Aphra Behn’s Satiric Interrogations of Medical Models,” in Alison Hobgood and David Houston Wood (eds), Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 42–56, at 47.

  15. 15.

    John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (London: 1653) sig. C1v.

  16. 16.

    Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, “Introduction: The Dislocation of the Human,” in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (eds), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 1–8, at 2.

  17. 17.

    Ibid.

  18. 18.

    David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1 and 6.

  19. 19.

    Pamela Gravestock, “Did Imaginary Animals Exist?” in Debra Hassig (ed.), The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York: Garland, 1999), 119–139; Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim, “Ungefraegelicu deor: Truth in the Wonders of the East,” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, 2 (2009), 1–22. We thank Asa Mittman for drawing our attention to these essays.

  20. 20.

    Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 7.

  21. 21.

    Judith Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 147–176.

  22. 22.

    For an overview of this literature see Anna Dunthorne, “How to Approach a Monster: A Comparison of Different Approaches to the Historiography of Early Modern Monster Literature,” History Compass 6.4 (2008), 1107–20. Further: Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: the Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century France and England,” Past & Present 92 (1981), 20–54; Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2005); Serina Patterson, “Reading the Medieval in Early Modern Monster Culture,” Studies in Philology 111.2 (2014), 282–311; Mark Burnett, Constructing “Monsters”: Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

  23. 23.

    The literature on this is vast, but see recent work by Asa Simon Mittman, “Are the ‘Monstrous Races’ Races?” Postmedieval, 6 (2015/16), 36–51; Noreen Giffney, “Monstrous Mongols,” Postmedieval, 3 (2012), 227–245; Marina Münkler, “Experiencing Strangeness: Monstrous Peoples on the Edge of the Earth as depicted on Medieval Mappae Mundi,” in James Muldoon (ed.), Travellers, Intellectuals and the World beyond Medieval Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 331–358; and Derek Newman-Stille, “Morality and Monstrous Disability in Topographica Hibernica,” in Wendy J. Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (eds), The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 2010), 231–258.

  24. 24.

    As summarized in Sharpe, “Foucault’s Monsters,” 389.

  25. 25.

    Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  26. 26.

    Eco, On Ugliness, 43–46.

  27. 27.

    Joseph Ziegler, “‘Cuius Facies est Deformis, Mores Habere Bonos non Potest nisi Raro’: Reflections on the Notion of Deformity in Medieval Learned Physiognomy,” in Gian Maria Varanini (ed.), Deformità fisica e identità della persona tra medioevo ed età moderna (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2015), 181–196.

  28. 28.

    Medieval reassurance: Ziegler, “‘Cuius facies’,” 183; Metzler, Disability, 57–60; early modern sin: Alison Hobgood and David Houston Wood, “Introduction: Ethical Staring,” in Hobgood and Houston Wood (eds), Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, 1–22, at 15.

  29. 29.

    Pattison, Saving Face, 174.

  30. 30.

    Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference,” 30.

  31. 31.

    David M. Turner, “The Body Beautiful,” A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment ed. Carole Reeves (Oxford and NY: Berg, 2010), 113–131, at 124.

  32. 32.

    Naomi Baker argues for this particularly gendered split in the relationship between exterior and internal ugliness in the early modern period (post-Descartes): Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

  33. 33.

    Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2002), 11.

  34. 34.

    This does appear to be reflected in scholarly work, where studies of “monstrous” births focus mainly on the post-medieval period: Ottavia Niccoli, “Capi e corpi mostruosi: un immagine della crisi del potere agli inizi dell’età moderna,” Micrologus, 20 (2012), 381–400; Jennifer Spinks, “Wondrous Monsters: Representing Conjoined Twins in Early 16th-century German Broadsheets,” Parergon, n.s 22 (2005), 77–112; Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, “A Time for Monsters: Monstrous Births, Propaganda and the German Reformation,” in Lara Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (eds), Monstrous Bodies: Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 67–92; Norman R. Smith, “Portentous Births and the Monstrous Imagination in Renaissance Culture,” in Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (eds), Marvels, Monsters and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), 267–283.

  35. 35.

    Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 1–17.

  36. 36.

    Some reports simply record the birth, for example, of a boy with beard, teeth, and a full head of hair in Bologna in 1157: Annales Pisani, ed. K. Pertz, in MGH SS 19: Annales Aevi Suevici (Hannover: Hahn, 1866), 243.

  37. 37.

    James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7.

  38. 38.

    For example, the Annales Polonorum report the birth in 1274 of a child with a full set of teeth and full powers of speech, both of which disappeared once he was baptized, but he only lived for three years thereafter: Annales Poloniae, ed. Richard Röpell and Wilhelm Arndt, in MGH SS 19, 640.

  39. 39.

    “Bisclavret,” in Die Lais de Marie de France, ed. K. Warnke (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900), 75–85.

  40. 40.

    William E. Burns, “The King’s Two Monstrous Bodies: John Bulwer and the English Revolution,” in Peter G. Platt (ed.), Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 187–202, at 191.

  41. 41.

    Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales, II.7, tr. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1978), 190–1. Gerald may misremember his source, as Quintilian’s surviving texts do not feature such an episode.

  42. 42.

    Paul-Gabriel Boucé, “Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters, in Eighteenth-Century England and France,” in George S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 86–100.

  43. 43.

    Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference,” 30; the story is recorded in Thomas Lodge, The Famous, True and Historicall Life of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy (1591), 4–5. For the medieval precursors to Lodge’s story, see Charles W. Whitworth, Jnr, “The Literary Career of Thomas Lodge, 1579–1596: Studies of the Plays, Prose Fiction and Verse” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1978), 93–7, online at http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4445/1/Whitworth78PhD.pdf [accessed 8 February 2017]. See also Francis Dubost, “Le péché de chair entre époux: sur la conception de Robert le diable,” in Françoise Mignon and Michel Adroher (eds), Chaire, chair et bonne chère: en hommage à Paul Bretel (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires, 2014), 65–86.

  44. 44.

    Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 35.

  45. 45.

    Palmira Fontes Da Costa, “The Medical Understanding of Monstrous Births at the Royal Society of London During the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26.2 (2004), 157–75.

  46. 46.

    Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference,” 26.

  47. 47.

    Tim Hitchcock, “Cultural Representations: Rogue Literature and the Reality of the Begging Body,” in Carole Reeves (ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010), 175–192, at 183.

  48. 48.

    Nancy Vine Durling, “Birthmarks and Bookmarks: The Example of a Thirteenth-Century French Anthology,” Exemplaria, 16 (2004), 73–94. For the later period see R. M. Wilkin, “Essaying the Mechanical Hypothesis: Descartes, La Forge and Malebranche on the Formation of Birthmarks,” Early Science and Medicine, 13 (2008), 533–67; and John B. Mulliken, Patricia E. Burrows and Steven J. Fishman, Mulliken and Young’s Vascular Anomalies: Hemangiomas and Malformations (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–42.

  49. 49.

    Ian Archer, “The 1590s: Apotheosis or Nemesis of the Elizabethan Regime,” in Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman (eds), Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 62–97, at 71.

  50. 50.

    William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Burton Raffel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), V.i.397–402.

  51. 51.

    Surekha Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” in Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 49–75, at 55–56; see further David Cressy, “Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution,” in Knopper and Landes (eds), Monstrous Bodies, 40–63.

  52. 52.

    Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 163.

  53. 53.

    On female saints and disfigurement see Patricia Skinner, “Marking the Face, Curing the Soul? Reading the Disfigurement of Women in the Later Middle Ages,” in Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (ed.), Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 181–201.

  54. 54.

    The literature on medieval responses to leprosy is extensive, but see especially Susan Zimmermann, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” JMEMS, 38 (2008), 559–587 for a discussion of its association with im/purity, and Elma Brenner, “Between Palliative Care and Curing the Soul: Medical and Religious Responses to Leprosy in France and England, c. 1100–c. 1500,” in Medicine, Religion and Gender, ed. Kukita, 221–235.

  55. 55.

    On leprosy as punishment see Peter L. Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 33–35; Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 34.

  56. 56.

    Laura Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178.

  57. 57.

    Cristian Berco, “The Great Pox: Symptoms and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain,” Social History of Medicine, 28.2 (2014), 225–244, reflects on the implications this had.

  58. 58.

    Anonymous, A Nights Search. Discovering the Nature and Condition of all sorts of Night-Walkers (London, 1640), sig. D7r.

  59. 59.

    Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference,” 233.

  60. 60.

    Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 43.

  61. 61.

    Sharon Howard, “Gender and Defamation in York, 1661–1700: Reputation, Authority and the Power of Words,” (M.A. Dissertation University of York, Department of History September 1999), accessed online [http://sharonhoward.org/archive/defamation-york.pdf], 28.

  62. 62.

    Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), 222.

  63. 63.

    Tim Hitchcock, “Cultural Representations: Rogue Literature and the Reality of the Begging Body,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment, ed. Reeves, 175–192.

  64. 64.

    Laura Gowing, “Marked Bodies and Social Meanings,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment ed. Reeves, 133–153, at 43.

  65. 65.

    Skinner, Living with Disfigurement, 71–75; Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Zone, 2004), 67–86; see also Patricia Skinner, “The Gendered Nose and its Lack: ‘Medieval’ Nose-Cutting and its Modern Manifestations,” Journal of Women’s History, 26.1, (2014) PMCID PMC4001321, 45–67; Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: UTP, 2005), 6.

  66. 66.

    William Tait, Magdalenism. An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and Consequences of Prostitution in Edinburgh Second Edition (Edinburgh: Rickard, 1842), 309.

  67. 67.

    Laura Gowing, “Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London,” History Workshop 35 (1993), 1–21, at 10.

  68. 68.

    The practice still persists in some cultures today, for all that it is now illegal: see for example the survey provided by Jürgen Wasim Frembgen in “Honour, Shame, and Bodily Mutilation. Cutting off the Nose among Tribal Societies in Pakistan,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 16.3 (2006), 245—247; Skinner, “Gendered nose.” For examples in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America see Lawrence Henry Gipson, “Criminal Codes of Pennsylvania,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 6.3 (1915), 323–344; Robert Fantina, Desertion and the American Soldier, 1776–2006 (New York: Algora, 2006), 50.

  69. 69.

    England: Skinner, Living with Disfigurement, 81–86; Italy: Trevor Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 98.

  70. 70.

    Coventry Act: see above, note 11; Anonymous, A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bayly, At a Sessions there held On April 25, and 26. 1677 (London: 1677), sig. A4r.

  71. 71.

    Anonymous, A True Narrative of the Proceedings, sigs. A3v–A4r; Anonymous, The Confession and Execution of the Seven Prisoners suffering at Tyburn on Fryday the 4th of May, 1677 (London: 1677), sig. A3r.

  72. 72.

    Anonymous, The Confession and Execution, sig. A3r.

  73. 73.

    Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, “Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioural Correlates of Face Pareidolia,” Cortex 53 (2014): 60–77.

  74. 74.

    Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley” (1970) trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (June 2012): 98–100.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Emily Cock

  2. Department of History, College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Patricia Skinner

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  1. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Richard H. Godden

  2. California State University, Chico, Chico, CA, USA

    Asa Simon Mittman

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Cock, E., Skinner, P. (2019). (Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous?. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_4

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