Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World 9780271095882

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Marking Skin: A Cutaneous Collection
Part I. Marked encounters in America, Asia, and Africa
1. “Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted”: English Ideas of Tattooing as Indigenous Literacy
2. Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes
3. Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification
Part II. Marks of faith
4. Jerusalem Under the Skin: The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos
5. Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection
6. The Invisible Mark: Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy
7. Rabies and Relics: Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe
Part III. Standing out: marks of honor, shame, and beauty
8. Skin Narratives: Speaking About Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
9. Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe
10. Mouches Volantes: The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France
Afterword: Cultural Inscriptions: Body Marking After 1800
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Stigma

Books in the Perspectives on Sensory History series maintain a historical basis for work on the senses, examining how the experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching have shaped the ways in which people have understood their worlds. Mark Smith, General Editor University of South Carolina, USA editorial board Camille Bégin  University of Toronto, Canada Martin A. Berger Art Institute of Chicago, USA Karin Bijsterveld  University of Maastricht, Netherlands Constance Classen Concordia University, Canada Kelvin E. Y. Low  National University of Singapore, Singapore Bodo Mrozek  University of Potsdam, Germany Alex Purves University of California, Los Angeles, USA Richard Cullen Rath  University of Hawaii, USA

Stigma Marking Skin in the Early Modern World

Edited by

Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

This book received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies. It is made to commemorate the career of Howard Mayer Brown. The publication of this book has also been generously supported by a Bowdoin College Faculty Research Grant. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dauge-Roth, Katherine, editor. | Koslofsky, Craig, editor. Title: Stigma : marking skin in the early modern world / [edited by] Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky. Other titles: Perspectives on sensory history. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Series: Perspectives on sensory history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Investigates the intersecting histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, and the wounds and scars borne by early modern men and women. Examines these forms of dermal marking as manifestations of a powerful and ubiquitous material practice”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022046248 | ISBN 9780271094427 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Body marking—History. Classification: LCC GN419.15 .S85 2023 | DDC 391.6/509—dc23/eng/20221025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046248 Copyright © 2023 The Pennsylvania State University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Cover illustrations: (front, clockwise from left) John White, Algonquian woman with extensive tattooing, ca. 1584, detail, British Museum, London (photo © The Trustees of the British Museum [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]); H. Winterstein, tattooed arms of Ratge Stubbe, 1676, detail, from Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten (1701); unknown artist, Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, 1875, detail, from Qingren taiwan fengsu wuchan tuce, Palace Museum, Beijing, ref. 00021119 (photo: Palace Museum); (back) tattoos of Arab women from Palestine, detail, from W. M. Thompson, The Land and the Book (1868); branded Quaker leader James Naylor, detail, from Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography (1662), Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Contents

List of Illustrations [vii] Acknowledgments [xi]

introduction: Marking Skin: A Cutaneous Collection  [1] Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

part i  marked encounters in america, asia, and africa 1. “Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted”: English Ideas of Tattooing as Indigenous Literacy  [19] Mairin Odle 2. Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes  [37] Xiao Chen 3. Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification  [58] Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper

part ii  marks of faith 4. Jerusalem Under the Skin: The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos  [85] Mordechay Lewy 5. Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection  [124] Allison Stedman

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6. The Invisible Mark: Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy  [143] Ana Fonseca Conboy 7. Rabies and Relics: Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe  [163] Katherine Dauge-Roth

part iii  standing out: marks of honor, shame, and beauty 8. Skin Narratives: Speaking About Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus [199] Nicole Nyffenegger 9. Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe  [220] Craig Koslofsky 10. Mouches Volantes: The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France  [238] Claire Goldstein afterword: Cultural Inscriptions: Body Marking After 1800  [257] Peter S. Erickson

List of Contributors [269] Index [273]

Illustrations

I.1.

Ifa divination tray showing scarified figures. Aja/Fon, seventeenth century  [2]

1.1. John White, Algonquian woman with extensive tattooing on her face, arms, and legs, identified as “one of the wives of Wingina,” the chief ruler of Roanoke, ca. 1584 [24] 1.2. Engraving by Theodore de Bry, after a watercolor by John White, “The true picture of one Picte,” 1590  [27] 1.3. Engraving by Theodore de Bry, after a watercolor by John White, “The Marckes of sundrye of the Cheif mene of Virginia,” 1590  [29] 2.1. Unknown Chinese artist, Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, late eighteenth century. From Qingren taiwan neishan fandi fengsu tuce (An album of Taiwanese customs and products)  [50] 2.2. Unknown artist, Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, 1875. From Qingren taiwan fengsu wuchan tuce (An album of Taiwanese customs and products)  [52] 2.3. Illustration of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing. From Joseph B. Steere, “Formosa,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 6 (1874): 308 [53] 2.4. Illustration of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing. From Joseph B. Steere, “Formosa,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 6 (1874): 306 [53] 2.5. Illustration of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing. From Joseph B. Steere, “Formosa,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 6 (1874): 312 [53] 3.1. Entry with “Portuguese mark” described on multiple recaptured people. Register of Liberated Africans (RLA), 1812–14  [67] 3.2. Invoice of slaves, papers of the Brazilian brigantine “União,” 1829  [70] 3.3. Runaway slave advertisement, Weekly Jamaica Courant, July 30, 1718  [71] 3.4. Runaway slave advertisement, Edinburgh Evening Courant, December 9, 1746 [72] 3.5. Extracts from the registry of His Majesty’s Vice Admiralty Court, Cape of Good Hope, “The Elizabeth,” 1812  [77] 4.1. Coat of arms of the Franciscan Custodia terrae sanctae, 2008  [88] 4.2. Jan van Scorel, Portraits of Five Members of the Utrecht Jerusalem Brotherhood, ca. 1541  [89] 4.3. Illustration of tattoos of Arab women from Palestine. From W. M. Thompson, The Land and the Book (New York: Harper, 1868), 92  [90] 4.4. Photograph of Nerses the Goldsmith tattooing a female pilgrim next to his shop in front of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, 1900–1910  [93]

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4.5. Photograph of a Jerusalem tattoo, including the year of the pilgrimage (1968) [98] 4.6. Sign of Wadia Razzouk’s shop, Jerusalem, 1998  [99] 4.7. The reopened shop of Wassim Razzouk, Jerusalem, 2019  [100] 4.8. Woodblock with the decapitated head of Saint James Major brought by two angels to Mary, mother of Jesus  [100] 4.9. Photograph of Kevork Torossian, the Armenian Muhkhtar of Jaffa, early twentieth century  [100] 4.10. H. Winterstein, tattooed arms of the pilgrim Ratge Stubbe, including the year 1669, 1676. Engraving from Johann Lund, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten (Hamburg: Liebernickel, 1701), 732  [105] 4.11. Groeben’s 1675 tattoo of the Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa). Engraving from Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, Reisebeschreibung (Marienwerder: S. Reiniger, 1694), between pp. 284 and 285  [106] 4.12. Groeben’s 1675 tattoo of the Resurrection. Engraving from Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, Reisebeschreibung (Marienwerder: S. Reiniger, 1694), between pp. 286 and 287  [108] 4.13. Unknown artist, portrait of Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf as a tattooed pilgrim, 1699 [110] 4.14. Attributed to Frans von Stampart, portrait of Duke Siegfried von Kollonitz bearing a Jerusalem tattoo dated 1700, ca. 1701  [111] 4.15. Early Eastern depiction of the Resurrection for tattooing. From Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 99  [115] 4.16. Later Eastern depiction of the Resurrection for tattooing. From Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 100  [115] 4.17. Woodblock depicting the Jerusalem cross with a damaged inscription  [115] 4.18. Tattoo design depicting of the Western Wall with the Temple Mount in the background and a Hebrew inscription. From Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 114  [116] 7.1. “Canis Rabiosus,” a group of men hunt a rabid dog. Woodcut. From Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii in libros sex . . . de medica materia (Venice: Valgrisus, 1558), 753  [166] 7.2. Remacle le Loup, monastery of Saint Hubert in the forest of Ardennes, near Liège. Engraving from Pierre Lambert de Saumery, Les délices du Païs de Liége (Liège: Everard Kints, 1743), 3: between pp. 16 and 17  [168] 7.3. “Diversity of current cauterizing irons, that you can use as they suit you” and “Other cauterizing irons.” From Amboise Paré, Œuvres, 5th ed. (Paris: la Veufve Gabriel Buon, 1598), bk. 19, ch. 33, 717 and 718  [169] 7.4. Jacques Callot, Saint Peter holding the keys of heaven, ca. 1626  [171] 7.5. Frontispiece portraying the future Saint Hubert’s miraculous vision while hunting a buck crowned with a crucifix, the hunter’s horn that will become his

Illustrations

ix

symbol draped on his back. From Abregé de la vie et miracles de Sancti Hubert, Patron des Ardennes, 2nd ed. (Liège: J. F. Broncart, 1704)  [172] 7.6. Unknown artist of the workshop of the Master of the Life of the Virgin, Saint Hubert receiving the miraculous stole from heaven, with a dog in the foreground, signaling belief in his ability to protect against rabies, Cologne, ca. 1485–90 [173] 7.7. Branding iron. From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 269  [174] 7.8. Keys of Saint Peter and Saint Hubert. From Xavier Barbier de Montault, “Le reliquaire de Lacour-Saint-Pierre (Tarn-et-Garonne) et les clefs de Saint-Pierre et de Saint-Hubert,” Bulletin Archéologique de la Société Archéologique de Tarn-et-Garonne 6 (1878): plate II, between pp. 56 and 57  [175] 7.9. Key of Saint Peter, Église paroissiale Saint-Pierre, Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, France [176] 7.10. François Fayet, Saint Peter Receiving the Keys, 1681  [176] 7.11. François Fayet, Saint Peter Receiving the Keys, detail of the Marquis of Angosse kneeling before a Benedictine monk, accompanied by his wife and two young sons, 1681  [177] 7.12. Simple Saint Hubert “key” produced in Belgium resembling a flat-headed nail, 1880–1920 [178] 7.13. “Clavem S. Huberti.” From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 505  [178] 7.14. Print representation of a thread of the Saint Hubert stole inserted under the skin, ostensibly reproduced to scale. From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 377  [183] 9.1. Quaker leader James Naylor, branded on the forehead for blasphemy. From Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or, A description and history of the hereticks and sectaries sprang up in these latter times (London: W. Wilson for John Marshall and Robert Trot, 1662), 244  [223] 9.2. Burning in the hand of Joseph Relph, Old Bailey criminal court, London, 1778. From William Jackson, The New Newgate Calendar (London, 1795), between pp. 322 and 323  [225] 9.3. An ink print made by a branding iron representing the Frankfurt city seal, alongside the condemnation of branding on the face. Frankfurt Strafbuch (1585), fol. 17r [226] 9.4. English device used for branding on the cheek, ca. 1700. Drawing from S. Meeson Morris, “The Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire [part 3],” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 11 (1888): 368  [232] 10.1. Publicity poster for Christian Vincent’s La discrète starring Fabrice Luchini, Judith Henry, and Maurice Garrel, 1990  [240]

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume first emerged from an interdisciplinary seminar on “Signs, Symptoms, Stigmata: Early Modern Techniques of Inscribing the Body and Their Contemporary Relevance,” organized by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Peter S. Erickson at the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, held at Harvard University. The two days of dynamic exchange there, which included Stigma contributors Ana Fonseca Conboy, Craig Koslofsky, and Mairin Odle, laid the groundwork for this edited volume. We are grateful to all of the original seminar presenters and attendees for inspiring us to move forward with this collection. Since then, we have been thrilled to welcome several more scholars to the project, and we thank each of our contributors for their outstanding work and the unique perspectives they bring to this collection. We are grateful to Jeffrey Castle for his superb translation of Mordechay Lewy’s chapter into English and to Dr. Lewy for working closely with Jeff to revise and update his text for this volume. Our own work and thinking has been nourished throughout the process of building this book by exchanges, workshops, and conferences with other colleagues working on skin and skin marking, notably all the members of the Renaissance Skin Project at King’s College London, including Sebastian Kroupa, Hannah Murphy, and Evelyn Welch, as well as the many participants in the events they sponsored during the course of their five-year grant from the Wellcome Trust. We are grateful for their leadership in the important new field of skin studies and for the many opportunities they have given us to share our research and expand our knowledge about early modern skin. We have also benefitted from lively exchanges on skin with the skin studies working group and the 2021 symposium convened by Charlotte Mathieson and Stigma contributor Nicole Nyffenegger, as well as from the intellectual generosity of many other colleagues who responded thoughtfully to our work at conference presentations throughout the life of this project. We thank Perspectives on Sensory History series editor Mark Smith and Pennsylvania State University Press Assistant Director/Editor-in-Chief Kendra Boileau for their initial enthusiasm for this project and for ushering it through the review process. The members of the editorial team at Penn State have been nothing short of fantastic partners in producing this volume. We thank their entire staff, in particular Acquisitions Editor Kathryn Bourque Yahner, Managing Editor Laura Reed-Morrisson, Editorial Assistant Maddie Caso, Production Coordinator Brian Beer, and Senior Designer Regina Starace for their exemplary responsiveness, efficiency, and kindness. It has been a pleasure working

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with them. For her invaluable assistance in preparing the initial manuscript for submission, we thank Heather Freund Carter. Finally, Annika Fisher, our indefatigable copy editor, has our deepest gratitude for her extraordinary work in preparing this complex volume, written by twelve authors spread across three continents, for print. It has been truly delightful collaborating with her. Bowdoin College and the Newberry Library have provided substantial publication grants for the production of this collection, for which we are deeply grateful. As an editorial team, we have shared this work with one another, but also with our spouses, families, and colleagues, who have supported this project in many ways. Our heartfelt thanks go out to them as well.

Introduction

Marking Skin A Cutaneous Collection

Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

Deliberate, permanent, meaningful marks on human skin are as old as humanity itself. But the early modern period opened a new era in the history of cutaneous marking. Beginning in the fifteenth century, intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, forced bodies and dermal practices into contact as never before. The distinctive skin cultures and marking practices of Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania began to circulate and reshape one another. While much of our evidence of this circulation and transformation comes from texts and images created by Europeans, the phenomena they document were global. Dermal marking had its place in diverse cultures around the world, and early modern people experienced “skin contact” from multiple perspectives.1 As this new age of dermal encounters began, Europeans understood the skin as a ready surface for inscription by political, natural, and supernatural forces. The belief that these inscriptions could elevate, protect, or exclude the marked person could not have been more deeply rooted in the Western tradition. Cain was “cursed from the earth,” condemned to be “a fugitive and a vagabond,” but marked for protection as well: “And the lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (Genesis 4:10–15).2 At the Apocalypse, the damned and the saved were imprinted respectively with the mark of the Beast (Revelation

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Fig. I.1  Ifa divination tray showing scarified figures, Aja/Fon, seventeenth century. Wood, height 34.4 cm; width 55.7 cm. Photo © Ulmer Museum & Bernd Kegler, Ulm (CC BY-NC).

13:16–17) and the mark of God (Revelation 7:2–8), sealing their destinies. Early modern Europeans wove Judeo-Christian traditions that cast the mark on skin as a sign of election, protection, punishment, or damnation together with their knowledge of cutaneous marking in antiquity—notably the tattooing or branding of prisoners, servants, and enslaved people—and their own complex astrological systems that framed human skin as literally signed by the universe. This fabric of contrasting conceptions of skin marking provided the backdrop for the early modern explosion of new cross-cultural dermal interactions. Early modern Europeans wrote and illustrated fascinated accounts of the tattooing, cutting, painting, circumcision, and other skin marking traditions they encountered across the globe, just as the Native inhabitants of these contact zones recorded and transmitted the marking practices that were part of their everyday lives through textual and artistic representations as well as through oral tradition. In West and West-Central Africa, for example, rich and complex scarification and tattoo traditions were reflected in material culture, as seen on a seventeenth-century Ifa divination board (fig. i.1). The eight human figures on the board all display scarification on the torso and face similar to the marks the Yoruba placed on their bodies, reflecting the important roles of voluntary dermal marking in many cultures of West Africa, the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. As Europeans described, misunderstood, and adapted the new dermal practices they encountered, they integrated their observations into existing beliefs and assumptions

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about the marked body and its meanings in medical, astrological, religious, and legal realms. They also created new hybrid forms of dermal marking to meet new economic and political demands. Foremost among these was the branding of enslaved Africans upon purchase in Africa or arrival in the Americas. This marking practice, used by slave traders from all European nations, was fundamental to the early modern Atlantic economy. Based on the pioneering work of Katrina H. B. Keefer, we can estimate that at least four million Africans and people of African descent were branded by slave traders, customs officials, plantation owners, or local authorities in the period from 1500 to 1800.3 Like the judicial branding practiced in Europe and its Atlantic colonies to identify repeat criminal offenders, the branding of the enslaved created an archive on the skin, one that could be “read” to identify, control, and punish.4 Branding became the material manifestation of the inscription of power upon the body. In his postmodern reframing of the human body, Michel Foucault famously argued that “power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”5 As a practice essential to the triangular trade, branding was imposed on Black skin until the abolition of slavery. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Europeans were examining systematically their own cutaneous practices in relationship to those they observed around the world. In 1647, the first treatise entirely devoted to signs on skin, the voluminous De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco by French theologian Théophile Raynaud (1583–1663), was published in Grenoble.6 Raynaud’s treatment of stigmata, as its title suggests, examined a wide variety of marks imprinted on the human body, from the bleeding wounds of saints to the devil’s mark on witches. Three years later, English physician John Bulwer (1606– 1656) published his weighty Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling, which cataloged, illustrated, and condemned body marking and modification practices from every region of the world, including his own.7 Far from representing isolated scholarly endeavors, the works of Raynaud and Bulwer—though very different from each other—reveal a new interest in dermal marking both as a topic for historical investigation and as a modern global phenomenon. Their works point to a novel conceptualization of body marking as a cross-cultural phenomenon that could be understood through history and by comparison or analogy. Across the early modern world, the cutaneous sign was being deployed, observed, and theorized in novel ways. New interest brought with it new terminology. Though today we know the Latin plural term stigmata as merely describing wounds resembling those of Christ, early modern writers gave stigma and stigmata a far greater semantic reach, referring to a wide range of marks on skin made by nature, supernatural forces, or human beings. Stigma is drawn from the Greek word στίγμα,

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meaning a “mark made by a pointed instrument, brand,” which in turn derives from the Greek στίζειν, meaning “to prick or to puncture.”8 As these origins suggest, early modern stigma encompassed not only signs that carried infamy, as we use the word in our present time, but all marks made upon—or by penetrating—the skin. Among these forms of stigmata, one has attracted special attention due to its extraordinary cross-cultural spread in the modern era: the tattoo. But a permanent mark on skin made with ink was not known as a “tattoo” outside Polynesia until the late eighteenth century. The Polynesian word tatu entered European languages in the 1770s through the published narratives of the South Sea voyages of the French admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the English captain James Cook.9 Yet while the word “tattoo” was new to the European lexicon in the eighteenth century, the practice of permanently marking the skin with pigment definitely was not.10 In addition to flourishing in the Americas, South Asia, and Oceania, tattoos had existed in Europe for centuries; in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, they could be found on the bodies of pilgrims, alchemists, mystics, lovers, servants, and sailors. They figured prominently in the written accounts of cultural go-betweens and world travelers.11 Better known to Europeans as “marks,” “pricks,” or “figures” (in French marques, picqueures, figures; in German Figuren or Markierungen) and described through the verbs “mark,” “prick,” “engrave,” “pownce,” and “race/rase/raze” (in French marquer, piquer, or graver; in German kratzen, stechen, or bemalen), terms for skin marking were borrowed from those used to describe other material marking practices that proliferated in this period.12 Moreover, the terminology used by modern European vernaculars for naming deliberate, permanent, meaningful marks on human skin expanded from the Greek and Latin stigma, with its classical and pejorative associations, to include, by the early nineteenth century, the words tattoo/tatouage/Tätowierung—signaling a new familiarity with body marking as a global phenomenon. Until recently, scholarship on early modern dermal marking has focused on particular types of marking, such as Native North American tattoos or Christian stigmata. This tendency to examine cutaneous signs in isolation from each other is, in part, a result of disciplinary boundaries that have compartmentalized the study of body-marking practices: historians of religion have examined devotional marks, legal historians have investigated judicial branding, anthropologists have analyzed Indigenous tattooing, and so on.13 But early modern markers of skin and “readers” of marked skin did not think about different kinds of dermal signs as separate from each other: they frequently cross-referenced the growing variety of known marking traditions to inform their understanding or use of any particular type of skin mark. For example, Mordechay Lewy notes that when Europeans first described tattooing among the Huron, in the Siamese capital of Ayuttaya, and in the Philippines, they all referenced the tattoos received by some Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem or Bethlehem, which were presumed

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familiar to the readers of these travel accounts.14 And in another well-known instance, Augustine of Hippo compared the invisible dermal mark of baptism to the permanent mark placed on a Roman soldier or enslaved person as a sign of allegiance or belonging.15 When explaining the devil’s mark on witches, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians claimed it was an inversion of holy marks such as baptism or divine stigmata; they also compared it with birthmarks and branding marks on both livestock and people.16 It is the early modern recognition of the fundamental comparability of dermal marking that informs this collection. Together we follow the lead of these observers of cutaneous marks and theoreticians of skin signs by bringing together analyses of a wide variety of dermal marking practices deployed and described in Europe and the wider world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. To do this, our contributors examine both dermal marks that moved across cultures and those that developed primarily within a specific culture. Our collection reveals a rich and dynamic history of skin in early modern Europe and points the way to similar histories for other regions. By bringing diverse practices, contexts, and approaches to the marked body into dialogue, we highlight the deeper cultural foundations of beliefs about the body, the marking of its surface, and the specific early modern forces that put marked bodies in motion. This project joins a growing corpus of exciting scholarship on the history of signs on skin. Over the last decades, scholars have begun to document past practices of corporeal marking in Europe and the Atlantic world, questioning long-standing assumptions about the history and meanings of the cutaneous sign. Publications include Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp’s collection Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (2018) and Jane Caplan’s germinal collected volume on the tattoo in the West, Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (2000), as well as edited volumes on divine stigmata by Dominique de Courcelles, Stigmates (2001); by Barbara Menke and Barbara Vinken, Stigmata: Poetiken der Körperinschrift (2004); and by Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2020). Moreover, the skin itself has come to the fore as a meaningful object of study across time and disciplines, inspiring scholarship, conferences, exhibitions, and collective projects.17 Claudia Benthien’s Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World (2002) and Steven Connor’s Book of Skin (2004) reveal diverse and complex meanings of human skin in Europe from ancient times to the present, while Nina Jablonski explores its biological anthropology in Skin: A Natural History (2006) and Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (2012).18 Led by historian Evelyn Welch and funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Renaissance Skin Project at King’s College, London, has made crucial contributions to the study of early modern skin. Katherine Dauge-Roth’s Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (2020) brings an unprecedented range of methods and materials to bear on the question of dermal marking in the sixteenth through

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eighteenth centuries, part of a whole wave of new research on early modern skin undertaken by empirically driven historians, literary scholars, art historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists.19 Parallel to this research on skin and its marks, vital scholarship on skin color both in Europe and in the Atlantic world has begun to examine the construction of race and color in scientific, medical, aesthetic, and legal contexts.20 This work is creating new opportunities to theorize and study skin color as the culminating form of early modern and modern dermal marking. But all this scholarship only scratches the surface of the global history of skin: for most early modern cultures, dermal marking remains a ubiquitous but underresearched phenomenon.21 There is much more work to be done, and it is an exciting time to study the history of marks on skin.22 This growth in scholarship has made it possible to survey a wide range of early modern dermal discourses and practices within specific cultures and across cultural contact zones.23 The chapters in this collection follow travelers journeying, whether by choice or by force, through diverse geographies: from the coasts of West Africa to the Caribbean; from mainland China to Taiwan; from Europe to North America, the Middle East, and Asia; and from one European principality to another. These essays examine marks burnt on the bodies of enslaved African captives, European convicts, and animal-bite victims, as well as the marks, wounds, and scars made on the bodies of heroic soldiers and devout Christians. They bring to light the significance attributed to tattoos pricked into the skin of Algonquians, Indigenous Taiwanese, and European pilgrims and consider the potent instability of the decorative paste-on beauty marks fashionable Europeans placed upon their skin. Interrogating the histories and meanings behind marks both hidden and displayed, immaterial and material, natural and artificial, permanent and transient, chosen and imposed, these interdisciplinary contributions reveal hidden connections between identity and effacement, belonging and exclusion, election and punishment, slavery and freedom, and wounding and healing. We have grouped these diverse investigations of the marked body from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in three parts: first, three essays on “Marked Encounters” interrogate dermal interactions and interpretations in contact zones across the globe; second, the contributions in “Marks of Faith” highlight the importance of religious belief and spiritual practice in thinking about the marked body and giving it meaning in the early modern era; and third, the chapters in “Standing Out” examine the ways in which marks on skin functioned in this period diversely to honor, shame, or beautify the body. Yet across these groupings and the range of contexts examined in the contributions assembled in this volume, some unifying themes emerge: the studies collected here show how old and new forms of dermal marking coexisted, how the power to mark the skin was adapted to serve new economic and political systems, and how the early modern cutaneous mark promised self-evidence and social legibility but often proved unstable, unreliable, or deceptive.

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Age-old marking practices endured in the early modern period, even as new signs emerged or old signs were redirected to new ends. Signs on skin in this period were both conservative and innovative: they affirmed traditional roles and beliefs in the face of new challenges. As the contributions to this volume reveal, the Christian mark of baptism, God-given stigmata on the bodies of saints, and penal branding were all long-standing marking practices that still held intense significance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Used to maintain old social and cultural orders and expressive of enduring beliefs, these dermal practices faced new interpretations and were adapted to new ends in this period of profound transformation, modernization, and epistemological upheaval. Even as belief in the invisible mark of baptism and in the miraculous appearance of the stigmata of Christ persisted into this new age, their traditional meanings were confronted by new cultural and intellectual contexts. As Ana Fonseca Conboy shows, the sacred sign of Christian baptism, a permanent but unseen mark of grace and belonging, became doubly invisible in French martyr plays of the seventeenth century as new rules of vraisemblance and bienséance banished from the stage the all-important ceremony of baptism that confirmed conversion and acceptance into the Christian community. Dramatic strategies for making visible this profoundly transformative sacrament, now absent from view, took on paramount importance for the accomplishment of the didactic ends of hagiographic theater in this period. Catholic belief in miraculous stigmata also faced challenges in the mid-seventeenth century when confronted with ascendant Cartesian mind-body dualism, as Allison Stedman investigates. But Descartes’s refusal to admit the ability of a spiritual force to effect change within the human body opened the door to a new mechanistic explanation of these increasingly frequent somatic phenomena. New theories celebrated the power of the human imaginative faculty, which, when moved through intense pious contemplation, could physically impress Christ’s wounds upon the believer’s skin. Similarly, the physical branding and incisions used in popular healing practices for rabies and other diseases—offered by the Church from at least the sixth century and informed by enduring belief in the power of relics and sacred touch in the early modern era—came under fire in the seventeenth century as well. As Dauge-Roth shows, these healing marks raised significant controversy in a climate of intense religious reform and rising empiricism. However, despite charges of superstition, practices of curative ritual branding and cutting to ward off rabies showed remarkable persistence, continuing through the early modern period and well into the nineteenth century. The early modern period also saw the emergence of innovative and hybrid approaches to skin marking with roots—but no real predecessors—in earlier periods. In ancient Greece and Rome, tattoos and brands had occasionally been imposed on the bodies of enslaved people, convicted criminals, soldiers, and servants, but branding became ubiquitous in the seventeenth-century Atlantic

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world, adapted to the needs of new labor regimes in European colonies and increasingly centralized administration at home. As the Atlantic trade in enslaved men and women gained its devastating momentum and judicial systems across Europe developed more systematic responses to crime, African captives and European convicts found themselves tracked and identified through signs painfully burned into their skin, as chapter 3 by Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper and chapter 9 by Craig Koslofsky show. In the New World, where labor was scarce and mobile, brands visibly marked African captives as signs of their commodification and as aids in their recapture if they fled. European colonial authorities and slave masters relied on this marking practice for more than four centuries: it was a horribly effective method of controlling human labor.24 But in England and Western Europe, the growing free-labor market relied on a large pool of employable surplus labor. The disfiguring facial brands known since antiquity made convicts so marked unemployable, and thus they were replaced by branding on the hand, the shoulder, or other discreet locations. To counter to this trend, in 1699, the English Parliament introduced more stigmatizing facial branding for some property crimes. But this new facial branding was short-lived: six years later the law was repealed when authorities agreed that it served only to remove convicts from the labor market. While chattel branding continued for enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic colonies, more discreet branding was the answer for white bodies within the labor regime of eighteenth-century England. Retooled to serve new commercial and legal ends, ancient marking practices were hybridized to become essential components in vast systems built upon the violent coercion and control of labor. As these examples suggest, a second overarching theme that unites the marking practices of the early modern era is the tension between being marked oneself and the power to mark the skin of another. In this period of intensified material and cultural exchange, early modern Europeans, intimately familiar with past marking traditions that conveyed religious and social identity, placed them in parallel with the novel dermal marks they encountered globally, giving new prominence and visibility to signs on skin as markers of difference and belonging, election or exclusion. From the baptismal mark to the brand, from battle scars to stigmata, from tattoos to beauty marks, marks on skin had the power to communicate their bearers’ identities and declare their place both within their own communities and in relationship to other communities they encountered. For some persons, dermal marks affirmed and projected a desirable, positive identity—indicating belonging to God, to a community, or to a distinguished group of travelers. But others bore “stigmatical” marks considered signs of savagery or deviance or as reflections of their status as property.25 Dermal marking could proudly showcase one’s identity—or encase and limit it. Exercising the power to mark the skin never merely reflected some timeless tradition: our studies show

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how early modern people adapted dermal marking to serve or resist new economic and political systems. Cast simultaneously as a mark of belonging and of difference, the tattoo held particular prominence as sign of identity in this period of unprecedented global movement. As Xiao Chen shows, Qing Chinese officials in Taiwan chose to describe Indigenous tattooing as an ancestral practice reflecting filial piety, thus imagining a Confucian value shared between colonizer and “barbarian.” European travelers to the Holy Land observed the diverse body marking practices prevalent among its cosmopolitan population during their stay and adopted Levantine Christian tattooing for their own purposes. As shown in Mordechay Lewy’s chapter on European pilgrim tattoos, the Jerusalem mark served some Christian pilgrims quite literally as a sign of identity, displayed to gain them safe passage through otherwise hostile territories on their routes home. More profoundly, pilgrimage tattoos held both spiritual and social significance, signaling a pilgrim’s devotion as a person who had braved the challenges of travel to the Holy Land and followed in the very steps of Christ. Despite their familiarity with tattoos on Christian or white skin, early modern European travelers and settlers saw the tattoos and other markings on the bodies of Indigenous people they encountered as manifest signs of alterity and barbarity. But they also sought to understand the significance of these novel cutaneous marks, just as the Native peoples they encountered examined European skin and costume for distinguishing marks in order to make sense of them. English colonists entering Algonquian land in the late sixteenth century saw their hosts’ tattoos and other bodily accoutrements as signs of difference that required translation for their European audience. As Mairin Odle argues, the English saw the body markings of the Native inhabitants of coastal Carolina as functionally similar to—though not the equal of—alphabetic writing; understanding these marks required a reversal of lessons in literacy, as Europeans attempted to gain dermal knowledge deemed essential to the success of the colonial enterprise. Xiao Chen’s comparative study of Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese writing about tattooing among Indigenous Formosans in Taiwan and Indigenous Bizayas in the Philippines reminds us that “othering” people of different nations by interpreting their body markings and skin color as signs of savagery was not unique to the European imperial gaze. Nor was the attempt to understand tattooing in relationship to the colonizer’s own material practices and cultural norms: European and Chinese officials read Indigenous dermal marking as signs of social rank, bravery, barbarity, or filial piety. The “reading” of marks on skin presumes access to them. For early modern Europeans, the condition of being marked raised the fraught question of control over one’s own skin—one’s own self. On the dramatic stage, Shakespeare transformed the story of the Roman hero Martius Coriolanus from the fifth century bce into a struggle over access to dermal marks. All of Shakespeare’s sources for

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the play Coriolanus describe its protagonist as willingly following the Roman custom of displaying one’s battle wounds as a sign of service to Rome. But Shakespeare’s Coriolanus refused to expose his wounded body, triggering a personal and political crisis. To whom did the scars of Coriolanus belong? To the hero himself, who could withhold them from public display? Or was he marked by his service to Rome and thus obligated to show his marked skin to the Roman people? As Nicole Nyffenegger shows, in Shakespeare’s retelling, Coriolanus will not let his wounds speak for themselves as a public display, and he would rather let his wounds heal into scars than allow his social inferiors to talk about them or speak for them. His wounds should be his to display or conceal. The play thus poses the deeper question of who may “read” someone’s dermal marks and make meaning of them in an age of increasingly self-fashioned social identity. On the courtly stage, Claire Goldstein shows how the paste-on cosmetic beauty mark, or mouche, found itself reinvested and redeployed from its Ovidian roots onto the skin of aristocrats and into the new periodical press. These versatile and mobile imitation moles provided not only a welcome enhancement of the much sought-after whiteness of the skin—by creating a point of dark contrast—but also a potential means of signifying one’s amorous status or intentions. Produced of black taffeta, the mouche counterfeited the natural, permanent birthmark so invested with meaning by Renaissance astrology, offering instead an artificial permanence in a new signifying system. Instead of a stable, natural sign of the bearer’s identity and destiny, this temporary dermal mark allowed its bearers to direct and modulate their self-presentation, much as Coriolanus sought to do. European and Chinese observers sought to interpret the dermal signs they encountered when they traveled outside their cultural core regions—but they also wondered whether accurate readings were even possible. This imperial-colonial interest in skin points to a third question that plagued all attempts to make Indigenous dermal marking practices “speak” in the early modern period. In a time of extraordinary and unprecedented change, early modern individuals and regimes sought to anchor identity, authority, and truth in indelible signs made on skin. Colonization, new regimes of violently coerced labor, and the mobility of people and goods across imperial borders led to an increasing reliance on dermal marks to recognize allies, runaways, and coreligionists, from Taiwan to Virginia. Building new empires on Indigenous land with enslaved labor, Europeans invested the cutaneous mark with stability, creating fantasies of permanence and legibility. But just how reliable was the cutaneous mark? Time and again, marks on skin proved themselves ambiguous, unstable, and even subversive; they resisted reading or were concealed. Chinese scholar-administrators in Taiwan reported that, bafflingly, some Indigenes were tattooed with “the scripts of red barbarians [i.e., the Dutch].”26 What could such doubly foreign marks mean? Other native Taiwanese bore dermal marks that might be an unsettling record of their

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successful head-hunting. European colonists in the Americas worried over their inability to accurately read dermal signs they construed as political and thus crucial to their relations with Native tribes regarding land, loyalty, and trade. Stigmata on the bodies of devout Christian women inspired conflicting interpretations as theologians and philosophers struggled with the inadequacy of their existing theories to explain their appearance. Birthmarks signifying healing ability were regularly faked by con men and thus unreliable, just as artificial beauty marks proved subversive in their mobility, impermanence, and promiscuous indeterminacy. Authorities relied on the branding of African captives and European convicts, but even these practices were inconsistent, and searches for previous brands were sometimes inconclusive, futile, or did not take place at all. On stage, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus refused to offer his wounds up for public reading and definition, preferring to keep them hidden under his clothes and thus rendering them illegible. The mark of baptism, itself invisible, was even more elusive, requiring its presence to be made manifest through other means. The early modern cutaneous mark promised self-evidence, permanence, and visibility, but the scholarship collected in this volume shows how often such marks proved unreliable, ambiguous, or undecipherable. From birthmarks to brands, stigmata to tattoos, battle scars to beauty marks, signs on the skin took on new prominence in the early modern period. These cutaneous marks moved across discourses and cultures, difficult to contain in any one frame or interpretation. But the early modern dermal theories and practices surveyed here reflect a common context: a world of increased trade, intensified cultural contact and exchange, and epistemological upheaval. Under these conditions, early modern people relied on dermal marks to uphold traditional authorities and identities. But they also saw in skin marking new opportunities, creating novel hybrid dermal practices to serve new economic and political systems or to forge new identities. Early modern men and women also resisted the power to mark and the condition of being marked by concealing their marks or choosing new ones. Despite increased investment in its legibility and stability, the cutaneous mark sometimes proved unstable. Each of the chapters in this study reflects these varied aspects and meanings of early modern dermal marking: conservative and innovative forms of marking side by side, reflecting both the power to mark and resistance to marking, even as these embodied marks claimed to provide a solid basis for knowledge about groups of people or specific individuals. The wide-ranging pressure on the marked skin to reliably signify legal status, authority, or community succeeded in some areas: the European branding of enslaved Africans was brutally effective and widespread, carried out over four centuries on millions of persons. And as the early modern period created and solidified notions of whiteness and Blackness, the dermal practices and discourses surveyed in this volume contributed to a new and fateful role for skin

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in the modern world. The assembled scholarship places the emergence of early modern skin color in a new context: it arose not just from nascent European science or more long-standing prejudices but from a multitude of dermal marking practices and discourses that circulated around the world. The following chapters illuminate these interconnected practices and discourses and so provide new ways to understand historically how skin color became such a powerful marker of human identity and difference today. Notes 1. As several of the essays in this volume attest, much can be gleaned about Indigenous marking practices around the world from early modern European written and printed sources. But to write a more complete and less Eurocentric history of the marked body, we need more research and study of both material artifacts and orally transmitted narratives and traditions related to skin and its marking. 2. Christian scripture quotations are from the King James Bible. On Cain and early modern punishments, see Sarah Covington, “‘Law’s Bloody Inflictions’: Judicial Wounding and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 279–80. 3. Katrina H. B. Keefer, “Marked by Fire: Brands, Slavery, and Identity,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 40, no. 4 (2019): 659–81. See also Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper’s contribution to this volume. 4. Conversely, Keefer’s major ongoing project to catalogue, identify, and track brands made by slave traders and owners uses the reading of this corporeal archive instead as a means for reconstructing family histories, establishing ancestry, and retracing the lives of enslaved individuals. This project, “Violence in Iron and Silver: Data Visualisation and the Reconstruction of Identities through Slave Brands,” is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. See also “Decoding Origins: Creating a Visual Language of Marks,” https://‌language ofmarks‌.org. 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 25.

6. Théophile Raynaud, De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco, 2nd ed. (Grenoble: Apud C. Bureau, 1647; Lyon: Antoine Cellier, 1654). 7. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: Or, The Artificiall Changling, Historically presented, 2nd ed. (1650; London: William Hunt, 1653). 8. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Stigma,” 2nd ed. (1989), https://‌www‌.oed‌.com‌/view‌ /Entry‌/190242, and Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Le Robert, 1992), “Stigmate.” For further discussion of the terms used to describe marks on skin in this period, see Katherine DaugeRoth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), esp. 3–4. 9. The journals of James Cook and his fellow captains were published by John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773). Bougainville’s account appeared as the Voyage autour du monde, par la frégate du Roi La Boudeuse, et la flûte L’Étoile; En 1766, 1767, 1768 & 1769 (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1771). The OED records the first appearances of “tattoo” as a noun and a verb in 1769, and “Tatouer,” “Tatoué, ée,” and “Tatouage” first entered the French dictionary at the close of the eighteenth century. See Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 5th ed. (Paris: J. J. Smits, 1798), 2:634. 10. Historian Anna Felicity Friedman discusses and debunks the “Cook myth” that the tattoo was an exotic import, first brought to Europe on the backs of Cook’s sailors—an idea that persists despite overwhelming evidence disproving it. See Anna Felicity Friedman, “The Cook Myth: Common Tattoo History

Marking Skin Debunked,” April 5, 2015, www.tattoohistorian .com/2014/04/05/the-cook-myth-common-tat too-history-debunked, as well as her dissertation, “Tattooed Transculturites: Western Expatriates Among Amerindian and Pacific Islander Societies, 1500–1900” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012). 11. On Holy Land pilgrim tattooing, see Juliet Fleming, “The Renaissance Tattoo,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 61–82; Mordechay Lewy’s contribution to this volume (first published in Hebrew under the English title “Towards a History of Jerusalem Tattoo Marks Among Western Pilgrims,” Cathedra 95 [2000]: 37–66; and in German as “Jerusalem unter der Haut: Zur Geschichte der Jerusalemer Pilgertätowierung,” trans. Esther Kontarsky, Zeitschrift für Religions und Geistesgeschichte 55, no. 1 [2003]): 1–39; Robert Ousterhout, “Permanent Emphemera: The ‘Honourable Stigmatisation’ of Jerusalem Pilgrims,” in Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel, ed. Renana Bartal and Hanna Vorholt (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 94–109; and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 171–205. On devotional tattooing in Loreto, Italy, see Guido Guerzoni, “Notae divinae ex arte compuntae: Prime impressioni sul tatuaggio devozionale in Italia (secoli XV– XIX),” in “La Peau humaine / La pelle humana / The Human Skin,” special issue, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 13 (2005): 409–37, and Guido Guerzoni, “Devotional Tattoos in Early Modern Italy,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 6 (2018): 119–36. On tattoos by alchemists, see Jennipher A. Rosecrans, “Wearing the Universe: Symbolic Markings in Early Modern England,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 46–60, and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 262–63. On lovers’ tattoos, see Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 263 and 270 n. 22. On Native American and Indigenous Canadian tattooing as described by the French and English and their borrowings of it, see Arnaud Balvay, “Tattooing and Its Role in French-Native American Relations,” French Colonial History 9 (2008): 1–14; Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), 195–99; Friedman, “Tattooed Transculturites”; Michael Gaudio,

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“Savage Marks: The Scriptive Techniques of Early Modern Ethnography,” in Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–43; Mairin Odle’s contribution to this volume and her Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Gorden M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 165, 175; and DaugeRoth, Signing the Body, 121–69. On the material culture of Native American tattooing, see Aaron Deter-Wolf and Carol Diaz-Granados, eds., Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), and Aaron Deter-Wolf, Tanya M. Peres, and Steven Karacic, “Ancient Native American Bone Tattooing Tools and Pigments: Evidence from Central Tennessee,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 37 (2021), https://‌doi ‌.org‌/10‌.1016‌/j‌.jasrep‌.2021‌.103002. 12. On resemblances between body-marking practices and other premodern material-marking practices, see the essays in Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds., Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018); Joel Konrad, “‘Barbarous Gallants’: Fashion, Morality, and the Marked Body in English Culture, 1590–1660,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 1 (2011): 29–48; Jane Caplan, introduction to Written on the Body, xi–xxiv); Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo”; and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body. 13. On stigmata, see Dominique de Courcelles, ed., Stigmates, Cahiers de l’Herne 75 (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2001), especially Jacques Le Brun’s essay in that volume, “Les discours de la stigmatisation au XVIIe siècle,” 103–18; Barbara Menke and Barbara Vinken, eds., Stigmata: Poetiken der Körperinschrift (Munich: Fink, 2004); Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Nicole Pellegrin, “Fleurs saintes: L’écriture des stigmates (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps: Sang, Santé, Sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières, ed. Cathy McClive and Nicole Pellegrin (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2010), 101–22. On judicial

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branding, see Covington, “‘Law’s Bloody Inflictions’”; Marc Vigié, “La Flétrissure des forçats au XVIIIe siècle: Un exemple de justice emblématique,” Revue de science criminelle et de droit comparé 3 (July–September 1986): 809–17; Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 217–56; and Craig Koslofsky’s contribution to this volume. On Indigenous tattooing in North America, see Carayon, Eloquence Embodied, 195–99; Deter-Wolf and Diaz-Granados, Drawing with Great Needles; Friedman, “Tattooed Transculturites”; Gaudio, “Savage Marks”; Balvay, “Tattooing and Its Role”; and Marin Odle’s contribution to this volume as well as her forthcoming monograph, Under the Skin. 14. See Mordechay Lewy’s contribution to this volume; Ousterhout, “Permanent Emphemera”; and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 171–215. 15. See Ana Fonseca Conboy’s contribution to this volume. 16. See Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 32–43. 17. Museum exhibitions include My Skin, curated by Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden, 2007; Skin, curated by Javier Moscoso, Wellcome Collection, London, June 10–September 26, 2010; Skin/Peau, Musée de la Main, Fondation Claude Verdan, Lausanne, June 16, 2011–April 29, 2012; Tatoueurs, tatoués, Musée du quai Branly, May 6, 2014–October 18, 2015, with the catalog Tatoueurs, tatoués (Arles: Actes Sud, 2014); and Les signes du corps, Musée Dapper, September 23, 2004–April 3, 2005, with the catalog Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, ed., Signes du corps (Paris: Musée Dapper, 2004). Conferences addressing the history of skin and/or body marking include “La Peau humaine / La pelle humana / The Human Skin,” at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, 2002, with its papers collected in an issue of Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 13 (2005); “Nella Pelle / Into the Skin: First International Conference on the Identity, Symbolism, and History of Permanent Body Marks,” organized by Mordechay Lewy at the Universitario Pontifica Università Ubaniana, Vatican City, December 5–6, 2011; “The Porous Body in Early Modern Europe,” November 30–December 1, 2017, and “Global Skins in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700,” September 19–20, 2019, organized by the Renaissance Skin Project at King’s College, London, in addition to many

other events sponsored by this research group (see https://‌www‌.renaissanceskin‌.ac‌.uk). 18. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and Other, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004); Nina Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Nina Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 19. For work on skin and skin marking specific to the early modern era, see, for example, François Delpech, “Les marques de naissance: Physiognomonie, signature magique et charisme souverain,” in Le corps dans la société espagnole des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Augustin Redondo (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1990), 27–49; François Delpech, “La ‘marque’ des sorcières: Logique(s) de la stigmatisation diabolique,” in Le Sabbat des sorciers: XVe–XVIIIe siècles, ed. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin et Maxime Préaud (Grenoble: Millon, 1993), 347–68; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Les marques insensibles, ou les nuages de la certitude,” Littératures Classiques 25 (Fall 1995): 97–134; Mieneke te Hennepe, “Of the Fisherman’s Net and Skin Pores: Reframing Conceptions of the Skin in Medicine, 1572– 1714,” in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 523–48; Hannah Murphy, “Skin and Disease in Early Modern Medicine: Jan Jessen’s De cute, et cutaneis affectibus (1601),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 179–214; Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body; and Craig Koslofsky, “Knowing Skin in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1750,” History Compass 12, no. 10 (2014): 794–806. 20. See, for example, Guillaume Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 439–78; Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

Marking Skin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022); Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Sujata Iyegar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Colour in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Anne Lafont, L’art et la race: L’africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2019); Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 89–113; Christina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002); Christina Malcolmson and Sujata Iyegar, eds., “Race and Skin Marking in the Early Modern Period,” special issue, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 (2018): 134–212; Hannah Murphy, “Skin Before Colour in Early Modern Europe,” Historian’s Watch, Histories of the Present, February 27, 2020, https://‌www‌.his toryworkshop‌.org‌.uk‌/earlymodern‌-skin‌-colour; Jessica Pierre-Louis, “La couleur de l’autre: L’altérité au travers des mots dans les sociétés coloniales françaises du Nouveau Monde (XVII–XVIIIe siècle),” in Poétique et politique de l’altérité: Colonialisme, esclavagisme, exotisme (XVIIIe–XXIe siècles), ed. Karine Bénac-Giroux, Rencontres: Le dix-huitième siècle 31 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 143–54; Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 563–92; Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Megan Vaughn, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Roxanne Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and

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Craig Koslofsky, “Superficial Blackness? Johann Nicolas Pechlin’s De Habitu et Colore Aethiopum Qui Vulgo Nigritae (1677),” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 (2018): 140–58. Unfortunately, some scholarship on the role of skin in early modern European ideas of the body and the self limits its focus to an abstract or unmarked human skin, as if this era did not give birth to enormously powerful and lasting categories of human difference based on skin color. The formation of racialized skin color from early modern ways of knowing and marking skin is the focus of Craig Koslofsky’s current project: The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 21. Archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf (see n. 11 above) has led the way in the study of the physical tools of Native American tattooing, but there is more to be done on the intangible ritual practices that accompanied almost all tattooing and other forms of dermal marking in the early modern era. 22. The history of skin marking and of tattooing, in particular, has also drawn lively popular interest. Web-based work such the Renaissance Skin Project’s site, https://‌www‌ .renaissanceskin‌.ac‌.uk, and Friedman’s https://‌www‌.tattoohistorian‌.com helps bridge the gap between popular interest in marks on skin and ongoing scholarship in the field. 23. On other forms of embodied expression and communication in early modern contact zones, see Carayon, Eloquence Embodied. 24. The earliest records of the branding of enslaved Africans stem from the 1440s, when Portuguese traders on Arguin Island, off the coast of Mauritania, recorded branding their African captives. See Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 388–97. 25. This term comes from Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis. 26. See Xiao Chen’s contribution to this volume.

pa r t i

Marked E n c ou nters in A m e rica, Asia, a nd Africa

Chapter 1

“Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted” English Ideas of Tattooing as Indigenous Literacy

Mairin Odle

In July 1585, an English ship named the Tyger arrived at Ossomocomuck, the region now known as the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The expedition had orders to make close systematic observations of the land, its products, and its peoples. Two men on board were specifically tasked with this work of describing the unfamiliar in images and words: John White, a “gentleman-limner” (watercolorist), and Thomas Harriot, a scholar. While White and Harriot’s exact orders no longer exist, directions given for an earlier expedition, proposed but never completed, give a hint of English priorities: an on-board artist was expected to draw “the figures and shapes on men and woeman in their apparrell as also their manner of wepons in every place as you shall finde them differing”; a scholar-linguist was ordered to note “the dyversitie of their languages and in what places their speache beginnethe to alter.”1 White and Harriot had similar responsibilities for describing Ossomocomuck’s people in paintings and in words to edify voyage sponsors like Sir Walter Raleigh and a broader audience of prospective travelers. In doing so, they would decipher the significance of Native bodies for their audiences, translating the sounds of Native tongues as well as the marks “pownced”—that is, tattooed—on Native bodies. The two were closely linked for English observers: how foreign people

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communicated was a crucial question for colonial projects, whether in writing, speech, body language, or—as in the case of tattoos—something that might blur those categories. First published in 1588 as A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and again, two years later, with lavish illustrations based on White’s watercolors, Harriot’s account attempted to interpret Native tattoos, even while delimiting their potential as a communication system.2 While one might expect early English travelers to dismiss the cultural productions of Native American societies as unimportant or meaningless, chroniclers like Harriot and White made complex, albeit ambivalent, investigations into Algonquian tattoos. As Katherine Dauge-Roth has explained, early modern Europeans drew on a wide-ranging vocabulary with “semantic reach” in describing marks made on skin.3 They did so in ways that generated new interpretations—and that, by their very nature as metaphors and comparisons, urged “the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference.”4 White and Harriot were uncertain of how to regard tattoos—whether as writing, as art, as religious expression, as signatures, as heraldry, or as military insignia—and therefore of how to value them. They were, however, quite sure that tattoos were significant, even as they regarded that significance in divergent, often equivocal ways. Tattooed Algonquians, with their meaningful marks, destabilized an English worldview that presumed a dichotomy between people who read and people who were meant to be read.5 Tattoos, as some anthropologists have argued, demand to be read, particularly by those outside of the bearer’s circle of close family and friends. Alfred Gell explains that tattooing “is always a registration of an external social milieu,” noting that “style in self-presentation presupposes a degree of intersubjective ‘otherness’ which is equally inconsistent with solitude, and with a social universe constituted wholly of intimates.”6 Algonquians, then, were marked with mysterious characters that invited reading and in which the English lacked literacy—prompting colonial observers to both assert their reading expertise in tattooed “language” and sometimes to disavow the interpretative qualities of tattoos entirely. Tattooing sparked conversations among and between European and Native societies about language, communication, and meaning. As a communication system written on and carried within the body, tattooing concretely linked early modern travelers’ efforts to interpret body modifications and to translate unfamiliar languages. A close consideration of the images and texts produced by each of the expedition members, as well as subsequent interpretations of their work, demonstrates that early English colonists saw Native societies of the Carolina coast as possessing complex media forms that, they concluded, were analogous— but not equivalent to—their own alphabetic script. In doing so, they compared Native forms to English alphabetic writing and—fearing that European systems were inadequate to interpret these bodily manuscripts—attempted to gain linguistic power over them, while still insisting that they were inferior.

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In cross-cultural encounters, judgments about the intentions, capabilities, and cultures of strangers might start at the surface of their bodies.7 For early modern Europeans, knowing where, exactly, one was in the world meant systematic mapping of people as well as physical landmarks. Dress, gesture, hairstyles, and bodily adornment could tell you where you were and what to expect: who belonged to which nation and who had potential for violence or alliance. Given the space limitations and expenses faced by exploratory voyages, the inclusion of artists might seem like a luxury. But artists were crucial for recording information that was more clearly documented in images than in writing, such as the appearance of foreign bodies. Art and text complemented each other in early modern accounts, seemingly providing both knowledge acquired ad vivum (from life) and interpretations. Regardless of such presumed dichotomies between visual “fact” and writerly inventiveness, both Harriot and White were making interpretative choices about the stories and images they conveyed, shaped by their own epistemologies and colonial goals. Their works need to be approached with the same cautions as other ethnographic mappings, with the understanding that they reveal as much or more about what the English expected or hoped to see as they do about the lived experiences of coastal Carolina Algonquians. Harriot and White’s records tell us something about Indigenous practice and thought but much more about English ideas about writing, reading, and the challenges of navigating the human landscape of the Outer Banks. Body modifications showed what people valued enough to change and how they wished to be perceived by others. Travelers gave special scrutiny to marks within the skin—what sixteenth-century English instructions had called “the figures and shapes on men and woeman”—because such marks signaled commitments that were worth both physical pain and permanent alteration.8 They were also “consciously assumed markers” of self-presentation that seemed harder to falsify or misrepresent than clothing that might be taken off or paint that might be washed away.9 To European eyes, Indigenous tattooing required not just description but possible translation. Studying bodily signs was important not only for newcomers but for Natives as well. English explorers felt certain that Native Americans were paying attention to their bodies and clothing. Harriot described the expedition’s arrival as follows: “Wee came vnto a Good bigg yland, the Inhabitante therof as soone as they saw vs began to make a great an horrible crye, as people which neuer befoer had seene men apparelled like vs. . . . Suche was our arriuall into the parte of the worlde, which we call Virginia, the stature of bodye of wich people, theyr attire, and maneer of lyuinge . . . I will particullerlye declare vnto yow.”10 While the Carolina Algonquian communities who met White, Harriot, and the other Englishmen in 1585 had, in fact, probably seen men “apparelled like” the English—Europeans had coasted the region for the previous sixty years—they were likely interested in the Englishmen’s “stature of bodye,” their hairstyles

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(lacking the asymmetrical scalp locks and topknots adult Algonquian men usually wore), and their pox scars. One of the voyage leaders, Arthur Barlowe, imputed Native interest in his crew members’ bodies to their differences in skin tone: “They wondred mervelously when we were amongest them, at the whitenes of our skinnes, ever coveting to touch our breastes, and to view the same.”11 What Barlowe understood as wonder at “whitenes” may have been an investigation of English bodies for identifying marks, with Algonquians looking for information in and underneath European clothing. Cross-cultural encounters can be thought of as a process of translation on a number of levels—through not only the obvious efforts to learn what the other person is saying but also the transformation of the unfamiliar into something recognizable and therefore legible (with the inevitable erasures and losses that entails). It is critical not to inadvertently reinscribe such erasures by overdrawing the comparisons between Indigenous tattoos and alphabetic scripts, yet it is necessary to explore the parallels that the English themselves drew between such practices in order to more fully understand their worldview and the ways they interpreted Native American societies. While this essay is narrowly focused on European perceptions of Native tattooing, Native societies also interpreted and deployed tattooing in a variety of ways, often to perform symbolically powerful, communicative work within and between human communities, as well as with other-than-human or supernatural beings.12 Significant differences between communities in the gendered and status-based ways that tattoos were used would have required translation and interpretation in inter-Indigenous relations as well as in interactions between Natives and Atlantic newcomers. As Eric Cheyfitz argues, “Translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization,” deploying metaphor to interpret foreignness. Controlling language—even defining what forms it could take—was crucial in the contest for linguistic, cultural, and political power.13 Translation should here be understood, therefore, as both an expansive concept referring to the ability to decode or decipher the information in body modifications as well as a more precise usage referring to instances when early modern English treated tattoos as written sign systems that could be interpreted. Studies of the role of literacy in encounters between Indigenous and colonizing societies have traditionally emphasized the European introduction of alphabetic writing and its subsequent impact on Native knowledge and communication systems.14 For decades, such studies often assumed a clear division between literate Europeans and the “primary oral cultures” of Native people; they argued that colonists rejected or overlooked Native media forms entirely, attempting to impose their own systems of writing and reading. Yet many colonial authors and artists showed great interest in understanding Native media systems, like tattooing, even as these accounts attempted to circumscribe and deploy that knowledge for their own purposes. Engaging with European efforts

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to document and interpret Indigenous sign systems ought, therefore, to reframe our understandings of the “literacy encounter” in North America as mutual and multivalent: a process inflected on both sides by what Richard White terms “creative misunderstandings” rather than a unilateral colonial imposition.15 There is growing acknowledgment of the “multi-media literacy” of early America, where “other-than-text” communication systems operated alongside and among text in colonial spaces.16 As “marks made upon a material base for the purpose of recording, storing, and communicating information,” tattoos, along with other Indigenous sign systems, like wampum, winter counts, and khipu, could be considered literacies.17 Native Americans, counter to assumptions that they had no technologies for recording or conveying information other than well-developed oral tradition, possessed a variety of Indigenous sign systems that shaped cross-cultural communications and European intellectual history.18 Of the seventy-five extant watercolors by White, four are portraits of tattooed elite Algonquian women who lived in the communities surrounding Pamlico Sound. They are prominently marked with dotted and striped patterns on their faces, legs, and arms, with differences that likely reflected regional or personal variations (fig. 1.1).19 None of White’s individual portraits of elite Algonquian men definitively depict tattoos, although the men have other, more transitory markings.20 In one of White’s best-known paintings, a portrait of a male werowance (or chief), White’s caption makes clear that the man’s elaborate costuming is temporary: “The manner of their attire and painting them selues when they goe to their generall huntings, or at their solemne feasts.”21 White’s depiction of coastal Algonquian tattooing as practiced in a distinctly gendered manner is corroborated by other English accounts. John Smith at Jamestown observes “their women, some have their legs, hands, breasts and face cunningly imbrodered with divers workes,” while George Percy similarly writes in 1607 that “the women kinde in this Countrey doth pounce and race their bodies . . . with a sharpe Iron, which makes a stampe in curious knots.”22 Percy goes on to describe Algonquians as ornamented “with artificiall knots of sundry lively colours, very beautifull and pleasing to the eye, in a braver fashion than they in the West Indies.”23 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, “bravery” often referred to embellishment or adornment, sometimes with connotations of ostentatiousness but also used to refer to something legitimately valuable. Percy’s positive assessment of Algonquian tattooing as “beautifull and pleasing”—and his evaluation of how it compared to body ornamentation he had viewed in the West Indies—demonstrate that White and Harriot were not the only colonial promoters treating tattooing as a crucial source of information. Significant differences appear between White’s images and the engravings created a few years later by Theodore de Bry for the illustrated Report. While White’s portraits focused on tattooing among elite women, de Bry’s engravings showed men and women alike with extensive designs that are, indeed, far more

Fig. 1.1  John White, Algonquian woman with extensive tattooing on her face, arms, and legs, identified as “one of the wives of Wingina,” the chief ruler of Roanoke, ca. 1584. Watercolor over graphite. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

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numerous than in the paintings. This heightened emphasis on tattoos resulted, in part, from the medium; engraving highlights line and tactility, therefore potentially conflating tattoos, body paint, and other marks.24 But prolific tattoos should also be understood as part of de Bry’s choices in translating White’s images for a much wider audience. While White’s portfolio likely circulated among members of Raleigh’s circle, the engravings made by de Bry’s workshop were immensely popular and distributed across Europe in the multivolume set America.25 These images were not ad vivum but rather carefully edited promotional materials. In the Report, tattoos on Algonquian bodies demonstrate a sophisticated system of social status, as well as the apparent leisure to create detailed adornment. Harriot reports that different tattoo styles could distinguish people from various communities around Pamlico Sound. “Their foreheads, cheeks, chynne, armes and leggs are pownced,” he writes about the elite women of Secotan, “About their necks they wear a chaine, ether pricked or paynted.”26 Yet in other towns such as Dasemunkepeuc, the women, while “attired, and pownced, in suche sorte as the woemen of Roanoac are,” are different in appearance because they do not have “their thighes painted with small pricks.”27 The engravings in the Report show many Algonquians as tattooed, thus depicting New World inhabitants as highly ornamented and in possession of distinctive sign systems. The English found New World tattoos significant in part because Britain had its own Indigenous practices of tattooing. Late sixteenth-century English observers drew two major parallels to Native practices: the tattoos supposedly borne by ancient Britons, particularly the Picts, and the contemporary tattoos available at pilgrimage sites throughout Europe and the Middle East, especially Jerusalem. Pilgrims to the Holy Land could be tattooed with a Jerusalem cross to commemorate their pious journey.28 Many hoped that the tattoos would provide them safe passage on their return voyages. Pilgrimage tattoos, signs of affiliation and accomplishment, were a concept readily applied to interpreting Native markings. English advocates of colonization also drew frequent comparisons between the tattoos of Native Americans and those of the ancient Picts.29 These analogies suggested a chronological continuum between the history of the British Isles and the future of the New World. To English eyes, these comparisons were encouraging: just as Romans had brought civilization to barbaric Picts, so too might Native Americans be brought such benefits by the Picts’ own descendants. As Karen Kupperman argues, “Reports of graded status markers in badges, body painting, and tattooing were reassuring [to potential colonists] because they indicated impressively sophisticated social and communal distinctions and an orderly society.”30 While the actual extent of tattooing among the Picts is debatable, British writers of the late sixteenth century believed it was one of their primary characteristics, citing Roman accounts. In William Camden’s Britannia, published

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in Latin in 1586 and then in English in 1610, the Picts are described as deriving “a name drawne even from their bodies, for that by the artificiall pricking therein of small holes with a needle, the workman wringing out the juice of greene grasse, encloseth the same within, that their Nobilitie and Gentry thus spotted, may carrie these starres about them, in their painted pownced limmes, as badges to be knowen by.”31 The frontispiece to John Speed’s 1611 Historie of Great Britaine has at its center an ancient “Britaine” with tattooing across his chest, while the text refers to the “artificiall incisions of sundry forms” worn by Britain’s “Barbarians.” “Neither do these sauage Nations repute any thing a greater testimonie of their patience,” Speed writes, “then by such durable skars to make their lims drinke in much painting and colour. These skarres by Tertullian are tearmed Britannorum stigmata, The Britaines markes.”32 Native tattoos, in their resemblance to “Britaines markes,” could make Indigenous Americans seem familiar rather than exotic. In the illustrated edition of the Report, the connection was made explicit; the main text, with its images of Algonquians, is followed by an appendix about “the Pictes which in the olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne.” De Bry, the illustrator and publisher, writes: “The painter of whom I have had the first [images] of the Inhabitans of Virginia, giue my allso thees [images of Picts] . . . for to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia.”33 Indeed, the comparison was intended to favor the Algonquians rather than the Picts. If the Picts, depicted in the Report as both violent and lacking in the markings of class and gender that distinguished the Algonquians, had been brought to “civilization” by Roman conquest, the work hinted, how much more easily might the Native peoples of America be “improved” by the Picts’ own descendants. In the Report, the Picts visually read as far more barbaric than the Algonquians. They wear no clothing: the Pictish man has only a sword belt, while he grasps both a spear and a severed head (fig. 1.2).34 Their body art, rather than the geometric or abstract tattoos shown on Natives, is expansively pictorial. Images of owls, lions, “monstreus face[s],” stars, and flowers cover the Picts from neck to feet in de Bry’s engravings.35 In the Report, Picts lack elements of civility, such as clothing, while they are profuse in tattoos and tools of violence. Native Americans, on the other hand, are conspicuously not shown at war, and their elaborate tattoos are accompanied by equally elaborate clothing differing by gender, season, and social role. This contrast could have suggested to readers that New World residents were more civilized, perhaps, than their own ancestors. Pictish markings are itemized in the text rather than explained or translated in the manner of Algonquian tattoos. This absence of explanation suggests several interpretative possibilities: the significance of Pictish tattooing might have seemed so apparent as to obviate the need for translation, or it might have signaled that the marks communicated very little at all. Meaningless ornament,

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Fig. 1.2  Engraving by Theodore de Bry, after a watercolor by John White, “The true picture of one Picte,” 1590. From Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.

the text implies, may be the more truly savage in that it does not perform the same useful tasks of social organization and differentiation that Harriot ascribes to Algonquian tattoos. The intent behind the Report’s discussion of both societies also differed: the commentary on Algonquians held practical implications for potential colonists, while that on the Picts drew historical and metaphorical connections. Harriot describes tattoos with language that conveys their significance and associates them with ideas about art, fashion, and, most importantly, writing. He explains that the women of Secotan, for example, have “their foreheads, cheeks, chynne,” and limbs “pownced.”36 Other sixteenth-century European accounts describe peoples of the Eastern Seaboard as being “painted” or “pricked,” with skins “inlaid in a strange fashion,” covered in “curious knots” or “antique work.”37 Pouncing, pricking, and rasing were all common English terms for tattooing until the late eighteenth century, as were pinking, listing, cutting, engraving, and embroidering. Juliet Fleming notes that “pounce,” in particular, was “associated with writing as well as with face-painting” and could refer to “powder used to . . . transfer embroidery designs through a perforated pattern, or prepare parchment to receive writing.”38

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By describing tattooing as pouncing or engraving, English “early modern vocabularies of writing and tattooing actually overlap[ped].”39 To “rase” or “raze” could mean both to erase by scraping or to mark by scratching or cutting. Peter Martyr, in reference to the supposed ease of converting Natives of the Americas, had claimed they were “lyke as rased or vnpaynted tables . . . apte to receaue what formes soo euer are fyrst drawen theron by the hande of the paynter.”40 Imagining Native America as tabula rasa—an unpainted surface that might be easily written upon to suit new arrivals—was crucial for promoters of colonization. Yet Martyr’s analogy insisted that Europeans were the hands doing the marking: how, then, might such newcomers interpret the tattooed evidence that Native peoples were perfectly capable of scripting themselves? Both European and Native cultures attributed great significance to the material properties of inscribed objects.41 Native media forms, especially tattoos, were enmeshed in the particularities of their material, embodied existence; full communication of a mark’s message often required an individual’s physical presence and verbal explanation. Neither did the early modern European book treat information as fully abstracted. While it made knowledge portable and exchangeable, the book was not a disembodied text: the location and materiality of writing mattered, and the page was not its only location. Rather than denying or ignoring the physical nature of a written-upon item, Elizabethan England paid close attention to its meaning. As Fleming argues, settings “where matter [appeared] to bind thought” were common, with, for example, inscriptions ascribing particular intent to the items on which they appeared.42 Such ideas meant that English newcomers to the Americas might potentially grant the same logics of communication to Native practices—even as this apparent similarity of practices may have encouraged greater misinterpretation rather than less. Page and skin were suggestively blurred at several moments during the expedition’s meetings with Algonquian communities. In one incident, Harriot reports that he had attempted to explain the Bible, with this result: “And although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of anie such vertue . . . but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke ouer all their bodie with it; to shewe their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.”43 While insisting that his listeners understood that the contents of the book, not the object itself, was what was valuable, Harriot simultaneously describes their efforts to transfer powerful communications from paper to flesh, highlighting skin “as a writing surface on which ideas are enmeshed in matter,” in Fleming’s words.44 The story might have reminded readers of Native propensities for inscribing knowledge within the surface of the skin. In his observations, Harriot implies the need for prospective colonists to be familiar with differences in Native tattooing and bodily appearance so that they can distinguish people by geographic and political regions. The Report therefore

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Fig. 1.3  Engraving by Theodore de Bry, after a watercolor by John White, “The Marckes of sundrye of the Cheif mene of Virginia,” 1590. From Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.

functioned not only as a solicitation to colonization but also as something of a diplomatic brief. While the majority of readers would never visit the Carolinas in person, potential colonists may have studied the text to learn about the communities they might encounter—and in doing so, sidestepping the direct engagements with Native informants that allowed Harriot and White to produce their accounts in the first place. By enabling long-distance readings of foreign bodies, the Report muted some of the intensity of first-hand encounters. Attentive audiences might have seen the Report as a key to visually differentiate between peoples with quite different behaviors, politics, and intentions toward colonists—without having to risk engaging them directly. The final image of an Algonquian in the Report, “The Marckes of sundrye of the Chief mene of Virginia,” makes explicit the claim that tattoos could be a Native communication system that Europeans might learn to translate (fig. 1.3). This engraving has no parallel in White’s extant watercolors (although de Bry’s workshop may have worked from a now-lost original), and it operates quite differently from them: rather than a portrait of an individual from a specific village, this illustration functions as a vocabulary list, indexing tattoos to place and to social group.45 A male figure stands with his back to the viewer, leaning on his

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bow in his left hand and loosely holding two arrows in his right. An abstract design of two crossed triangular points is prominently marked on his upper back. Harriot writes that such marks were “rased” on men’s backs “wherby yt may be knowen what Princes subiects they bee, or of what place they haue their originall. For which cause we haue set downe those marks in this figure, and haue annexed the names of the places, that they might more easelye be discerned.”46 The engraving also contains, distributed across the plane of the image, a schema or map of seven different marks that Harriot claims to link to various chiefs among the coastal Algonquians. For example, Harriot explains, “The marke which is expressed by A belongeth tho Wingino, the cheefe lorde of Roanoac. That which hath B is the marke of Wingino his sisters husband.” He groups C and D with leaders of Secotan, and E, F, and G with “certaine cheefe men” in Pomeiooc and Aquascogoc.47 This image differs significantly from others in the Report. Throughout Harriot’s text, women from different communities are distinguished by the bodily location of their tattoos (whether on their calves, arms, or faces). This illustration alone focuses on the style and imagery of the tattoos, and it does so in order to determine men’s social affiliations. Although Harriot pinpoints stylistic choices as significant distinctions, he makes no comment on why specific marks represent different “Princes”—leaving the pictographic content, in that sense, untranslated. This decision treats the “marckes” as abstract signs, invisible in some of the same ways that the shape and form of alphabetic letters become invisible to their users, their design subsumed within their meaning. Individual agency in choosing tattoos is muted in Harriot’s passive-voice descriptions: those who are tattooed “have marks rased,” possibly as an imposition by the elites whose “subiects they bee.” Such a claim would have strengthened the Report’s assertion of orderly society among Algonquians, demonstrating the power of their rulers to compel the remaking of their subjects’ bodies. Harriot also decouples tattooing from possible linkages with heathenism, claiming the practice was an “industrie . . . which . . . hath god indued them withal although they be verye simple, and rude.”48 “Most thinges they sawe with vs,” he writes, including “bookes, writing and reading . . . were so straunge vnto them . . . that they thought they were rather the works of gods then of men, or at the leastwise they had bin giuen and taught vs of the gods.” Yet even while outlining a comforting narrative to his readers about the impressiveness of European technologies, Harriot suggests that Native peoples, too, might possess God-granted (and presumably therefore appropriate) technologies.49 Harriot’s implied claim to have accurately acquired the ability to translate this Algonquian textual form must be approached, of course, with doubt, since the gaps in his translation abilities are noted at other points. He writes, for example, that for “want of perfect vtterance in their language,” he is unable to explain Christian concepts fully to his Native hosts, a rare acknowledgment

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of the linguistic and cultural gaps that early encounters struggled to bridge. 50 Frequently, however, Harriot’s tone is authoritative, telling readers how to understand “the naturall inhabitants” of the Carolinas by dress, manners, and their “marckes.” Certainly, coastal Algonquian men and women chose tattoos—or had tattoos chosen by their communities—that identified them both personally and collectively: as members of a family or kin network, as affiliates of a religious society, as citizens of a polity, as representatives of a certain social class, or as survivors of particular life transitions, like warfare or childbirth. Yet those choices were, in all likelihood, largely opaque to early English investigators. The assertion that White’s images were “counterfeited according to the truth” (in the contemporary sense of “counterfeit” as closely imitating and accurately portraying by an image), as well as such clear pronouncements by Harriot, belied the inherently interpretative nature of their translations.51 The “Marckes” image and Harriot’s accompanying text likely did derive from direct observations, yet the decision to emphasize men’s tattoos—as clear signs of their allegiances—over those of women may have been heightened by a tendency to regard male Indigenous bodies as assumed political subjects and therefore as crucial objects of translation. Understanding the political allegiances of Native men may have driven the creation of the “Marckes” plate, yet ultimately White’s paintings, de Bry’s engravings, and Harriot’s writings tell us less about the significant information embedded in Native tattoos than that they were significant to European observers. For English advocates of colonization, tattoos represented both a barbaric manner of bodily ornamentation and a sophisticated signal of hierarchies among Native Americans and their own ancestors; “civility” was a matter of context. These early observers’ assessments of Indigenous tattoos were shaped by divergent impulses to highlight the difference of Native societies while assuring their readers and sponsors that cultural commonalities would smooth the way for colonization. In comparing tattoos to alphabetic scripts or acknowledging their communication potential, European observers were assessing commonalities, although not necessarily asserting equality. Efforts to interpret Native sign systems were not a full embrace of those systems but rather an engagement with how those systems might prove useful for colonial efforts. In turn, those systems changed and relativized European understandings of their own writing systems. Cross-cultural attempts to interpret unfamiliar literacies could spark creative, syncretic responses in early America. Harriot, inspired by his interactions with Algonquian speakers and Algonquian textual forms, was the first English scholar to devise a nonalphabetic attempt at a universal script. He developed a phonetic writing system that, he hoped, could represent the sounds of any language. It was, he wrote, “an vniversall Alphabet” that could express “the lively image of mans voyce in what language soeuer” and was inspired by “occasion to seeke for fit letters to expresse the Virginian speche.”52

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Harriot’s development of a phonetic script was a response to the inadequacies of the Roman alphabet to encompass the sounds of Algonquian languages—and an idea that may have been inspired by seeing Algonquian pictographs and tattoos as alternative textual practices. While the script’s characters do not resemble the tattoo designs recorded by White or de Bry, the cross-cultural motivation for their creation and the foreignness of the marks’ appearance may have been linked. In addition to the alphabet, Harriot is thought to have produced an English-Algonquian dictionary, since lost. His role in the colonial project included not only learning to speak and translate languages but crafting materials that others might use to do the same. An unattributed manuscript titled “Virginia: A Vocabulary with severall Phrases of Speech in Virginia,” catalogued in the Sion College library, was likely authored by Harriot—but it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.53 While Michael Gaudio argues that Harriot’s and de Bry’s productions envisioned Algonquians as “lost in their orality,” the Report’s attentiveness to Native communication systems suggests instead an effort to find interpretative commonalities. Harriot’s design of a universal alphabet could be understood as the rescue of lost Algonquians through the bestowal of writing, but it might also be seen as a rescue of lost colonists from an alphabet inadequate for the transcription of the Algonquian language. If “Marckes of sundry of the Cheif mene of Virginia” “stages a writing lesson upon the body of an American Indian,” as Gaudio claims, it is a writing lesson for Europeans and Natives alike.54 This American “writing lesson” meant that the English viewed Native media forms not necessarily as commensurate with European technologies of alphabetic writing and the codex but rather as comparable: analogous but not equivalent. European scholars of the era tended to discuss languages and communication through a religiously inflected lens, emphasizing the failure and incompleteness of all contemporary languages compared to the divine, universal tongue originally available to humanity. Tattoos, then, could have been contemplated by Europeans as a flawed but comparable system for recording and transmitting knowledge. Harriot could simultaneously argue that Algonquians did not possess “letters . . . to keepe recordes of the particularities of times past” while carefully translating the implications of their “marckes.”55 Though his conclusions presumed a hierarchy that valued alphabetic forms more than other means of communication, they, in many ways, echo the challenge found in contemporary efforts to describe Indigenous media systems. As Andrew Newman argues, “writing” may be too narrow a conceptual lens to fully encompass Native signs, constraining our ability to comprehend systems that operate beyond or outside of its forms.56 Harriot’s assertion that Algonquians possessed no “bookes, writing [or] reading” and his simultaneous insistence on reading and translating

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tattoos might seem contradictory, yet both ideas were crucial conceits in rationalizing and performing English colonization.57 Reading against the grain of colonial presumptions, however, might point to a deeper truth in his conclusions: the people of the Outer Banks did not need books to engrave stories and signs into their lives. Notes 1. David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 52, 54. 2. Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report was first published in 1588 as an unillustrated tract. It was also printed in 1590 in Frankfurt by Theodore de Bry as the first part of his monumental America, in an illustrated edition available in several languages. Harriot wrote explanatory notes to accompany the illustrations for the de Bry edition, in addition to his original text. When quoting the Report or Harriot’s captions for the America engravings, I cite the editions in the document collection by Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, while de Bry’s own textual commentary is cited from Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (New York: Dover, 1972). When discussing the John White watercolors in the chapter, the image titles I use in the text are taken from White’s own captions, but I cite the images by the plate numbers and titles used in Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 3. Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 4. 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31. 5. For the formulation of “people who are meant to be read,” see Miles P. Grier, “Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination,” in Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 2015), 193–220. 6. Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 37, 298, respectively. 7. See Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019). 8. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 52, 54. 9. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 43. For colonial fears of false appearance, see Ann M. Little, “‘Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an Englishman’s Coat On!’ Cultural Cross-Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620–1760,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2001): 238–73. 10. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 414–15. See also Michael Leroy Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 33. 11. Richard Hakluyt [the younger], The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation . . . (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589), 732. 12. Indigenous tattoos enacted cultural work both through the chosen iconography and the act of tattooing, which took ritualized form in both religious and secular ceremonies. Tattooing’s historic functions varied widely between societies, from signaling military honors to accessing sacred power, to enabling the performance of gender roles. While direct archaeological evidence for tattooing can be sparse, items found in several southeastern North American sites are thought to be parts of tattooing bundles: needles, pigments, scrapers, and stamps. Human figurines at several sites show ornamentation analogous to the tattooing depicted on southeastern Native people in early European sources. See Benjamin A. Steere, “Swift Creek Paddle Designs as Tattoos: Ethnographic Insights on Prehistoric Body Decoration and Material Culture,” in Drawing with Great Needles, ed. Aaron Deter-Wolf and Carol Diaz-Granados (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 73–94, and Aaron DeterWolf, “Needle in a Haystack: Examining the Archaeological Evidence for Prehistorical

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Tattooing,” in Deter-Wolf and Diaz-Granados, Drawing with Great Needles, 43–72. 13. Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 104. 14. For traditional dichotomies between “primary oral cultures” and literate cultures (as defined by alphabetic writing and print), see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2002). Exclusive attention to Native reception can result in a lopsided picture, presenting Native actors as puzzled or awed by European technologies while neglecting similar European reactions. See James Axtell, “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 300–309. For a critique of assumptions that Natives attributed magical properties to European writing, see Peter Wogan, “Perceptions of European Literacy in Early Contact Situations,” Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 407–29. 15. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). White’s concept of “creative misunderstandings” argues that Native and European communities often attempted to act in ways that they thought aligned with the cultural premises of the other, drawing on real or perceived congruences to create new meanings and new practices. 16. On “multi-media literacy” and “otherthan-text,” see Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, introduction to Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, ed. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 2. For additional reconsiderations of Indigenous literacies, see Germaine Warkentin, “In Search of ‘The Word of the Other’: Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada,” Book History 2 (1999): 1–27. For a critique of expanding definitions of writing and literacy to encompass Indigenous media, see Andrew Newman, “Early Americanist Grammatology: Definitions of Writing and Literacy,” in Cohen and Glover, Colonial Mediascapes, 76–98. 17. Warkentin, “In Search of ‘The Word of the Other,’” 3. Warkentin notes that wampum, as a sign system, is distinguished from alphabetic writing by its “character as process rather than as representation,” since it requires performance by a speaker to communicate its

full message (7). Similarly, tattoos often require an oral performance or interpretation by the bearer in order to fully activate their significance. This acknowledgment conflicts with assessments of writing systems that define written signs as being interpretable without intervention. Such models may unnecessarily privilege alphabetic systems while overlooking the complex communicative work done by systems that employ both text and rhetoric. 18. See Sarah Rivett, “Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: The Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (October 2014): 549–88. Similar cross-cultural engagements between writing and tattooing have also occurred outside of North America, particularly in the Pacific. See Simon Schaffer, “‘On Seeing Me Write’: Inscription Devices in the South Seas,” Representations 97, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 90–122; Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Mˉaori, and the Question of the Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 19. See Sloan, New World, 130–31, plates 14, 16, 18, and 22, and the British Museum collection online: http://‌bit‌.ly‌/1BzPFKh. Tattooing is also visible in White’s paintings of a Timucuan man and woman and an Inuk woman (plates 19, 20, 36), which I do not discuss here. 20. Men in some group images may have tattoos. See marks on the backs of male figures at the lower left and lower right in the image titled “A festive dance,” in Sloan, New World, 116–17, plate 11. While blurred due to water damage, these marks do resemble the arrowshaped tattoos depicted in “Marckes of sundrye of the Cheif mene of Virginia,” a de Bry engraving discussed later. 21. “An Indian werowance, or chief, painted for a great solemn gathering,” in Sloan, New World, 120–21, plate 13, and the British Museum collection online: http://‌bit‌.ly‌/1BzQG C0. For the artistic and epistemological significance of White’s watercolors, see Michael E. Harkin, “John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 7 (2011): 216–45. Harriot’s description of the “weroan or great

“Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted” Lorde” for de Bry’s edition suggests that “they ether pownes [pounce], or paynt” their bodies in a manner different than that of “inhabitantz of Florida,” evidence both for male tattooing and for close English attention to regional bodily differences. Harriot also mentions ritual bleeding or cupping that might cause marks: “Vnder their brests about their bellyes appeir certayne spotts, whear they vse to lett them selues bloode, when they are sicke.” Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 441. 22. George Percy, “Discourse” (1606), in Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America, ed. James Horn (New York: Literary Classics of the United States), 931; John Smith, “The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles” (1624), in Horn, Captain John Smith, 283. On the significance of women’s tattooing in several southeastern societies, see David H. Dye, “Snaring Life from the Stars and the Sun: Mississippian Tattooing and the Enduring Cycle of Life and Death,” in DeterWolf and Diaz-Granados, Drawing with Great Needles, 215–57. 23. Percy, “Discourse,” 926. As brother to Harriot’s patron, the earl of Northumberland, Percy would have likely studied Algonquian language with Harriot prior to his departure for Virginia in late 1606. See Vivian Salmon, “Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the Origins of Algonkian Linguistics,” in Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays, 1981–1994 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1996), 143–72, at 163. 24. On engraving as an early modern technology of empire, see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 25. Peter Stallybrass, “Admiranda narratio: A European Best Seller,” in Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Library at the Mariners’ Museum, 2007), 9–30. Quinn argues that White made as many as six copies of the portfolio, whether in full or with only selected images. The images held at the British Museum, he asserts, are one of those copies, and the archetypes are now no longer extant. Quinn’s basis for this argument is, in part, due to the inclusion of miscellaneous non-American images within the British

35

Museum portfolio, such as costume studies of Turks. See Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 392–98. 26. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 424. 27. Ibid., 420. 28. On Holy Land pilgrim tattooing, see Mordechay Lewy’s contribution to this volume and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 171–215. On tattooing at a pilgrimage site in Europe, see Guido Guerzoni, “Devotional Tattoos in Early Modern Italy,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 6 (2018): 119–36. The acceptability of tattooing within Christian practice was and remains contested. Tattoos imposed by Roman administrators, intended quite literally to stigmatize, were repurposed by some Christians under the Roman Empire as symbols of faith in the face of persecution. Conflicting interpretations of Biblical passages could be seen as authorizing or prohibiting bodily modification. See Mark Gustafson, “The Tattoo in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17–31, and C. P. Jones, “Stigma and Tattoo,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 1–16. 29. Joel Konrad, “‘Curiously and Most Exquisitely Painted’: Body Marking in British Thought and Experience, 1580–1800” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2011), 118. 30. Kupperman, Indians and English, 64. 31. William Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the ilands adioyning, out of the depth of antiquitie (London: [Printed at Eliot’s Court Press] impensis Georgii Bishop & Ioannis Norton, [1610]), 115. 32. John Speed, The history of Great Britaine under the conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London: [By John Beale] anno cum privilegio 1623 are to be sold by George Humble at the Whit horse in Popeshead Alley, [1623]), 167. 33. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 75. De Bry’s engravings of the Picts were likely based not only on White’s watercolors but also on images by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. See “A young daughter of the Picts,” attributed to or after Le Moyne, in Sloan, New World, 152, fig. 94, which corresponds with “The trvve picture of a yonge dowgter of the Pictes III,” in Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 80. 34. See Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 76, plate 1 in the appendix.

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35. Ibid., 76, 78. 36. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 424. 37. For European sources on Native tattooing, see Antoinette B. Wallace, “Native American Tattooing in the Protohistoric Southeast,” in Deter-Wolf and Diaz-Granados, Drawing with Great Needles, 1–42, at 6–8. 38. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001), 90. 39. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage, 22. 40. Richard Eden, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera [Peter Martyr], and Sebastian Münster, The first three English books on America. (?1511)– 1555 A.D.: Being chiefly translations, compilation, etc. by Richard Eden, ed. Edward Arber (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 106. 41. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 86. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 377. 44. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 83. The boundaries of book and body might also be violently undone. In an incident from King Philip’s War (1675–76), in what is now southern New England, the Algonquian assailants of one English colonist “rippe[d] him open and put his Bible in his Belly,” a gesture that conflated English religion and physical presence and rejected both. Colonists, in turn, described the conflict as one in which their bodies were being written upon in “bloody characters” by the hand of God—an image that made their skins a text and their bodies a book but that avoided acknowledging Native actors as those doing the writing. See Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998), 105, 100. 45. Quinn has argued that another copy of White’s watercolors, now lost, must have been made for de Bry in 1588 or 1589 as source material for his workshop’s engravings, but he does not explain his rationale for concluding that White introduced the changes seen in the de Bry engravings. The “Marckes” plate is clearly derived from another de Bry plate (that of “A weroan[ce] or great Lorde of Virginia”), which in turn is derived from an extant White watercolor (“An Indian werowance, or chief, painted for a great solemn gathering,” in Sloan,

New World, 120–21, plate 13). Yet the choice to create a schematic vocabulary list, rather than a portrait or group setting, sets the “Marckes” plate apart from all extant White watercolors. See Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 394. 46. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 443. 47. Ibid., 444. 48. Ibid., 443. 49. Ibid., 375–76. 50. Ibid., 375. On the “filled-in blanks” of language barriers in exploration narratives, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse, 22–51. Greenblatt argues, “Such conventions are almost never mere technical conveniences. If it was immensely difficult in sixteenth-century narratives to represent a language barrier, it is because embedded in the narrative convention of the period was a powerful, unspoken belief in the isomorphic relationship between language and reality” (28). Two Native interpreters, Manteo and Wanchese, played major roles in the English explorations and attempted settlement at Roanoke. Whether they might have supplied Harriot with information about the significance of tattoos or helped craft the “Marckes” plate remains to be explored. Michael Leroy Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange, 1584–1590,” Itinerario 24 (July 2000): 146–69. 51. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “counterfeit, v.,” 2nd ed. (1989), accessed March 1, 2021, https://‌www.oed.com, esp. definitions 7 and 9. 52. Salmon, “Thomas Harriot,” 145. Harriot’s use of phonemes, rather than letters, may be a result of his engagement with pictographic and semasiographic systems in the Americas. 53. Ibid., 158. 54. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage, 5. 55. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 373. 56. Newman also suggests that “during the colonial period the European concept of writing was more easily contained by indigenous categories than vice versa” (“Early Americanist Grammatology,” in Cohen and Glover, Colonial Mediascapes, 84–85). 57. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages, 375–76.

Chapter 2

Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes

Xiao Chen

A memorial submitted to the Qing emperor in Beijing on the fourth day of the sixth month of 1794 concerned the capture of a fugitive rebel in the frontier of Taiwan.1 By the time the eighty-three-year-old Qianlong emperor read this brief report, its subject, a criminal named Lin Lin, had already suffered the penalty of “imminent decapitation and exposure of the head [zhanjue xiaoshi].” A Han Chinese living in Taiwan, Lin was found guilty of participating in a major anti-Qing rebellion in 1786, allegedly killing two pro-Qing civilians and several soldiers. After being taken captive by Qing forces following the suppression of the rebellion, he managed to escape. What is unusual about this case is that Lin fled into Taiwan’s central mountain range (neishan), mingled with some Indigenous Taiwanese, and turned himself into a “raw savage.”2 The official reported to the throne that “we had examined that this criminal [who] wore long hair covering his body and bore tattoos all over his forehead.” Upon capture Lin confessed that he had come to know some “raw savages” and had learned their language. Until being recaptured, he seemed to be completely integrated into

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an Indigenous society and had obtained a fresh identity by adopting an Indigenous name and receiving tattoos on his face.3 On the one hand, this intriguing legal case epitomizes the Qing colonial discourse on the Indigenous Taiwanese, in which a “raw savage” was first and foremost identified by his (or her) skin markings. As I shall show in this chapter, Lin’s story confirms that skin marking remained a sharp dividing line in the Qing construction of Indigenous Taiwanese identity, whether in miscellaneous travel literature or official accounts. On the other hand, when seen in a comparative light, this case reminds us that the Chinese interest in using skin marking as a means of categorizing humans was not an a priori assumption. By comparing European and Chinese accounts of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, I bring these self-proclaimed “civilized” cultures into dialogue, revealing not only similarities but also key differences in the role of tattooing in Chinese and European representations of the Taiwanese during the early modern era. Most important, early modern Taiwan serves as a perfect case for such Sino-European comparison because it was subject to the colonial rules of three imperial powers: the Dutch (1624–62), the Spanish (1626–41), and the Qing (1683–1895). I argue that in their colonial encounters both the Chinese and the Europeans used skin-marking practices to construct the Indigenous Taiwanese as the foreign “other.” But the description and interpretation of skin markings played a more essential role in Chinese constructions of Indigenous Taiwanese alterity during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century; Europeans, in contrast, were more interested in interpreting human difference via skin color. This contrast has to do with how tattooing was interpreted in the Chinese and European observers’ home cultures. Finally, I suggest that encounters with Indigenous tattoos on the edge of the Qing Empire expanded the traditional Chinese understanding of skin marking by supplying “new” ethnographic knowledge. Encountering the “Other”: Skin Marking and Skin Color From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, many Chinese and European writings on the Indigenous Taiwanese used skin marking to demonstrate the exotic alterity of the Indigenes. Both European and Chinese travelers and officials commented on Indigenous skin markings, but extant evidence suggests that the latter were more captivated by this “barbarous” practice. Before the arrival of modern ethnographers in the late nineteenth century, the most thorough descriptions of Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking appeared in Chinese accounts. Ming and Qing authors (mostly Confucian scholar-officials) mentioned Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking in local gazettes, travelogues, and poems and even represented it in painting. Parallel to Chinese authors’ acute interest in Indigenous skin marking, European observers described Indigenous skin color as indexing the level of “civility” or “barbarism” of the Taiwanese.4

Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking

39

As the first to establish formal colonial rule in Taiwan, the Dutch produced the earliest known European reference to Indigenous Formosan skin marking.5 In 1623, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) sent two of its employees, Jacob Constant and Barend Pessaert, to Tayouan Bay (in south Taiwan, across from the Penghu/Pescadores Islands and near the coastline of the Fujian province) to investigate establishing a permanent stronghold on the island. Constant and Pessaert’s report to the company provides rich ethnographic detail. In a paragraph on the physical appearance of the people of Soulangh village, they observe that “some old people have their bodies painted and scorched with a hot iron from top to toe, which [we] have not noticed or perceived on any young or middle-aged persons. These have totally sound and smooth bodies.”6 In contrast to the “sound and smooth” bodies of the younger folk, the “painted and scorched” bodies of the older Indigenes were strange and unnatural to the Dutch. In similar terms, Moyne de Morgues, a French artist serving with the French expedition to Florida from 1562 to 1565, reports that the tattooed Timucua people were “astonished” by the “difference between the smoothness and softness of our bodies and theirs.”7 European observers contrasted “smooth” European bodies with those of Indigenes bearing elaborate skin markings to describe a cultural “other.” Europeans like le Moyne de Morgues seemed to care less about the specifics of tattooing (such as designs and meanings) and more about the integrity of the body. Constant and Pessaert’s 1623 report says nothing further on the skin marking of the Soulangh people, nor did they try to understand why skin marking remained exclusive to its senior members. In fact, among the great number of records generated by the Dutch during their forty-plus years in Formosa, this early account is the only reference to Indigenous skin marking I have found.8 The Dutch began to encounter the Indigenous Formosans in the 1620s, but the two other important accounts from this period, from the Dutch naval commander Cornelis Reyersen and the reverend Georgius Candidius, do not mention skin marking at all. Candidius was the first Dutch Protestant minister in Formosa and resided there for about eighteen months. He claimed to have visited many villages near the Zeeland Castle in Tayouan Bay, including Soulangh, which Constant and Pessaert had visited earlier, never mentioning any markings.9 It is worth considering, though, that during the early stage of this encounter, the Dutch held a generally positive view of the Indigenous Formosans. The Natives’ manner of speaking was praised as “charming, modest, slow, and full of grace, so that one on account of this would take them to be exceedingly wise men instead of savages, being full of virtue and modesty up to their gizzards.”10 Candidius likewise commended the Indigenes’ eloquence in discussing public matters: “I think Demosthenes himself could not have been more eloquent and more fluent with words.” He also praised the craftsmanship of the Formosan homes, remarking, “I have seen none finer and more beautifully built in all India.”11

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But for the Dutch, the Formosans still fell into the echelon of “barbarian” people, a view unanimously held by Reyersen, Candidius, Constant, and Passaert. This assessment corresponds to their continual references to “dark” skin color as signs of Indigenous otherness. Constant and Passaert praised the Indigenes for having “graceful and perfect figures, so that nature has not been ungenerous to them, except for their brownish body and skin which equals the Ternatean blackishness, although the young people have a lighter and more yellowish colour.” In another case, Constant and Passaert note, “The women are very chaste (as we have ascertained), not in the least inclined to whoredom, graceful and civil spoken, with a well-proportioned body and facial traits like our people, and a chestnut coloured skin.”12 Formosan skin is described as colored, signaling a deficiency all the more significant because of all the other similarities in behavior and “body and facial traits” between the Indigenes and Europeans. Skin color is identified as a threshold separating the exotic other from the Europeans. In contrast with their rare and brief remarks on Indigenous tattooing, the Dutch were quite focused on discerning the nuances of skin color: regarding skin color of Indigenes near Zeeland Castle, Candidius mentions that the men’s “colour is between black and brown, like most Indians, but not so black as the Caffirs” and that the women have a “colour being between brown and yellow.”13 Indigenous Taiwanese skin could also turn “white” in Dutch eyes. Historian Michael Keevak argues that in the early modern era, European color terms (including white) were evaluative rather than descriptive: “If the Chinese or Okinawans were described as white, it was a function of their affluence and their power and their apparent level of cultural sophistication.”14 Despite references to the dark skin color of some Indigenes, other contemporaneous Dutch accounts describe Indigenous Formosans as being “white.” In the Dutch journal Dagregisters Zeelandia, Lieutenant Thomas Pebel reported on January 23, 1643, that the Dutch stationed at the formerly Spanish-ruled Tamsuy (in northern Taiwan) were visited by a headman and his two sons from a nearby village called Kipandan. The Dutch record shows that the two parties exchanged gifts, and the Kipandans expressed their goodwill toward the Dutch. Perhaps because northern Formosa and its peoples were new to the Dutch (they had just taken the area from the Spanish fewer than six months earlier), Pebel commented on the appearance of the visitors: “These people are just as white as us and carry bows and arrows according to their custom.”15 As Keevak notes, it seems that in this case the Dutch linked the skin color of the Kipandan people with their level of friendliness. In another case in 1625, a Chinese translator working as a representative of the Dutch authorities informed the Dutch that the Lonckjouw people in southern Formosa were “the most civilized to be found on the whole of this island.” This is most likely because, as the translator reports, the Lonckjouw people were “well dressed . . . [and] the women wear skirts down to their ankles and cover up their breasts.” Based on this report, the Dutch judged them

Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking

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“to be more fair-skinned than those [from Sincan],” although this comment on skin color was made before the Dutch had any face-to-face contact with the Lonckjouw people!16 As Joan-Pau Rubiés reminds us, skin color mattered more than racial classification in this period because the former “suggested, by association, a particular level of civility” while the latter was “superficial and unsystematic.”17 Compared with the Dutch who recorded little on Indigenous skin marking, Chinese travelers and officials, overall, had much more to say about these practices. The Chinese accounts describe a wide variety of signs and figures tattooed on Indigenous Taiwanese bodies, evoking exoticness and alterity. Two examples from the early days of Qing colonial encounters with Indigenous Taiwanese exemplify this trend. In 1685, only two years after the Qing conquest of Taiwan, Lin Qianguang, a Qing official supervising the administration of dynastic schools (guanxue) in Taiwan, wrote Sketch of Taiwan (Taiwan jilue). Under the section on “customs,” Lin notes that the Indigenes struck him as “stubborn and stupid people,” traits initially manifested in their ignorance of ancestral worship and extended kinship relations, both of which were central to the practice of Confucianism. Lin then documents the Indigenes’ customs, including how they modified different parts of their body, including their hair, ears, teeth and skin: “Many barbarians [fan] . . . bear marks on their skin, either on arms or backs; some go to the extreme to have tattoos all over their bodies, and what they tattoo are the scripts of red barbarians [the Dutch].”18 Later Chinese accounts confirm the tattooing of “scripts of red barbarians” on Indigenous skin, these being either Dutch words or a romanization of native tongues made by Dutch missionaries.19 The Gazetteer of Taiwan Prefecture, first compiled in 1685, was the first official gazette of Taiwan authorized by the local government and also testifies to this practice.20 Compilers of the official gazette copied many descriptions of Indigenes from Lin’s Sketch of Taiwan, modifying them slightly to eliminate certain negative comments, such as the qualification “stubborn and stupid.” But the description of alien characters tattooed on bodies of Taiwanese barbarians remained prominent. In 1697, another Chinese official named Yu Yonghe spent about ten months in Taiwan on an official trip. Traveling from southwestern to northern Taiwan, Yu recorded his experience in the Small Sea Travel Diaries (Pihai jiyou) published in 1732.21 Supposedly based on Yu’s direct observations and mostly narrated in the first person, Small Sea Travel Diaries contains extensive references to tattooing practices by “indigenous barbarians [tufan].”22 Two days after he embarked on his trip north, Yu commented on the elaborate skin markings that he encountered: “All the carters of indigenous origin whom I saw bear tattoos all over their bodies; their backs had figures of spreading wings; from shoulder to belly, there were sharp diagonal marks resembling a fish net; figures of beheaded heads were marked on both arms, which looked terrifying.”23 This is the first place in the main narrative of Small Sea Travel Diaries that the author discusses the

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appearance of “indigenous barbarians.” Apparently, Indigenous skin markings caught the Chinese official’s attention and seem to have been prioritized over other features, such as the enormous number of iron bracelets that Indigenous wore “from wrist to elbow” and their “large [pierced] ears.”24 Indigenous skin markings have an enduring appeal for Yu throughout the rest of his journey: “The barbarians we saw this day were even more commonly tattooed, and their earlobes were nearly the size of bowls.” Fifteen days after he first mentioned Indigenous skin marking, on the twentieth-third of the fourth lunar month, Yu records that “the barbarian carters . . . [had] their chests and backs tattooed with a leopard figure.”25 In the latter half of Small Sea Travel Diaries, Yu mentions the mountain-dwelling Dou-wei-long-an people, who were “all valiant and strong.”26 Again, skin marking proves central to Yu’s construction of the identity of the mountain people: “As if not content with tattooing their bodies all over, they also tattoo their faces. They look utterly weird, like devils. They frequently sally forth to burn and loot and kill people.” He remarks that even Indigenous barbarians fled from the Dou-wei-long-an people, whom he simply dubs the “tattooed-faced men.”27 What did Indigenous Taiwanese skin markings mean to Yu? Deeply entrenched in Yu’s and other Confucian travel writers’ accounts of skin marking and other physical traits among Indigenous Taiwanese is what historian Emma Teng terms the “rhetoric of privation—the savage is constructed as backward and culturally inferior.” When properly ruled, however, the “savages” could also transform into imperial subjects. Teng notes that Yu was “on the whole sympathetic toward the indigenes,” proposing to “civilize” the “barbarians” with a “code of proper social behavior.”28 In considering the prospects of such a “civilizing process,” Yu drew an historical analogy between the Indigenous Taiwanese at the frontier of the Qing Empire and ancient “barbarians” in southeastern China. According to Yu, the Wu and Yue region (the present Zhejiang province in southeastern China), once inhabited by an ancient barbarian people who practiced “the customs of cutting the hair and tattooing the body,” was now transformed into a “flourishing center of [Confucian] learning,” thanks to the Chinese civilizing process.29 Just as Yu drew parallels between the Indigenous Taiwanese and the Wu and Yue peoples of ancient Chinese history, Antonio De Morga named the tattooed Bizayans in the Philippines the “Picti,” using a Roman term meaning “the painted people.”30 In his well-known work The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (first printed in 1609), De Morga, once a colonial official in the Philippines, captured Spanish curiosity about Indigenous tattooing: “The first island which the Spaniards conquered and settled was Sebu, where the conquest commenced, and was followed up in all the surrounding islands: these are inhabited by people natives [sic] of these same islands, who are named Bizayas, and by another name, Pintados (Picts); because the men of most importance, from their youth,

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tattoo the whole of their body; pricking it in the appointed places, and throwing over the blood certain black powders, which never come out.”31 Tattooing among the Bizayas, along with its technical details, was not only recorded but became a synonym for local inhabitants. In the eyes of the Spanish colonizers, tattoos remained essential to the identity of the Bizaya people under their rule. Significantly, the analogy evoked here between the newly encountered people in Asia and the ancient “barbarian” people in Roman times suggests a distancing in time and a “denial of coevalness denoting the Bizayas’ cultural inferiority.”32 “Head-Hunting Tattoos”: A Specter Haunting Colonial Rule Following the initial stage of encounter, after Europeans and Chinese forces had established formal colonial control in Taiwan, Indigenous skin marking found its way into Spanish and Chinese travelers’ writings in close association with head-hunting. In my research, I find that both Chinese and Spanish writers connected certain forms of Indigenous tattooing with head-hunting activities practiced among the Indigenes. The graphic accounts of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing themselves in celebration of successful head-hunting must have deeply shaped readers’ impressions toward the Indigenes in both past and present. This view of “head-hunting tattoos” was quite distinct from how tattooing was then understood in China and Europe respectively. I argue that the particular way that European and Chinese observers made sense of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing had to do with the fear of head-hunting as a particular threat to colonial order. But before we discuss this knowledge about Indigenous tattoos presented in early modern Chinese and European ethnographies, we must first briefly examine how tattooing was understood by early modern Chinese and Europeans in their home societies. In the orthodox tradition of imperial China, skin marking, along with bodily modification at large, had persistently been employed to identify “primitive” or marginalized people. As early as the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 BCE), when vassal states of the Zhou ruling house competed with each other for power, people in the remote Yue state, as mentioned above, were known for having tattooed bodies and short hair. Chinese records suggest that the phrase “cutting hair short and tattooing the body [duanfa wenshen]” long remained synonymous with the “barbarous” Yue people.33 In the early Song dynasty (960–1179), compilers of the official history of the previous Tang dynasty (618– 907) referred to several “miscellaneous barbarous peoples” in southern China as inhabitants of the places where tattooing or cutting marked their bodies. They listed people of the “embroidered feet,” of “the embroidered face,” and of the “carved forehead,” as well as the “pierced-nose people,” among others.34 In the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), a Confucian scholar-official named Qu Dajun described the tattooed Dan people, who resided on boats in the rivers of

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the Guangdong province and remained unregistered with the government, as “nonhuman.”35 Beyond ethnic minorities in imperial borderlands, tattoos were also associated with “socially” marginalized people. Elad Alyagon examines how the Song state used tattooing to keep army conscripts from fleeing. This practice, in turn, made “military tattoos . . . markers of a low social status, of convicts, refugees, the poor, the uncivilized, and other marginal social types.”36 Tattooing had also been used extensively as a state punishment since the Song dynasty. Those convicted of certain crimes would receive tattooed characters on their faces or arms. This monopolization of tattooing by the state made private tattooing a rebellious act.37 By the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Confucian scholar-officials voiced their hatred of tattooing, long associated with criminality—a situation quite similar to that of nineteenth century Europe.38 In early modern Europe, as many scholars have demonstrated, skin marking was not uncommon among Europeans both at home and abroad. Thus, in most contexts, there was no strong disapproval or prohibition against the practice. Not only had early modern Europeans inherited skin-marking traditions from antiquity—“notably the tattooing of prisoners, slaves, and soldiers”—but they also undertook a number of new skin-marking practices reflecting a burgeoning need to “express identity, profess belief, affirm truth, and assert authority.”39 These practices included colonial tattoos, pilgrim tattoos, devil’s marks, and divine stigmata. Katherine Dauge-Roth also mentions Queen Anne of Austria’s ladiesin-waiting, who refer to their lovers tattooing their beloveds’ names on their arms.40 All these cases suggest that skin marking remained far more ubiquitous and versatile in early modern Europe than in China. But criticism of skin marking (especially of non-European origins) did exist. Mairin Odle discusses cases in which Europeans tattooed by Native Americans later sought to remove them after returning to Europe.41 A seventeenth-century English writer discussed “ancient English inking customs” to “compare and slander the women of his age who painted and patched their faces.”42 These authors’ silence concerning contemporary European skin marking suggests that the practice was neither marginal nor unanimously disapproved. European and Chinese contact with Indigenous Taiwanese and their tattoos produced “new” ethnographical understandings of the meanings and functions of these specific tattoos, which were quite distinct from how tattoos were perceived in China and Europe respectively. Both European and Chinese visitors to Taiwan noticed the connection between Indigenous skin marking and the practice of head-hunting. They understood that an Indigenous warrior would tattoo his body after successfully cutting off a victim’s head. While for the Indigenes, head-hunting tattoos acknowledged personal bravery and honor, both Chinese and European observers spoke disapprovingly of them as reinforcing the barbarous image of the Indigenous Taiwanese and further illustrating their

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“otherness.” Indigenous skin marking was thus not only an exotic sight but also a warning sign and a threat to colonial order. Dominican missionary Jacinto Esquivel discusses head-hunting tattoos in his report published in 1632, six years after Spain had established its first formal colony in northern Taiwan. Intended to help the colonial government further its rule in Taiwan, Esquivel’s report is entitled “Memoria de las cosas pertenecientes al estado de la Isla Hermosa” (Record of affairs concerning Isla Hermosa).43 Esquivel, believed to be the first missionary preaching among the Indigenous people of northern Taiwan, stayed for three years before he left for missions in Japan.44 Different sources confirm that many Indigenous people living in northern Taiwan were well-versed in Spanish and that Esquivel himself displayed mastery of native tongues—even compiling grammar books for native languages—all of which strengthened his ability to obtain first-hand information.45 Among the pre-1800 accounts of the Formosa that I have examined so far, Esquivel’s report is the only European source that mentions the connection between head-hunting and skin marking among Formosans and is thus worth quoting at length: Description of the villages south of Tamsui The natives of Pantao are our friends; they are baptized while still infants. . . . Beyond Pantao there are many other native villages along the shore with whom we are neither friendly nor at enmity; we simply have no contact with them. The natives who live near Pantao are the opposite of those in Pantao; they go around head-hunting. . . . Before the Spaniards came, they were all cutting off each other’s heads and celebrating this with drunken feasts and masitanguitanguich. To honor the bravery of those who managed to cut heads, they would paint their necks, legs and arms. But later on, they realized how much trouble they caused their villages due to their treachery, and they no longer dare even to kill their fellow-villagers, considering this to be bad luck. Only the Cabalan natives still practice head-hunting. At harvest time, they hid along the path of the river and shot arrows to kill and then cut the heads of the natives of Tamsui who pass by on small boats . . . that carried the servant of the Commander of Tamsui and two other Spaniards. They rained arrows on them, which overwhelmed and rendered useless the muskets that they carried.46 The place inhabited by the Pantao people represented the southern borderland of Spanish rule in Taiwan, as the villages beyond Pantao had no contact with the Spanish. The Pantao people themselves did not practice head-hunting but their inimical neighbors did. It is unclear what “trouble” and “bad luck” refers to here or why the Indigenes quit head-hunting after the arrival of the Spanish. We may find some clues by looking at Dutch attitudes toward head-hunting in Formosa.

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When pro-Dutch villages were attacked by headhunters, the Dutch responded by launching retributive expeditions against head-hunting villages, razing houses and causing massive casualties among their inhabitants.47 In any case, Esquivel’s account suggests that head-hunting remained a threat to the activities of the colonial government and the religious orders—in fact, two Dominican missionaries were killed and had their heads removed by Indigenes.48 It was likely that tattoos on Indigenous “necks, legs and arms” symbolizing “bravery” served as legible marks of danger for the Spaniards to distinguish dangerous headhunters from other Indigenes. Esquivel’s report suggests that this practice would decline with the expansion of Spanish rule and that the only Indigenous people known to the Spaniards who still practiced it were the Cabalans in northeastern Taiwan (present-day Yilan, far from the Spanish fortresses in Danshui and Jilong). The Chinese were also aware of the link between skin marking and head-hunting, as evidenced by an eighteenth-century poem written by Xia Zhifang, an itinerant inspector of the Taiwan prefecture from the xun’an yushi office (responsible for overseeing the civil bureaucracy and administration of justice in Taiwan), who was appointed by the Qing court in 1727. This four-line poem, accompanied by a note, was included in a collection of more than one hundred poems composed during his tenure in Taiwan: The smell of blood lingers on, as a barbarian or civilian has just been killed; Yet figures are busily being carved on skin, in the shapes of men. Competing for the number of human figures borne all over the body; This is how the most adroit warrior stands out. The poem’s corresponding note reads: “Every time barbarians went to hunt and kill [someone], they would tattoo a human figure on their body. If the victim is a fellow barbarian, then the tattoo is made below the [headhunter’s] waist or on his foot; if a Chinese is killed, then the tattoo is made on his waist or hands. The person who has the most human figures on his skin is seen as the most powerful among his fellow tribal members and thus no one dares antagonize him.”49 Compared with Esquivel’s earlier account, Xia’s record gives far more specifics, such as the correspondence between the location of a tattooed figure with the ethnicity of the victim. Xia graphically evokes to his readership of Confucian literati the violence and brutality of head-hunting by noting that the most tattooed Indigenous headhunters were the most celebrated and, thus, most powerful warriors. Curiously, although all three colonial regimes in early modern Taiwan had to tackle Indigenous head-hunting as a threat to their rule, not all of them documented the connection between head-hunting and skin marking. For instance, while the Dutch used the “right” of head-hunting as a reward in exchange for extracting services from pro-Dutch Indigenous villagers, I find no reference to head-hunting tattoos in their writings about Formosa.50

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So, how do we understand the references to Indigenous Taiwanese head-hunting tattoos in Esquivel’s and Xia’s accounts? Were they fiction or fact? When Taiwan fell under the control of the Japanese empire in the early twentieth century, Japanese ethnographers indeed reported that the “Atayal people”51 used different tattoo designs to represent the numbers of heads an Atayal male had managed to hunt. But they also show that the head-hunting tattoos were simply made of lines or curves carved over the faces and/or chests of Atayal men, which was far from the sensational pictograms of Xia’s poem.52 Setting aside issues of veracity, the practice of head-hunting tattoos was a topic where European and Chinese discourses on Indigenous culture intersected. For instance, in the wake of “new learning” about the West and the world during the late Qing, a Chinese literati named Zou Tao, in his encyclopedic An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations (Wanguo jinzheng kaolue) of 1901, introduces the “customs of Indigenous peoples in inland America like Mexico and Peru” as follows: “[They] practice the custom of tattooing the body. Those who kill more people have elaborate tattoos on their chests; those who kill less have fewer tattoos accordingly; those who have no tattoos are despised by all.”53 It is difficult to pin down the sources of this account; Zou likely relied heavily on translated Western books and communication with Western missionaries.54 The motif of head-hunting tattoos would have been familiar to some of Zou’s readers, given its appearance in Qing representations of Indigenous Taiwanese. Expanding Knowledge About Indigenous Tattooing As discussed above, Chinese accounts of Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking played a far more essential role in the construction of difference between colonizers and the colonized than it did for the Dutch and Spanish. Head-hunting tattoos aside, Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking also functioned to mark difference in social standing, seniority, and gender, though none of these interpretations appear in earlier Chinese narratives of skin marking. A new discourse about Indigenous skin marking on the frontier emerged with the rise of Chinese travel literature on Taiwan. Just as tattoos representing bravery required “collective enforcement of standards regarding who merited [them],”55 so, too, did Indigenous tattoos that served as markers of other hierarchical dimensions, such as wealth and status. A Chinese account of the Indigenous Taiwanese entitled On the Countries in the Eastern and Western Oceans (Dong xi yang kao), written no later than 1617 (during the Ming dynasty), portrays Indigenous skin marking as an embodiment of the sumptuous excesses of the “better-off” Indigenes: “In the pursuit of beauty, men have their ears pierced, and women have their teeth broken. The hands and feet [of the Indigenous Taiwanese] are tattooed to show beauty. [When applying tattoos], the entire village celebrates and the costs [of tattooing] remain

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expensive. Thus the impoverished who cannot afford this extravagance dare not speak of tattooing themselves.”56 Here Indigenous tattooing is understood as a means to display material wealth. Whereas tattooing and other bodily mutilations were viewed as shameful in the eyes of Confucian scholar-officials, they constituted “the pursuit of beauty” among the Indigenous Taiwanese. Huang Shujing organizes his comprehensive survey of the Indigenous Taiwanese, Investigations of the Savage Customs in Six Categories (Fansu liukao), first published in 1736, by the titles of thirteen tribes living in the western plain of Taiwan: ten along the so-called Northern Route and three along the Southern Route. Each section contains six categories of inquiry, including dwellings, diet, clothing and ornament, marriage ceremonies, funeral practices, and instruments. Huang painstakingly records the specifics of skin marking in villages along the Southern Route: “Native officials (tuguan), vice native officials (fu tuguan), and native captains (gongxie) all bear tattoos on their shoulders, back, chest, arms, and armpits after getting married. Poking the skin using needles, they then add black ashes to finish [the tattoos]. Native officials are tattooed with the shape of human figures; vice native officials and native captains merely receive floral-patterned (mohua) tattoos; female native officials also receive such floral-patterned tattoos. This is how high and low ranks are differentiated.”57 Thus the Indigenous Taiwanese custom of skin marking portrayed in Huang’s ethnography is associated with the social standing of tribal leaders, making manifest the hierarchy among them through differences in their tattoos. Huang’s observation was quite original: no Chinese writer before him had seen Indigenous tattoos as marks of social status within villages. Xia’s poem on head-hunting quoted above might come the closest to this interpretation, since Xia sees the head-hunting tattoos as marks of power. Compared with their portrayal in Xia’s poem, Indigenous leaders in Huang’s account appear less as bloodthirsty headhunters, who would kill to rule, and more as docile people whose status as leaders in their community is confirmed by their distinctive tattoos. A half-century later, in the late eighteenth century, European travelers were well versed in the ethnographic knowledge that the Indigenous tattoo served as a marker of social standing. These tattoos struck the French explorer Bougainville as “indications of social differences” in his very first encounter with South Pacific islanders: “As for indications of social differences, I believe (and this is not a joke) that the first one, the one that distinguishes free men from slaves, is that free men have their buttocks painted. Then the amount of paint on the buttocks and other parts of the body, the beard and moustaches, the length of the nails, hair hanging down or gathered up over the head, these nuances distinguish, I believe, the various degrees.”58 While it is certainly true that tattoos make it easier for prospective colonizers “to establish individuals of significance with whom to parley,” it is also worth noticing that here Bougainville saw tattoo bearers as free men vis-à-vis slaves who bore no tattoos.59 He also suggests that

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the more tattoos an Indigenous male had, the higher his social status, a practice that contrasted sharply with the European tattooing tradition, in which tattoos had little to do with social standing. During the first half of the eighteenth century, some Chinese observers also noted the social context and actual process of tattooing among the Indigenes. What appealed to Chinese officials was a seniority-based kinship relation manifested through Indigenous tattooing. In the 1717 edition of the Official Gazetteer of Zhuluo County, the compiler, Zhou Zhongxuan (himself the magistrate of Zhuluo county), records skin marking among Indigenes under Qing jurisdiction as follows: “[Some barbarians] have the so-called tadpole script60 and figures of insects or fish tattooed all over their body, [some] merely have tattoos over their chest and two arms, the only place exempted from being tattooed is their face . . . [the Indigenous] were all tattooed under the orders of their father and grandfather . . . they receive tattoos despite the pain, since they will not turn their back on this ancestral practice.”61 This Gazetteer presents a more nuanced observation of Indigenous tattooing practices in Zhuluo, noting the variety of tattooed figures that appeared on different parts of the body. In contrast to the images of competition and violence pertaining to skin marking in Xia’s poem, it is noteworthy that in the latter part of this description, tattooing is seen as an obligation to one’s ancestors. By shifting the focus away from miscellaneous tattooed figures (as described, for instance, in Yu’s travelogue), the author also tones down the “otherness” in the practice of skin marking. Zhou’s account suggests that Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking was referenced out of mere curiosity or to show Indigenous “otherness”; the author understands the marking practice in light of the kinship relations in Indigenous Taiwanese societies. Similarly, visual representations of Indigenous skin marking confirmed the authority of the elders. One image among the eighteen illustrations representing “indigenous customs” in An Album of Taiwanese Customs and Products (Qingren taiwan neishan fandi fengsu tuce)62 is entitled “Tattooing,” and it portrays an Indigenous man lying on his back with his chest being tattooed by another man who sits astride his thighs (fig. 2.1). The scene is located inside a house, and the men are surrounded by other male villagers: two kneeling men offer plates of food, and other villagers, including at least one elder, closely observe the scene and chat with one another. In contrast to the men who are stripped to the waist, the two women outside the house are fully dressed and hold gifts in tribute to the event. The first half of the caption on the right margin of the image is copied nearly verbatim from the Official Gazetteer of Zhuluo County (1717) discussed above: “[The Indigenous] were all tattooed under the orders of their father and grandfather . . . they are tattooed despite the pain, since they will not turn their back on this ancestral practice.” Historian Laura Hostetler warns that paintings of this genre were likely not based on direct observation but “made by paid artists in a workshop setting,” adding, “Illustrations may

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Fig. 2.1  Unknown Chinese artist, Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, late eighteenth century. From Qingren taiwan neishan fandi fengsu tuce (An album of taiwanese customs and products). Palace Museum, Beijing, reference 00000352. Photo provided by Palace Museum.

have been sometimes reproduced by artists unfamiliar with their subject matter.”63 However, regardless of historical accuracy, what matters is that the artist chose to portray Indigenous tattooing as a collective act under the guidance of senior Indigenes. When Chinese observers discuss tattoos in Indigenous traditions, we must consider the agenda behind their ethnographic accounts. The Official Gazetteer of Zhuluo County discussed above was not a private travelogue or poem but represented the official Qing stance. The compiler, who was also the magistrate of Zhuluo county, perhaps chose to present Indigenous tattooing in ways that conformed to orthodox Confucian values, such as filial piety. Under the broad Confucian norms practiced in late imperial China, one’s social standing within a patrilineal descent group was largely contingent upon age and generational seniority. By presenting Indigenous tattooing as an ancestral obligation, the rebellious and “barbarous” practice (described in the earlier Chinese accounts) has now been tamed to fit the values of Qing colonizers. Chinese observers also note how gender difference was expressed through Indigenous skin marking. In the abovementioned Six Categories, Huang makes a record of Indigenous female tattooing, which was not discussed in any prior

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European or Chinese accounts: “When a woman is going to marry, her two cheeks are tattooed with a reticulate design that is called ‘tattooed-mouth hoop.’ If she is not tattooed then a man will not marry her.”64 In another case, the Manchu official Liushiqi (liošici), who served as an itinerant inspector of Taiwan from 1744 to 1747, offered a similar but more detailed account of women’s facial tattooing: “Newly married women use a needle to tattoo figures like flowers on their face by pricking the skin; [the tattooing] is about five or six fen wide and painted with black ink; it looks like a man’s beard, and serves to distinguish them from those unmarried.”65 These observations suggest that Indigenous women in the mountains were tattooed for social reasons that went beyond the adornment of body parts. In the eyes of prior observers, skin marking merely constituted an essential aspect of “savage” identity vis-à-vis the “civilized” Chinese. Here female facial tattooing manifested feminine appeal to Indigenous men and was seen as preparation for marriage. Conclusion Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing was “seen” and “unseen” in different colonial discourses. As this chapter shows, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, while the practice of tattooing looms large in Chinese Confucian observers’ depictions of the Indigenous Taiwanese, Europeans were consistently more interested in using skin color to create categories of human difference. This contrast has to do with the ways in which tattooing was viewed in the observers’ home societies. Other than this difference, the overlapping concern in both European and Chinese narratives about head-hunting tattoos reminds us that interpretations of Indigenous tattooing always served colonial agendas. During the nineteenth century, attention to Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing remained and perhaps even grew in Chinese accounts, as evident in the paintings in An Album of Taiwanese Customs and Products (1875), which were presented to the throne (fig. 2.2). Commissioned by an interventionist Qing official who wanted to completely “civilize” the remaining “raw savages” in Taiwan, this collection contained far more depictions of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing (in both text and drawing) than the “ethnographic paintings” made in the eighteenth century. As Teng argues, such images underscore the physical difference between “raw savages” and Han Chinese.66 Compared with images made in the eighteenth century (see fig. 2.1), the paintings in the 1875 collection seem more ethnographic or clinical.67 By the nineteenth century, Europeans considered tattooing an exotic practice, imported from foreign and savage cultures, an interpretation contingent on the forgetting or suppression of the long history of European tattooing examined in other chapters of this volume. This view also shaped the representation of Indigenous Taiwanese tattoos in Western observers’ accounts from the nineteenth

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Fig. 2.2  Unknown artist, Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing, 1875. From Qingren taiwan fengsu wuchan tuce (An album of Taiwanese customs and products). Palace Museum, Beijing, reference 00021119. Photo provided by Palace Museum.

century. For instance, an American ornithologist named Joseph Beal Steere published a report on Formosa in the Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York in 1874, after his six-month trip to Taiwan that year. Although he had traveled to Taiwan “for exploration and for making collections in natural history,” Indigenous tattooing apparently caught Steere’s attention. In meeting with his local guides, he immediately noticed the “curiously marked . . . lines of tattooing” on the face of his guide’s wife.68 Steere also carefully recorded the designs of the extensive Indigenous tattoos and the tattooing method used. The three illustrations in Steere’s report all concern tattooing, with two depicting facial tattooing on men and women and the third showing tattooing of hands (figs. 2.3–5).69 Many scholars have examined how Europeans interpreted the tattoos they saw in colonial encounters since the fifteenth century, exploring how these

Figs. 2.3–5 (clockwise from top left)  llustrations of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing. From Joseph B. Steere, “Formosa,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 6 (1874): 308, 306, 312.

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interpretations were employed to construct African, Asian, and American Indigenes.70 Recent scholars of Chinese history have begun to place Qing imperial expansion into comparative perspectives, opening valuable discussions with scholars of European colonialism and imperialism.71 This chapter contributes to this dialogue by exploring both the similarities and the contrasts found in early modern European and Chinese responses to Indigenous Taiwanese skin marking. Notes 1. Chinese lunar calendar date. 2. In Qing colonial discourse, “raw savages” referred to Indigenous people who did not mingle with Han Chinese and could not communicate with the latter, while “cooked savages” lived with Han Chinese and could speak Chinese. In Qing discourse on frontier Indigenes, “the meanings of ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ are closer to ‘wild’ and ‘tame.’” See Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683– 1895 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 128. 3. Document no. 03-1348-055, No. 1 Historical Archive, Beijing. 4. A “local gazetteer (fangzhi)” in late imperial China normally refers to the publication of encyclopedic information about an administrative unit such as a county (xian), usually compiled under the supervision of the local government. 5. As early as 1584, the Spanish captain Francisco de Gualle reported that a Chinese had told him that “those Ilands called Lequeos are very many, and that they haue many and very good hauens, and that the people and inhabitants thereof haue their faces and bodies painted like the Bysayas of the Ilands of Luçon or Philippinas and are apparelled like the Bysayas . . . they did often come with small shippes and barkes laden with Bucks and Harts-hides, and with golde in graines or very small pieces.” Gualle is quoted in Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Iohn Huighen van Linschoten: His discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies Deuided into foure books (London: By [John Windet for] John Wolfe printer to ye Honorable Cittie of London, [1598]), bk. 3, ch. 54, http://‌name‌.umdl‌.umich‌.edu‌/A055 69‌.0001‌.001. Japanese scholar Takashi Nakamura suggests that “Lequeos” here refers to the island of Taiwan since the Ryukyu Islands (pronounced similarly to “Lequeo”) did

not produce hides or gold for trade (“Shi qi shi ji he ren kan cha Taiwan jinkuang jishi / Dutch Exploration of Gold Mines in Taiwan During the Seventeenth Century,” trans. Lai Yongxiang and Wang Ruizheng, Taiwan Wenxian 7, no. 1/2 (1956): 95–116. 6. Jacob Constant and Barend Pessaert, quoted in Léonard Blussé and Marius P. H. Roessingh, “A Visit to the Past: Soulang, a Formosan Village anno 1623,” Archipel 27 (1984): 63–80, at 74. 7. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, quoted in Juliet Fleming, “The Renaissance Tattoo,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 71. 8. I have mainly examined Leonard Blussé, Natalie Everts, and Evelien Frech, eds., The Formosan Encounter—Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society: A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources, 7 vols (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 1999), and Jiang Shusheng, trans., Relanzhe cheng rizhi (Tainan: Tainan shi zhengfu, 2011), the Chinese translation of Dagregisters Zeelandia. 9. W. M. Campbell, ed., Formosa Under the Dutch: Described from Contemporary Sources with Explanatory Notes and a Bibliography of the Island Formosa under the Dutch (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1903), 18. 10. Constant and Pessaert, quoted in Blussé and Roessingh, “Visit to the Past,” 74. 11. Georgius Candidius, quoted in Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch, 15, 21. 12. Constant and Pessaert, quoted in Blussé and Roessingh, “Visit to the Past,” 74–75. Emphasis added. 13. Candidius, quoted in Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch, 9.

Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking 14. Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 28. 15. Thomas Pebel, in De dagregisters van het kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan, 1629–1662, deel 2, fol. 330v, http://‌resources‌.huygens‌.knaw‌.nl‌ /retroboeken‌/taiwan. Emphasis added. I wrote this English translation based on Jiang Shusheng’s Chinese translation of the De dagregisters. For Jiang’s translation in Chinese, see Relanzhe cheng rizhi [De dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia], vol. 2, Institute of Taiwan History Academia Sinica, https://‌taco‌ .ith‌.sinica‌.edu‌.tw‌/tdk. 16. Here “Sincan” refers to the region under direct Dutch control. For quotes, see Blussé et al., Formosan Encounter, 1:63. 17. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 173. 18. Lin Qianguang, Penghu Taiwan Jilue [An account of Penghu and Taiwan] (Taipei: Taiwan yinhang, 1961), 61. 19. Tu Chengsheng, Fanshe caifeng tu tijie [Genre paintings of Taiwan’s aboriginal society and culture at the beginnings of Taiwanese history: A historical interpretation] (Taipei: Zhong yang yan jiu yuan li shi yu yan jiu suo, 1999), 16. 20. Jiang Yuying, Taiwan fuzhi [Gazetteer of Taiwan prefecture] (1685; reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 58. 21. The earliest edition of Pihai jiyou is dated 1732, see Fang Hao, “Pihai jiyou banben zhi yanjiu,” in Fanghao liushi zidinggao [Self-collected essays of Fang Hao] (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1969), 978–88. 22. Yu notes the distinction between “indigenous barbarian (tufan)” and “wild barbarian (yefan).” The former lived in Zhuluo and Fengshan counties, under the jurisdiction of Qing, while the latter lived in the mountains. The binary construction of “barbarians” (between those who have more contacts with the Chinese vis-à-vis those who have not) is quite common in late Imperial Chinese travel writings. See Emma Teng, “Taiwan as a Living Museum: Tropes of Anachronism in Late-Imperial Chinese Travel Writing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59, no. 2 (1999): 445–84. 23. Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, vol. 2. All translations of Yu Yonghe’s writing in this chapter are taken from the following two sources: Laurence G. Thompson, “The Earliest

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Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the Formosan Aborigines,” Monumenta Serica 23 (1964): 163–204, and Macabe Keliher, Small Sea Travel Diaries: Yu Yonghe’s Records of Taiwan (Taipei: SMC, 2004). All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Under the appendix section entitled “Supplementary Notes on the Barbarian Territory (fanjing buyi).” 27. Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, vol. 3. 28. Teng, “Taiwan as a Living Museum,” 448, 465. 29. Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, vol. 3. 30. Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo,” 69. 31. Antonio De Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 266. 32. Johannes Fabian, quoted in Teng, “Taiwan as a Living Museum,” 447. See also the chapter by Mairin Odle in this volume. 33. Si Maqian, Shiji [Records of the grand historian], vol. 41. 34. Ou Yangxiu, Xin Tangshu [New Tang history], vol. 222. 35. “All Dan women are known to eat raw fish and swim under water. In the past, they were seen as belonging to the family of dragons. It was because they dived into the water with tattooed bodies in order to look like the offspring of dragons. They could move in the water for thirty, forty li without difficulty. Today they are called Tajia. The women are seen as sea otters and the men as dragons. They are really nonhuman.” Qu Dajun, quoted in Helen F. Siu and Liu Zhiwei, “Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China,” in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 287. It is worth noting, though, that some elements in Qu Dajun’s account of the Dan people (such as his claim that they were tattooed to pass themselves off as dragons) can be found in earlier texts. 36. Elad Alyagon, “Inked: Song Soldiers, Military Tattoos, and the Remaking of the Chinese Lower Class, 960–1279” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2016), 219.

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37. For more discussion on Middle Period Chinese tattooing, see M. Ceresa “Written on Skin and Flesh: The Pattern of Tattoo in China, Part One: Generalities,” Studi in onore di Lionello Lanciotti (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1996): 329–40; Chen Yuanpeng, “Shenti yu huawen—tangsong shiqi de wenshen fengshang chutan,” Xin Shi Xue 1, no. 1 (March 2000): 1–44; Daphne P. Lei, “The Blood-Stained Text in Translation: Tattooing, Bodily Writing, and Performance of Chinese Virtue,” Anthropological Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2009): 99–127; Carrie Elizabeth Reed, “Early Chinese Tattoo,” Sino-Platonic Paper 103 (2000): 1–55; Carrie Elizabeth Reed, “Tattoo in Early China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, no. 3 (2000): 360–76. 38. Jane Caplan, “‘National Tattooing’: Traditions of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 156–73. 39. Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 265; for the tattooing of soldiers and slaves, see C. P. Jones, “Stigma and Tattoo,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 12; for Europeans traveling to Jerusalem to get the “Jerusalem tattoo” as a proud “stigmata,” see Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo,” 80–81, and Lewy’s contribution to this volume. 40. Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 263. 41. Mairin Odle, “Indelible Ink: The Deep History of Tattoo Removal,” The Appendix, November 14, 2013, http://‌theappendix‌.net‌ /issues‌/2013‌/10‌/indelible‌-ink‌-the‌-deep‌-history -of‌-tattoo‌-removal. 42. Jennifer Allen Rosecrans, “Wearing the Universe: Symbolic Markings in Early Modern England,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 50. 43. José Eugenio Borao, Spaniards in Taiwan, 1582–1641 (Taipei: SMC, 2001), 1:162–78; Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chapter 4, n. 18. The document is generally divided into two parts: the first part discusses transportation, geography, the customs of Indigenous inhabitants, and their relationship with the Spanish in the Cheylam/Quelang/Jilong and Tamchuy/ Danshui regions; the second part mentions several difficulties facing the rule of the Spanish colonial regime (including competition with the Dutch colony in the south and other

inland and maritime trade issues as well) and suggestions as to how to address them. 44. On Jacinto Esquivel and his report, see Tsung-jen Chen, “1632 nian chuan jiaoshi Jactinto Esquivel baogao de jiexi” [An analysis of Fr. Jacinto Esquivel’s report “Memoria de las cosas pertenecientes al estado de la Isla Hermosa”], Taiwan wenxian 61, no. 3 (2010): 1–34. 45. José Eugenio Borao, “The Catholic Dominican Missionaries in Taiwan, 1626– 1642,” Leuven Chinese Studies 10 (2001): 103–30, at 127. 46. Jacinto Esquivel, quoted in Borao, Spaniards in Taiwan, 169–70. 47. Chiu Hsin-hui, The Colonial “Civilizing Process” in Dutch Formosa, 1642–1662 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 124. 48. Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, chapter 4. 49. Chen Hanguang, Taiwan shilu [Collection of poems on Taiwan] (Taipei: Taiwan sheng wenxian weiyuan hui, 1971), 5:253; quoted from Tu Chengsheng, Fanshe caifeng tu tijie, 16. 50. Chiu Hsin-hui, The Colonial “Civilizing Process,” 124. An official Qing account by Zhou Zhongxuan confirms that by the early eighteenth century, skin marking was still being practiced among Indigenes who were under former Dutch rule. Despite the Dutch having controlled the same region (referred as “Tirosen,” in present-day Jiayi City on the plain of southwestern Taiwan) for nearly forty years, Indigenous skin marking did not draw much Dutch attention in their descriptions of Formosans. David Wright, a Scotsman employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) around 1650, did leave a record of Indigenous Taiwanese tattooing: “The men paint the skin of their breasts, backs and arms, with a colour, which remains in the flesh and will never be got out and by them accounted a great bravery.” This account was first quoted in Jan Struys’s famous seventeenth-century travelogue Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspoedige Reysen [The perillous and most unhappy voyages of Jan Struys] with modifications, “The Men have sometimes their back, brest, and arms painted with a kind of colour which never goes out so long as they live.” It was also quoted verbatim in Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch, 144. Yet, Wright did not discuss if such bravery was measured by enduring the pain of tattooing or if it was

Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking confirmed by some brave act, like head-hunting. 51. “Atayal” refers to one of the officially sanctioned titles of Indigenous Taiwanese. The “Atayal people” resided in northern Taiwan. 52. Following the establishment of formal colonial rule in Taiwan in 1910, the colonial government soon issued a complete ban on Indigenous head-hunting. For a brief summary of Japanese ethnographers’ findings on Indigenous tattooing, see Ma Tengyue’s contribution, in Wen mian, guo shou, tai ya wen hua [Facial tattooing, head-hunting, and Atayal culture], ed. Ruan Changrui (Taipei: National Taiwan Museum, 1999), 141–69; for a Chinese translation of Japanese ethnographers’ report of the “Atayal people,” see Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, ed., Fan zu guan xi diao cha bao gao shu [An investigative report of barbarian customs] (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1996), 1:139–40. 53. Zou Tao, quoted in Chen Zhongyi, ed., Huangchao jingshi wen sanbian [Third sequel of the collected essays about statecraft of the Qing] (Shanghai, 1902), 75:4b. 54. For a recent study of late Qing encyclopedias, including the work of Zou Tao, see Li Hsiao-ti, “Late Qing Encyclopaedias: Establishing a New Enterprise,” in Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge, ed. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Rudolf G. Wagner (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 29–55. 55. Odle, “Indelible Ink.” 56. Zhang Xie, Dong xi yang kao [On the countries in the eastern and western oceans] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 105. Historian Xie Fang in the preface notes that the author of Dong xi yang kao, Zhang Xie, drew on Chen Di’s works on Taiwan (10–11). 57. Huang Shujing, Taihai shicha lu, vol. 7. 58. John Dunmore, ed., The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767–1768 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2002), 64; quoted in Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 32–33. 59. Ibid., 32. 60. This refers either to Dutch script or to romanized transcriptions of Indigenous tongues. 61. Zhou Zhongxuan, Zhuluo xianzhi, vol. 8.

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62. The exact date and authorship of the collection is unknown to us. According to historian Tu Cheng-sheng, the color illustrations were very likely made in the 1770s or 1780s by a well-known local painter named Chen Bichen (Fanshe caifeng tu tijie, 7). 63. Laura Hostetler, “Introduction: Early Modern Ethnography in Comparative Historical Perspective,” in The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao album” (Seattle: University of Washington Press), xvii–lxi, at xxiv. 64. Huang Shujing, Taihai shicha lu, vol. 6. 65. Liu Shiqi, Fanshe caifeng tukao [A study of genre paintings of Taiwan’s aborigines] (Taipei: Datong shuju, 1984), 9. 66. Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography, 223. Chen Zongren, ed., Wan qing tai wan fan su tu [An album of Taiwanese customs in late Qing] (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2013). 67. For a complete collection of the 1875 edition, see Tsung-jen Chen, ed. Illustrations of Aborigines in Late Qing Taiwan (Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Taiwan History 2013). 68. Joseph Beal Steere and Li Rengui, eds., Formosa and Its Inhabitants (Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Taiwan History 2002), 17 and 45. 69. Ibid., 20. Mimicking European imperial powers, Japan produced the eight-volume Investigative Reports on the Savage People (Banzoku cho¯sa ho¯ kokusho), which documents the miscellaneous tattooing habits and different tattoo designs in different Formosan villages. 70. For instance, Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo”; Harriet Guest, “Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 83–101; Karen Ordahl Kepperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, chapter 3; and Mairin Odle’s contribution to this volume. 71. For example, Laura Hostetler’s study of the Miao Album suggests that the production of the “Other” when expanding empires encountered peoples at frontiers or in distant regions was not unique to the West (“Introduction: Early Modern Ethnography”).

Chapter 3

Following the Trail of the Slave Trade Branding, Skin, and Commodification

Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper

The transatlantic slave trade was a system punctuated by powerful symbols of inhumanity that linger in our collective memories. Whips, shackles, and abhorrent punishments fill the historical record and emphasize the magnitude of the crime against humanity that took place between the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries. While each implement of dehumanization holds a powerful aura stemming from its contribution to a system of mass commodification that involved the enslavement of 12.5 million Africans and their transportation to the Americas, we posit that the branding iron demands particular attention. One of the most powerful moments in the trajectory of an enslaved individual’s life was the act of branding, which seared a trader’s or owner’s initials into the skin of an enslaved individual, marking them permanently as property. Branding, more than any other act, was the definitive moment that attempted to dehumanize bodies that had been previously understood as human. To brand is to commodify. Historically the branding of persons has been comparatively rare. Largely confined to judicial punishments, its rapid expansion during the period of the transatlantic slave trade marked a significant shift. Despite the intensity and comparative brutality of previous slave societies, previous slave traders and owners seem to have reserved branding primarily as

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a punishment. In cultures such as Rome or Babylon, it was reserved for those who offended divine laws or otherwise demonstrated that they were unfit to remain citizens of the upstanding society. We can recognize a pragmatic aspect to this scarcity of evidence for widespread branding of the enslaved in earlier cultures. In many slave societies where freed slaves could transition through manumission into identities associated with a citizen status, permanent disfiguration would be counterproductive. Only criminals, deserters, or fugitive slaves tended to be branded, and the act permanently marked them as outcasts. In a very real sense, they were being marked as inhuman since branding was understood to be a marking primarily applied to animals.1 As Jean-Pierre Warnier states in his analysis of how royal brands served to remove slaves from the commodities market, branding is fundamentally “related to the process of commodifying or decommodifying a person or thing.”2 Branding is commonplace in literary evidence and was used by slaveholders and slave traders to mark those they believed to be their property: it was a fundamental commodification of the human body. This chapter explores how this act of violence is also an act of trade, industry, and capitalism. Some context is necessary to situate branding in the spectrum of permanent body modification and to consider it especially in light of the nuances of slave societies and commodity theory. The value of an enslaved human has historically always been their human ability to perform tasks that no animals are capable of—the paradox of reducing humans to chattel and dehumanizing the enslaved is at the heart of this research problem. Branding is one of the most charged symbols of the reduction of human beings to chattel, and branding irons from the era of the slave trade are evidence of its profound inhumanity. But how many men, women, and children were branded, and to whom did those brands belong? This is the most basic question we can ask, but the need to even ask it speaks to the lacunae within the historiography around branding. For a topic holding so much symbolic importance, there is little within Anglophone scholarship to provide tangible evidence of even the numbers affected, let alone what the silences in the historical evidence might indicate. This present article is a first step toward addressing these broader questions. By positioning the act of branding within a longer history as stigma and then presenting what evidence we do have, a framework may be developed that permits room for further questions and research. The power of branding in early modern history lies not in its use to stigmatize the criminal but in the mass dehumanization of the commodified. In approaching this subject, we acknowledge the inherent problems associated with treating Black bodies as objects of analysis and recounting scenes of violence marked on the skin of enslaved Africans. Saidiya Hartman observes that the archive is “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property,” inundated with scandal and excess—“libidinal investment

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in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents.”3 We know, for example, of Thomas Thistlewood’s grotesque violence on Jamaican plantations (including branding the enslaved with his initials, TT), but, as Hartman explains, “the more difficult task is to exhume the lives buried under this prose.”4 Likewise, Hartman reminds us of the challenges for historians who seek to “recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive . . . without committing further violence” with our narratives. Hartman asks profoundly, “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”5 For guidance, we look to work by Marissa Fuentes. In her poignant analysis of the life of Jane, an enslaved woman on the run in eighteenth-century Barbados, Fuentes notes that the fragments of Jane’s life that appear in the archive—a brief description in a runaway advertisement—tell us “all that her owner wanted the public to know about her—scarred and running in a few sentences.” Jane’s body had been marked by scars including “a fire brand on one of her breasts.” Fuentes argues that this description “represents one of the points at which black bodies became racialized objects, and their scars produce multiple axes of meaning.” Fuentes refers to the phenomenon of “‘body memory’—the permanent marks and meanings inscribed on the body.” She argues convincingly that these scars became “a different type of ‘country mark,’ produced by a ritual of violence that identified a person to other enslaved people not by their ‘ethnic’ origins but by their dishonored condition that branded them as commodities.” Fuentes refers to “the violent condition in which enslaved women appear in the archive disfigured and violated” as “mutilated historicity.” These symbols communicated slave status to others, both enslaved and free, “and these flesh injuries are the remains with which we must reconstruct their history.”6 There also remain challenges to any apparently straightforward question of demographics and real numbers; not least of these is that there are no concrete records of slaveholders’ marks similar to the contemporaneous catalogues of brand patterns applied to animals.7 Despite the fact that slaveholders historically shared the names of their enslaved Africans with cattle or horses and kept livestock records that conflated humans and animals, there are no central registries that remain to clearly connect slave traders or slave owners with particular brands. Within the registries of horses or cattle, brands were clearly registered to prevent theft, confusion between owners, and duplication of unique marks. This is a remarkable gap—there is no question that branding was employed as a means of reducing humans to property historically, and the same economic demands would apply to human chattel as to nonhumans within such a system. In both cases, identification, prevention of duplication of marks, prevention of theft, and other such considerations would seem to necessitate a centralized registry to control an economically important trade of this kind. Brands were used not only on living flesh but on indigo cakes, crates and barrels, and other trade items—in all cases, the intention was to protect ownership and safeguard

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profit. However, no complete preserved registry of the kind typical in livestock has been located as of this writing, making reconstruction of these connections considerably more difficult. The gradual pace of study is due in large part to the complexity and scale of the trade in enslaved Africans and the commodities they produced. Humans were being sold and resold not only along the coasts of Africa but also extensively between the various slave societies within the Americas after enslaved Africans arrived and were first sold.8 It is worthwhile to attempt to define the problem and impact of branding despite these challenges and to situate it in the broader histories within which it is closely packed. Branding and Identity To brand another human being is to inflict considerable pain and to leave an indelible mark on the body—and branding shares elements with scarification and tattoo. Historically, however, the brand was inflicted upon criminals, gladiators, fugitive slaves, adulterers, heretics, and others cast out of the marking community. Branding human skin calls to mind the ancient practice of marking animals as possessions, first seen in Egyptian tomb paintings dated between 2800 and 2280 BCE, and its use on humans, in effect, is the inverse of permanent marking, like scarification or tattoo. Inscribing the skin in the latter fashion acculturates the individual and identifies him or her irrefutably as a member of the marking community. Branding, in contrast, ostracizes. Instead of situating humans within their culture, it performs two functions: it excludes the branded person from their society, and it can reduce humans to property. In antiquity, branding a human was an exceptional act very different from scarification or tattoo, which were seen by classical authors as self-decorative.9 The forced mark of the brand, imposed by authorities to police the limits of a society, arises explicitly from the same forms of marking as used on animals, whose bodies are legally not their own. Branding expels the marked subject from the human community and permanently defines him or her as nonhuman—in effect, it reduces him or her to an animal in status. The earliest examples of human branding in the global North are penal, including the law code of Hammurabi in 1754 BCE, which is understood to refer to a brand, and to Pharonic Egyptian examples of slaves and criminals marked in this fashion.10 In the Hammurabic code, the enslaved had their owner’s name inscribed on their arm, while the lex talionis of the code demanded that the brander who obscured the rightful brand on a slave’s arm would lose his hand for the deed. Branding was also used to punish slander, and some interpretations of the Hammurabic code suggest that this means the slanderer would be reduced to servile status.11 Among the Romans, slaves were only rarely branded; cases primarily consisted of the marking of FUG on the forehead for fugitivus, indicating a runaway slave. Those who were branded had, in effect, been removed from the society of accepted humans.

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In early modern Europe, branding remained a symbol of ostracization and shame for those on whose skin it was inflicted. Cheeks, faces, arms, and shoulders were branded as punishments for acts that the society of the time agreed were immoral and criminal, visibly marking the branded as those who had failed to adhere to society’s codes of conduct.12 Well into the nineteenth century, branding (and tattooing—documents unfortunately conflate the two in many penal examples) was used in this fashion, inflicted, for example, on deserters from the British Army (a practice only halted in 1870).13 Hands and thumbs as well as cheeks were subject to penal branding in colonial America for criminals of any background; branding was the standard non–capital sentence for crimes like grand larceny. This punishment, described as “burnt in the Hand,” was clearly differentiated from being marked with inks or needles.14 In effect, branding a human has historically been an indicator of the other, in stark contrast to alternative forms of markings with various and nuanced meanings, which may or may not include indications of criminal behavior or enslavement. Throughout history, branding always indicated an outcast from social norms, in part because of its forcible application on the flesh but also, arguably, due to its frequent use on animals. In effect, if the culturally marked human body is likened by anthropologists to the minting of a coin—clearly representing a ritual acculturation—then branding represents the opposite intent. Accounts among those engaged in ritual marking use similar terminology for the process and the result; as summarized by anthropologists, “The mark made upon the body has to distinguish the man from everything that is not himself, and in the first place from what is nearby: animals, or other humans not belonging to the same clan.”15 Branding, by contrast, is a way to commodify the body and mark it as existing outside the social norm. More intriguing, for colonial Americans in their initial stages of independence from England, branding was a nightmarish specter that was invoked as a metaphor for the power imbalance they experienced between the motherland and their new home. John Dickinson, an American founding father, wrote that, in his view, the Declaratory Act of 1766 was an effort to “to brand us with marks infamously denoting us to be their property, as absolutely as their cattle.”16 The act of branding therefore consistently maintains a stigmatic and negative association when applied to humans, from earliest antiquity well into the early modern period.17 Historically, it was reserved for those who were never envisioned as future members of society. Dehumanization and Exclusion Branding is ubiquitous and paradoxical within modern culture; we refer to “brands” of clothing or luxury goods casually, and we flinch at the idea of humans branded in the past or present. These two ideas are historically connected, of

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course, and both cases involve the application of a signifier of ownership. With respect to the application of such an identifier onto living flesh, there is an ancient association of branding with the explicit dehumanization of the one branded; to be branded is to become simultaneously worthless as a social person and valued as a commodity. To brand the flesh is to permanently represent ownership over it, and this association is ancient. Frank Fanselow’s theory of the “brand economy” is instructive; he posits that a brand economy is one in which commodities are graded, sealed, and exchangeable for similarly graded and evaluated items.18 Consumers can evaluate and review such commodities, and major historical expansions of commercial networks can be traced to periods of specialization in marking and grading goods. This marking includes the act of branding itself, and long before the capitalist expansion of the Industrial Revolution, commodity cultures experienced intense periods of standardization and marking. The existence of a mark on a given product signals the productive process over the commodity by its creator and serves as an indication of standardization and presumable quality. David Wengrow contends that this form of marking also conveys a sense of authenticity and ownership that may be observed on goods as early as 3000 BCE.19 Within the paradigm of the brand economy, livestock is considered to be an exchangeable, standardized commodity that may be traded for an equal measure of the same good. In a commodity market, the individuality of an animal is subsidiary to its reification as a raw material, and the brand on it serves to underscore this cognitive shift. In the context of commodity theory in the transatlantic slave trade, branding is related to the skin and the body and to the wrapping of goods. It is part of the dialectical process between opposing forces or things: it serves to mediate between existence as a person or as a good in the marketplace.20 As Sven Beckert and others note, modern capitalism was born from the union of slavery and industry.21 And without branding, there could be no slave trade or mass chattel slavery. In Atlantic slavery, branding was an explicitly capitalist technology used to obtain and control commodified labor. Branding, then, is a reification of the scholarly concept of dehumanization. David Livingstone Smith engages with the various assumptions around dehumanization: that it can be the act of treating another with cruelty or the act of treating him or her as a mere object. These are mutually exclusive ideas. For Livingstone Smith, dehumanization is the conception of another as subhuman. Branding as both a dehumanizing and a commodifying act becomes crucial to this framework given the centrality of branding as a marker of the commodity as well as the commodified. This closely connects with works such as Daina Ramey Berry’s study of the worth and value of the enslaved but narrows the focus to this singular violent act, which denoted a transition from human to commodity.22 While body modifications, such as scarification and tattoo, served to fundamentally acculturate the body into a community, marking it permanently as human, to be branded

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was to be reduced to the level of an animal.23 Margo DeMello elaborates upon theories of human/animal divisions and commonalities, as well as on societies where the differentiation is all but invisible, necessitating body modification to socialize the body as visibly human. Western thought emphasizes a clear distinction between humans and animals and fears conflation of the two, and DeMello notes the acceptance of modifications to animal bodies as opposed to the markings that identify humans as cultural beings in these societies.24 The act of overt ostracization associated with branding throughout history limited its application on human flesh in the ancient and medieval worlds; branding was reserved for those truly and irretrievably cast out of society. Early modern England saw many examples of branding on the thumb. Spectacular facial branding was more rare, but examples can be found, such as William Prynne in 1634, who was tried for seditious libel and an attack upon the monarchy and had his forehead branded, nose slit, and ears cut off, in addition to an S and an L branded on either cheek to identify him as a “seditious libeler.”25 These examples of branding as exclusion neatly illustrate the paradoxical nature of branding particularly as it existed during the transatlantic slave trade and as it served to differentiate free from servile, asset from individual.26 Slavery itself has long been considered inherently paradoxical: a slave’s worth depends on his or her explicit humanity and associated skill set, but a slave is simultaneously property, bought and sold no differently than an animal.27 In Claude Meillassoux’s analysis of slavery, there are many examples illustrating the profound othering of those considered appropriate for enslavement.28 That othering naturally finds its logical climax in the act of branding, which permanently emblazons the enslaved as no different than a similarly branded animal or commodity.29 The trade itself exacerbated this othering and dehumanization; as critical analyses of accounting have shown, the use of numbers and financial paradigms have historically been used to reduce entire populations into statistics.30 Existing studies focusing on both the Caribbean (particularly under British control) and Brazil have closely explored the ramifications of how commodification of human individuals was articulated.31 Within the slave-trading nations, slaves were seen as assets that could be loaned out by those who owned them or worked to death as enslavers saw fit. Plantation records from the British slave societies in the Caribbean make it clear that this same cognitive dissonance was present in estimating the value of slaves; while slaves were recorded on the same stock documents as cattle or horses, they were also often sorted by training and occupation.32 Enslaved Africans with skills deemed important by plantation owners were valued more highly than those newly arrived from Africa.33 As Philip Morgan, Richard Fleischman, David Oldroyd, and Thomas Tyson have found in varying analyses of plantation documents, enslaved Africans were listed alongside horses, mules, and other farm animals, with identical categories including age, condition, and value, often in documents titled “Other Stock.”34 However,

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assessors from the Caribbean to Brazil reportedly valued enslaved Africans more highly if their personalities were deemed suitable or acceptable, emphasizing the fundamentally human elements of those being simultaneously assessed as commodities.35 The paradox is clear: a slave’s value was in his or her human capacity and ability, but by reducing a human to an asset registered by brand or number in a ledger book, a system of commodification was built and sustained for centuries. According to Ofelia Pinto and Brian West, “The most fundamental implication of recognizing humans as assets—reducing them to quantities and money values—is to change the way in which people are (un)seen.”36 This is the core paradox that underpinned the entire system. By permanently marking the enslaved body as other—as no longer human—with a brand otherwise used on animals, enslavers enacted marginalization and monetization on enslaved individuals.37 This point was not lost on the enslaved Africans themselves. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a formerly enslaved man, recalls in his 1854 memoir of his life when enslaved that a man “went around with a hot iron, and branded us the same as they would the heads of barrels or any other inanimate goods or merchandize.”38 This understanding of the slave brand is complicated by the fact that in earlier slave societies, including those Meillassoux describes, the act of branding was, in fact, quite rare. For all the language around dehumanization and othering and the necessary exclusion of the servile population, that permanent act of final exclusion through a brand seems to have been largely absent in slave societies from antiquity to the premodern period. As most early slave societies offered paths for the enslaved to transition into status as free citizens, it would have been nonsensical to permanently mark potential citizens with signifiers of dehumanization. It is only in nascent capitalist societies, in which servile status was assumed to be permanent, that a similarly permanent marker of servility could and therefore would be used to mark ownership over a vast number of laboring bodies considered less than human. Understanding the Scope Thus, it was only during the period of the transatlantic slave trade that the relative rarity of branding abruptly shifted: branding was commonly described on the African coastlines as a typical means of identifying ownership of enslaved Africans, and branding irons survive to this day at museums of slave estates and plantations in the Americas as testament to frequent usage. During the height of the trade, ships’ manifests, sale papers, manumission documents, and other such material provide ample evidence for the practice, making it clear that any previous reluctance to brand humans was evidently immaterial in the face of a system of commodification and profit. Despite the rich corpus around branding, however, there are challenges in connecting particular brands—the initials, stylized

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letters, and symbols seen in archival documents—with specific slave traders or companies, particularly in the Anglophone sources.39 The same is not the case for all evidence, however, and exploring the context surrounding branding beyond the Anglophone data offers insights into the trajectory of the enslaved, the rationale behind their marking, and those who worked to commodify them. A major piece of the puzzle for understanding how branding was used to control and commodify is still missing from the historical record at present. To date, there are no complete central registers within the early modern sources that clearly indicate which traders’ marks were on which enslaved individuals, and no scholars have completed such a resource spanning the multiple nationalities involved in the trade. From contemporary documents, both abolitionists and slave traders were able to rapidly recognize the provenance of a given brand, even beyond their own nationality, but this knowledge may have been subsequently destroyed or was so commonplace that it was not recorded in documents that survived. So, while the Liberated African Registers generated in the nineteenth century in Freetown, Sierra Leone, identify a number of recaptured people as bearing “Portuguese marks” on their bodies, typically on the right breast, the full meaning of this mark is never fully explained by the clerks making the record (fig. 3.1). What the mark resembled is drawn, but whose mark it was is never explained— it is only identified as “Portuguese,” and the clerks evidently considered this sufficient information. This is not atypical in the corpus of material held in the registers, but it is unfortunately characteristic of the fundamental problem with much of the Anglophone evidence that survives. Evidence from the Caribbean readily shows that slave estates often kept records of livestock that included humans alongside cattle and horses; it is reasonable to infer that the brand an owner applied to his bales of produce, cattle, and horses would resemble whatever brand he inflicted upon his human “property” as well. By that same logic, practicality would suggest a system of centrally registering a given brand to prevent others from forging it or claiming “property” that they had not purchased and that did not belong to them. Despite extensive references to the process of branding and considerable examples of brands drawn within manumission documents and recorded in runaway slave advertisements, drawing clear connections that concretely link a given brand to a given trader on a global, transnational scale is challenging, and research around the problem is in its early stages. Individual freedom narratives, such as those of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, demonstrate the complex trajectories traveled by enslaved individuals and the networks within the Americas after the initial slave landing, which further complicates the record of brands.40 This is the challenge of the study of branding within slavery: there is so much evidence of its application on humans, but there is very little at present to easily connect those who might register a brand within the systems of trade

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Fig. 3.1  Entry with “Portuguese mark” described on multiple recaptured people. Register of Liberated Africans (RLA), 1812–14, Sierra Leone Public Archives (SLPA), Fourah Bay College, Freetown.

or abolition. The British evidence is particularly daunting, as so little remains to concretely link enslaver, trader, or company to brand, but archival documents make it clear that English slave traders and companies were branding as much as any other nation operating at the time. To date, there is very little evidence uncovered in Anglophone literature that explicitly connects slave traders with the brands that they regularly applied to the men and women bought on the shores of Africa. While the registration of brands for livestock and commodities was a regular occurrence, no documents have been found to date that would similarly represent a complete register of slave traders and their registered brands. A different and far more formalized system, however, emerges within the Lusophone sources, in which considerably more evidence has survived concerning the system of branding and its application. Portugal and Brazil had immense impact on transatlantic slavery, conducting the trade for longer and on a larger scale than the other countries involved. In the southern Atlantic system, enslaved Africans were branded in specific ways and for specific purposes, and records were kept on slave vessels that explicitly connected them to merchants and sometimes to specific Brazilian plantation owners. Much that might be assumed but is inexplicably absent within the British written record is well documented within Portuguese and Brazilian records. This chapter offers context and an overview of this material as part of the effort to untangle the complex web of trade networks that drove the transatlantic slave trade and saw the commodification of roughly 12.5 million human beings. The manifests of slave ships are testament to the level of dehumanization that was at the core of the trade. Registers exist today that note how many slaves a given plantation owner might desire, what mark they were to be branded with and where, and for what purpose. After 1807, when slave ships began to be captured by the Royal Navy, some of the inventories of the slaves aboard were seized together with the ship’s papers and remain preserved in various records in the National Archives (UK). These captured ships’ papers provide some of the clearest evidence we have for the uses of brands aboard slave ships in the

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nineteenth century. Understanding these brands in totality requires further ongoing collaborative work. To illustrate the potential of this evidence, however, it is helpful to explore some individual cases. They serve to demonstrate variations in the location where slaves were branded, how enslaved Africans were categorized through their brands, and, lastly, how many of them died. Ship captains often used brands to maintain a running tally of the financial losses each death represented, and these documents have also survived. These people were not humans to those keeping tally of such assets but saleable commodities after their categorization and branding. The Practice of Branding on the African Coast Understanding the actual mechanics and process of branding as it was applied to enslaved Africans requires careful analysis of the sources. There were certain geographic locations at which enslaved persons might be branded, and the reasons for branding at each kind of location differed considerably. For many enslaved individuals brought to the West African coastline, which was dominated by English, Dutch, and French traders, coastal branding served a pragmatic and economic purpose. These first sites for branding would be at coastal bulking centers and forts where groups of enslaved Africans were brought from their points of capture or sale in the interior. Here, as many European accounts report, individuals were branded in order to differentiate groups of enslaved Africans from one another and to identify which trade company now “owned” them. The Dutch chief factor at Elmina Castle, Willem Bosman, provides an explanation of the meaning behind slave branding in the early eighteenth century: “In the mean while a burning Iron, with the Arms or Name of the Companies, lyes in the Fire; with which ours are marked on the Breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French, or others; (which are also marked with their Mark) and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse; at which they have a good hand.”41 Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg have recently shown how Johann Peter Oettinger, a German barber-surgeon involved in the transatlantic slave trade, recorded the method of branding captives on the coast of West Africa in 1693. Oettinger’s diary recounts: “The others, found to be without defects, had to kneel on the spot, and as 20, 30, 40, 50, or more knelt down all around, the right shoulder of each was uncovered and smeared with a little palm oil, then branded by the chief factor with a glowing iron, on which stood C. A. B. C., which means Electoral Brandenburg African Company.”42 Elsewhere, brands were used to associate the ship with the enslaved and branded individuals, as opposed to the company, but a specific location on the body was again mentioned. Thomas Phillips, who was buying enslaved Africans at the same time as another ship of the English Royal African Company, wrote in 1694: “Then we mark’d the slaves we had bought in the breast, or shoulder,

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with a hot iron, having the letter of the ship’s name on it, the place being before anointed with a little palm oil, which caus’d but little pain, the mark being usually well in four or five days, appearing very plain and white after.”43 Likewise, Thomas Hodgeson, a surgeon aboard one of the infamous slaver Humphrey Morice’s slave ships, the Katherine Galley, signed a document titled “An Account of What Slaves died or was lost by Accident Onboard the Katherine Galley” at the conclusion of a voyage from 1724 to 1725. The Katherine Galley was captained by William Snelgrave, and it transported enslaved Africans from Whydah to Barbados. Hodgeson enumerated each of the sixty-eight captives who died on the voyage in this “dead list,” including forty-two who died of “flux,” and five who died of smallpox. The far-right column for each of the dead notes the “Marke of each Slave.” The mark (brand) “I.G.” appears in this leger on twenty-one of the deceased captives. M. D. Mitchell argues that this specific mark indicates that “at some point, a slave had passed through the hold of the Italian Galley captained by Snelgrave’s colleague in Morice’s service, John Dagge— allowing Morice to adjust accordingly the commissions due to each captain.”44 Another example, Paul Erdmann Isert’s 1788 account of his journey to Guinea, also mentions branding “with the factor’s mark,” which presents a third meaning of the mark applied to an enslaved individual’s body.45 Yet another purpose for branding was the marking of “privilege slaves” of the captain and crew of slave ships. We know, for example, that the eighteenth-century slave trader Morice gave instructions to one of his subordinates, Captain Prince, permitting Prince to claim “four slaves of every 104 as ‘privilege slaves,’ the proceeds of whose sale he was entitled to keep as part of his compensation.” In 1719, Prince wrote to Morice to indicate that because he was unable to obtain gold or ivory on the Gold Coast, he compensated himself by branding his mark on six captives, more than specified in his instructions.46 In each case, the references to branding describe a functional means of identification applied to those being commodified. The branding, in effect, was the moment at which humans were inescapably marked as goods.47 Even in the event of subsequent escape, the brand represented a permanent trauma to a now-stigmatized body. These examples establish a general similarity that stretched from the Guinea coast to Angola and beyond; throughout the coastal trading regions, brands were applied not at the point of capture but upon transferal of captives into European hands on the coast as part of the reified processing of human individuals into chattel slaves. Within the southern Atlantic trade networks, evidence remains that clearly connects specific traders to brands, as seen in ship records that were seized by vessels of the Royal West African Squadron after the Act to Abolish Slavery in 1807. Such papers are testament to the frequency and the utility of branding as a marker of commodification within this lucrative trade (fig. 3.2). However, some differences between the methods and rationales for branding clearly are indicated, particularly in West Central Africa, and they deserve

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Fig. 3.2  Invoice of slaves, papers of the Brazilian brigantine “União,” 1829. On the left-hand column, note the brands recorded alongside the names of traders, the numbers of slaves, and the intended recipients. FO 315/42/13, National Archives, UK.

closer analysis since they represent key evidence in understanding the networks of responsibility for the trade. In Angola, for example, enslaved Africans were not branded once but reportedly several times, with each brand serving to categorize and dehumanize in a different way. Branding in British Colonies Once captives arrived in the Americas, they were often rebranded with new marks to indicate their status as “property” of specific plantations and owners. Laurent Dubois describes the omnipresence of branding in Saint-Domingue, noting that enslaved Africans in the French colony were frequently branded multiple times. Each time an enslaved person was sold, the process of branding was repeated. Dubois notes, “According to one seventeenth-century priest one man, ‘who had been sold and resold several times was in the end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.’”48 Likewise in the British colonies of the Caribbean, runaway slave advertisements attest to the ubiquity of branding in the eighteenth century. A recent study of such advertisements from eighteenth-century Jamaica by Douglass B. Chambers surveys the Weekly Jamaica Courant, the Jamaica Mercury, the Cornwall Chronicle, and other island newspapers and shows that a majority of these advertisements include brands (“plantation marks”) among the descriptions of runaways. The initials branded into the flesh of the runaways

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Fig. 3.3  Runaway slave advertisement, Weekly Jamaica Courant, July 30, 1718.

very often correspond to the initials of the person placing the advertisement or the estate from which the enslaved person had absconded. For example, an advertisement in the March 22, 1716, issue of the Weekly Jamaica Courant seeking “a slim Coromantee wench named phidela with a large sucking child, marked W T in one on the right shoulder” was placed by William Townshend, from whom Phidela had run away. William Townshend was presumably the namesake of the “W T” brand.49 A recent study by Merrick Robinson of more than 2,800 runaway slave advertisements in English, North American, and Caribbean newspapers found a number of branding references, particularly in Jamaica (thirty-three of three hundred).50 These references included advertisements, such as one from the Weekly Jamaica Courant of July 30, 1718 (fig. 3.3). The subscriber sought a runaway named Darby, “mark’d W.P.,” who had “run away from the Estate of William Pusey, Esq. in Vere [Jamaica].” Here again, the letters of the brand correlate with the name of the master of the estate from which Darby escaped.51 Enslaved Africans would sometimes accompany their enslavers from British colonies in the Americas to Britain where they might also abscond. The digital database project Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century has compiled a remarkable inventory of eighteenth-century runaway advertisements from British newspapers, many of which also attest to the frequent use of branding. For example, one advertisement placed in the Edinburgh Evening Courant in 1746 sought the recapture of an unnamed runaway marked with the initials “G.M.” on his shoulder (fig. 3.4).52 In a recent compelling and comprehensive survey of nearly 1,000 runaway advertisements describing 1,200 individual fugitives from Jamaica and Barbados

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Fig. 3.4  Runaway slave advertisement, Edinburgh Evening Courant, December 9, 1746.

from 1718 to 1815, Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy argues convincingly that references in these advertisements to “deformities, impairments, disfigurements, amputations, and marks of punishments all increased, whereas branding significantly declined over the final period (1796–1815).” This did not mean, however, that the practice of branding had fallen out of practice on Caribbean sugar plantations “but rather that slaveowners were more conscious of how runaway advertisements were being used by abolitionists as evidence of slavery’s disabling and disfiguring violence.”53 Writing in 1824, Thomas Clarkson used runaway slave advertisements to highlight the brutality of slavery on Caribbean plantations in an abolitionist tract, quoting advertisements seeking runaways from a single issue of the Royal Jamaica Gazette to condemn the mistreatment of Africans in Jamaica. Clarkson notes, “Numbers of them appear to have been branded with the initials of their owners’ names, and other marks, on the naked flesh, with a heated iron, in the same manner as young horses or cattle are branded, when they are turned into our forests.” He lists numerous examples of runaways who were described with various brands, including one named Tom, who is “said to be 5 feet 2 inches high, and marked apparently RG on the shoulders, and PYBD on the right, and apparently LB, on the left breast. Thus we see in this last instance one individual branded with no less than ten capital letters.”54 Hunt-Kennedy argues that slaveowners, aware of abolitionist criticism, “shifted their public discourse to avoid those critiques.”55 In Brazil, as in British colonies, branding was also used as a form of punishment. Walter Hawthorne notes that laws passed in Pará, Brazil, in the mid-eighteenth century authorized officials to brand enslaved Africans who had run away to Maroon communities (macambos).56 A century earlier, the infamous Act for the Governing of Negroes, passed in Barbados on August 8, 1688,

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authorized justices of the peace to punish enslaved Africans who were convicted of a second offense of petty larceny of goods valued under twelve pence to “have his or their Noses slit, and be branded in the Forehead with a hot Iron, that the Mark thereof may remain.”57 Hunt-Kennedy notes that by 1731, Barbados law ordered that individuals attempting to run away a third time would receive thirty-nine lashes on their back and “be branded in the right check with a hot Iron, marked with the letter R.” Thus branding could serve as a permanent form of identification marking the enslaved both with a status as “disobedient” and as “property.”58 Branding in Portuguese Africa As one of the major suppliers of enslaved Africans during the whole period of the transatlantic trade, West Central Africa occupies an important place with respect to evidence. Portuguese traders had established close connections with the Kingdom of Kongo early in the sixteenth century, and eventually, settlements developed nearby in what is now Angola. Luanda, Benguela, and Cabinda became hubs of the trade in the south Atlantic, and complex systems of exchange were established. While the societal, demographic, and cultural changes have been extensively studied, for the purposes of understanding branding and its use, application, and scale, the trade between Angola and Brazil presents rich material. Evidence of how branding was applied within Angola is varied but mentioned throughout the literature, and well-drawn examples of brands are visible in slaveship manifests, along with requests from Brazil for particular numbers of slaves and clear correlation between the slave traders, their victims, and their brands. Within the accounting books of the period, branding was understood to be commonplace, and brands were applied in stages. This was very much a system in which humans were habitually and regularly made into commodities on a mass scale, and the sheer scope of the trade offers ample evidence for scholars today who are reconstructing connections between slave traders and specific brands. Roquinaldo Ferreira describes how, prior to being shipped to Brazil, enslaved Africans were regularly branded four times. If they came from the interior, they would be branded with a sign that identified the merchant (sertanejo) sending them to Luanda; this sign was also used to identify runaway slaves. Officials known as capitão das marcas monitored “all individuals who entered their jurisdiction. If they found someone who had been branded, they would send them to Luanda” for further investigation. Once they arrived in Luanda, enslaved Africans were branded on their right chest with a royal stamp, which certified that taxes for shipment to Brazil had been paid. Slaves who had been baptized were also branded with a cross. They would then

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be branded a fourth time, either on their left chest or arm, to indicate the name of the merchant shipping them to Brazil.59 It is important to note that the “royal stamp” mentioned here was directly connected to approval of taxation and registration; in effect, this brand served to identify enslaved Africans as taxable assets. They were not just made chattel at this point but were officially commodified in the eyes of the Portuguese crown and officials working on its behalf. This complex but well-recognized system can be seen when we examine the account books of the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão, the crown-chartered company largely responsible for overseeing the slave trade to northern Brazil in the eighteenth century. These records describe the direct costs of the enslavement process within Angola: “The branding of the slaves is not explicit in any of the analysed cargos, but on 4 June 1761 the company addressed a complaint to the King about the behaviour of the officials of the customs house (alfandega) of Maranhão. The company stated that, along with other fees, for the branding of each slave, it was being charged the following amounts: ‘60 reis for the Provedor [superintendent], 85 reis for the Escrivão [clerk], 25 reis for the Meirinho [bailiff or attendant] and 15 reis for the porteiro [warder] of the alfandega.’”60 In this discussion of accounts, branding was of course not challenged as such—but the fees charged to do it were contested. Branding also served another role as a punctuation point of contended identities in the region. The initial point of branding upon arrival into the Portuguese colony involved an interrogation concerning belief and origin. There were important differences between Africans who were understood to be exempt from enslavement and those who were able to be enslaved. Due to the series of relationships the Portuguese had built with local powers such as Kongo, it was vital at times to preserve regional authority and diplomatic ties. Unfortunately, the profits to be had in the slave trade made kidnapping and banditry viable avenues of gain for the opportunistic, and the system clearly was built to try to forestall mistakes as well as to regulate the mass commodification of captives. Mariana Candido describes this procedure more clearly, explaining: As a way to overcome the enslavement of vassals and free black people, the Portuguese colonial administration introduced in 1769 the inquisidor da liberdade (“interrogator of freedom”) to “examine the slaves coming from the interior to be sold and embarked to Brazil, hoping that no free person is among the slaves.” Manoel Gonçalves, the first priest to occupy the position in Benguela, was in charge of baptisms and of inquiring into the conditions of enslavement of each captive. If no claim of original freedom was found, the priest baptised them and then branded them with the royal mark, confirming their slave status.61

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Other scholars offer examples that support the need for this important process of interrogation and determination of origin. Kidnapping and betrayal could easily lead to the capture of those who were manifestly understood to be protected from enslavement. And clearly, these efforts were not always implemented or effective. After a letter from King Afonso I in 1526 complained that freeborn people of Kongo were being wrongfully enslaved and branded for sale—even including his own relatives—efforts were made to ensure that no one was exported without royal consent.62 Such efforts were clearly only intermittently successful. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the nephew of the king of Kongo Garcia V, Dom Afonso, was sent to Luanda to be educated and was later joined there by one of Garcia’s sons, Dom Pedro. Together, these princes decided to abduct an ambassador from Kongo and sell him into slavery. This ambassador, who regularly brought slaves to be sold at Luanda and was thus an important representative of Portugal’s oldest African trading partner, was shipped to a plantation in Brazil. Efforts were made to find and retrieve the wrongfully enslaved ambassador, and the two young men were returned to Kongo from Luanda in disgrace to face the king. Examples such as these demonstrate how easily even a person who was not legally subject to enslavement could be enslaved and the need within Portuguese West Central Africa for systemic oversight of such sales. In some cases, the discovery of freeborn status came as the enslaved persons were being branded with the royal stamp.63 Branding along the West Central African coastline was therefore representative of a systemized trade designed to preserve its relationships within the region. The association with identity was also central to branding in the southern Atlantic trade. The first branding came upon the presumable categorization of those who were freeborn—and was performed by a priest. It reified the servile as chattel, permanently identifying those who were freeborn and those who could legitimately be sold or considered to be royal assets suitable to be lent out for gain. This was a crucial moment in which dehumanization first took place, reducing individuals to goods that could be then loaded onto ships bound for Brazil and sold there. Evidence from the trade makes it clear that there were many reasons throughout the major points of the trade to brand. Understanding these justifications illustrates aspects of the system itself and illuminates the complexities inherent to such a global network. The Elizabeth (1812) We close this chapter with an example of one voyage by a slave ship from the early nineteenth century that illustrates the specific applications of branding. One of the principal purposes of branding in the south Atlantic was to distinguish

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captives procured by multiple purchasers who would be confined in large mixed groups in the hold of slave ships. When these ships arrived at their destinations, merchants wanted to know which of the captives “belonged” to which owners. Brands permitted merchants to consign goods to a captain to be exchanged for captives in Africa and subsequently have those captives mixed together below decks to be sorted out on arrival at their final destination. Nineteenth-century observers attest to this practice. John Duncan notes, “Each slave-dealer uses his own mark, so that when the vessel arrives at her destination, it is easily ascertained to whom those who died belonged.”64 Such arrangements required captains and supercargoes to diligently record the sale of consigned goods and the exchange for particular numbers of captives. Historians João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho have recently argued that branding irons used to mark trade goods coming from Brazil were also used on enslaved Africans. They note, “On the way back, the same branding irons would be used to mark the bodies of the captives that shipper had purchased.”65 Thus, records such as ships’ manifests can offer a pathway to discern identities and origins of brands. One ship that presents this opportunity is the Elizabeth, which was captured at the Cape of Good Hope by the HMS President on December 29, 1812. The Elizabeth was bound from Mozambique to Rio De Janeiro, laden with 442 enslaved Africans and forty-two bales of hemp. Along its voyage, the Elizabeth became stranded in Simon’s Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. The enslaved Africans were removed to Simon’s Town, and the ship was brought into Cape Town harbor, where it was condemned as a lawful prize. The judge at the Vice Admiralty Court at Cape Town pronounced the captives “to have been Slaves, treated, carried, kept, and detained as such, at the Time of the Seizure thereof, and by Interlocutory Decree condemned” them “to His Majesty, his Heirs and Successors.”66 In January 1813, Paulo Joze Branco, the master of the Elizabeth, submitted a claim to the Vice Admiralty Court at the Cape of Good Hope, which was subsequently appealed to the High Court of Admiralty in London. Branco made the appeal on behalf of Francisco Joze Fernandes Barbosa of São Sebastião, the owner of the ship, and Antonio da Silva Caldeiro, a merchant from São Sebastião who was owner of the hemp, as well as Sexamo Primogi, a merchant of Mozambique who was owner of a box of tortoiseshell on board. The appeal also listed the Prince Regent of Portugal as owner of nineteen of the 442 slaves and described the remainder of the captives as belonging to various Portuguese subjects.67 Appeals of this type generated a printed set of “appeals papers” that were drawn from the original manuscripts seized aboard the ship. In the case with the Elizabeth, both the original manuscript appeals papers and the printed papers are preserved. Thanks to Branco’s appeal, we have details about this slave voyage that might otherwise have been lost.

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Fig. 3.5  Extracts from the registry of His Majesty’s Vice Admiralty Court, Cape of Good Hope, “The Elizabeth,” 1812. HCA 42/405, National Archives, UK.

One remarkable document seized from the Elizabeth contains an inventory (“schedule”) of 273 of the captives, indicating the marks with which they had been branded and what those brands meant (fig. 3.5). For example, twenty-five of the enslaved Africans aboard had been marked on the left breast with the letter L with the letter O superimposed on the stem of the L (such that it looked like “Lo”). This brand, we are told, indicates that these twenty-five captives were consigned to Manuel Lopez da Silva (hence the “Lo”) “to be delivered to Joze Antonio D’Alviera e Silva in his absence on his order.” Twelve captives had been branded with the letter G on their left breast, indicating that they had been consigned to Guilherme Jacques Godfrey (whose name appears in Brazilian Ministry of Finance reports as late as 1849). The general trend of these marks was to represent some portion of the merchant’s name, usually the surname, in an initial or pair of letters. However, there were numerous exceptions. The letter A had been branded onto the right breast of forty-one captives and onto the left breast of another eleven captives who had been consigned to Paulo Joze Branco to be delivered to Francisco Joze Francisco Barboza. A stylized heart had been branded on the left breast of eighteen captives consigned to Luis Castodio to be delivered to Salvador Gaustato, and a simple heart had been branded onto the right arms of sixteen captives consigned to Sabastiao Joze Rois to be delivered to Domingos Gomez Louriero & Sons. The same inventory lists 157 captives bearing various brands who were shipped to Rio from Mozambique by Colonel Constantino Alves da Silva, a resident of Mozambique. These brands include only one that would plausibly have designated Alves da Silva’s initials, a stylized A with a smaller C embedded into the left diagonal of the A. This brand was placed on the right breast of eightytwo of the captives, which suggests that the brands may have corresponded to both the merchants in Brazil who consigned the goods to be exchanged for captives and the merchants in Mozambique who provided them.68 This evidence demonstrates the importance of the location of brands on the bodies of captives,

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but it also provides a clear source of information explicitly connecting owners of brands with those bearing them. Reflections Branding was an act of profound violence. It served to marginalize and ostracize the branded from the ranks of human and to transform them into assets. While reconstructing the complex network of trade that connected the Americas internally and to Africa and Europe is daunting due to the global scale involved, branding offers a means through which scholars can now begin to uncover responsibility and culpability. The evidence at present from the British traders and companies involved in the trade is challenging because, while there are ample brands to be found, there are few ways to connect them with specific individuals. The rich data from ship logs within the Portuguese trade offer scholars another way to get at these interwoven trajectories. In these data, we can identify specific traders and connect them with their drawn brands, allowing for cross-references to other sources of information from Vice Admiralty Courts, manumission documents, or sale papers. Documenting when specific brands were applied to specific sites on the body, when other marks were placed onto other sites, and where and when brands were not used deepens our understanding of those inflicting the brands as well those who bore them. Branding was both a deeply symbolic act that served as the repudiation of an individual’s humanity as they experienced commodification and simultaneously a completely pragmatic event driven by economic considerations. By examining individual cases, such as the Elizabeth, we can see how branding served to identify those who had been made into assets and how it permitted them to be tracked and classified. Encapsulated within the ledgers of economic losses and gains is the implicit crime against humanity; through records of humans turned into branded goods, we are reminded of the magnitude and trauma that the slave trade represents. Notes 1. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33. 2. Jean-Pierre Warnier, “Royal Branding and the Techniques of the Body, the Self, and Power in West Cameroon,” in Cultures of Commodity Branding, ed. Andrew Bevan and David Wengrow (2010; repr., New York: Routledge, 2016), 155–66, at 155. 3. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 26 (June 2008): 2–6, at 2 and 5, respectively.

4. Ibid., 6. 5. Ibid., 4. See also Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead Book Revisited,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 208–15. 6. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 13–16. 7. Katrina H. B. Keefer, “Marked by Fire: Brands, Slavery, and Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 40, no. 4 (2019): 667–70.

Following the Trail of the Slave Trade 8. Intra-American Slave Trade Database, accessed June 17, 2021, http://‌slavevoyages‌.org. 9. C. P. Jones, “Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987): 139–55, at 141, 152–55. Jones describes tattooing in antiquity and compares it to late eighteenth-century travelers’ accounts of the inscription of marks in the Middle East. He further notes that scarification was well known by the Greeks and Romans as common to Africans. While Jones provides an excellent series of examples of possible branding in the ancient world, his study demonstrates that human branding was, in practice, rare enough that most examples of its use are dubious and poorly documented. He further shows that references to stigma in ancient texts almost always describe penal or other tattooing, not branding. 10. Jean Blancou, “A History of the Traceability of Animals and Animal Products,” Revue Scientifique et Technique 20, no. 2 (2001): 413–25. 11. Percy Handcock, The Code of Hammurabi (New York: MacMillan, 1920), 22, 35. 12. Early modern England saw many such brands inflicted upon criminals, such as the example of William Prynne, discussed below. See Susan Dwyer Amussen, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 1 (1995): 1–34, at 6–7. On convict branding on the shoulder in France and its relationship with other commercial marking practices, see Katherine Dauge-Roth, “Stigma and State Control,” in Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 217–56. 13. The British Army stringently maintained that it used a spring-loaded tattooing machine, but the letters marked upon drunken soldiers or deserters were often called brands, and the process branding. See Peter Burroughs, “Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815–1870,” English Historical Review 100, no. 396 (1985): 545–71, at 570. On the rise and fall of actual facial branding in early eighteenth-century England, see the contribution of Craig Koslofsky to this volume, and Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, “Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005): 39–64, at 47. 14. See Morgan and Rushton, “Visible Bodies,” 48, and Koslofsky’s contribution to this volume.

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15. Michel Thévoz, The Painted Body (New York: Rizzoli International, 1984), 50. Thévoz argues that the use of branding to ostracize arises with centralized states and kingdoms. 16. John Dickinson, The Writings of John Dickinson: Political Writings, 1764–1774 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895), 1:495, and F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1980): 4–28, at 14. Okoye elaborates on how colonial rebels deemed the experience of enslavement as the ultimate horror and used terminology consistent with the abuse they visited upon enslaved bodies to fuel their desire for independence. 17. Enid Schildkrout clarifies that branding has generally been associated with involuntary marking and denial of personhood, although contemporary body modification culture has been subverting that semantic (“Inscribing the Body,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 [2004]: 319–44, at 323). 18. Frank S. Fanselow, “The Bazaar Economy or How Bizarre is the Bazaar Really?,” Man, n.s., 25, no. 2 (1990): 250–65, at 252. 19. David Wengrow, “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 1 (2008): 7–34, at 11. 20. Warnier, “Royal Branding and the Techniques of the Body,” 166. 21. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2014), 98–110. 22. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon, 2017), 207–9. 23. Thévoz, Painted Body. 24. Margo DeMello, “Blurring the Divide: Human and Animal Body Modifications,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, ed. Frances E. Mascia-Lees (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 338–53. 25. Amussen, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power,” 6–7. 26. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 27. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9. 28. Ibid., 75. 29. Keefer, “Marked by Fire.”

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30. Ofelia Pinto and Brian West, “Accounting, Slavery and Social History: The Legacy of an Eighteenth-Century Portuguese Chartered Company,” Accounting History 22, no. 2 (2017): 141–66, at 143. 31. Richard K. Fleischman, David Oldroyd, and Thomas N. Tyson, “Plantation Accounting and Management Practices in the US and the British West Indies at the End of Their Slavery Eras,” Economic History Review 64, no. 3 (2011): 765–97. 32. Philip D. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750–1751,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1995): 47–76. 33. Richard K. Fleischman, David Oldroyd, and Thomas N. Tyson, “Monetising Human Life: Slave Valuations on US and British West Indian Plantations,” Accounting History 9, no. 2 (2004): 35–62, at 46. 34. Morgan, “Slaves and Livestock.” 35. Lúcia Lima Rodrigues, Russell James Craig, Paulo Schmidt, and José Luis Santos, “Documenting, Monetising and Taxing Brazilian Slaves in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Accounting History Review 25, no. 1 (2015): 43–67, at 53. 36. Pinto and West, “Accounting, Slavery and Social History,” 159. 37. Keefer, “Marked by Fire.” 38. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2009). 39. Keefer, “Marked by Fire.” 40. Law and Lovejoy, Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. 41. Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts. Containing a Geographical, Political and Natural History of the Kingdoms and Countries: With a Particular Account of the Rise, Progress and Present Condition of all the European Settlements upon that Coast; and the Just Measures for Improving the Several Branches of the Guinea Trade Illus. with several cutts; Written originally in Dutch by Willem Bosman . . . And now faithfully done into English; To which is prefix’d, an exact map of the whole coast of Guinea, that was not in the original (London: J. Knapton, 1705), 364. 42. Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of

Johann Peter Oettinger (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 43. 43. Thomas Phillips, Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694, from England to Cape Mounseradoe in Africa; and thence along the Coast of Guiney to Whidaw, the Island of St. Thomas, and so forward to Barbadoes; In which is contained an exact Account of the Longitudes, Latitudes &c., As also a Cursory Account of the Country, People, Forts, Trade &c., in A Collection of Voyages and Travels some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts Others Now First Published in English in Six Volumes with a General Preface, giving an Account of the Progress of Navigation, from its first Beginning (London: Churchill, 1782), 6:218. 44. M. D. Mitchell, The Prince of Slavers: Humphrey Morice and the Transformation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1698–1732 (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 165–66. 45. Selena Axelrod Winsnes, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Edmann Isert’s Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia (Oxford: African Books Collective, 2007), 98. 46. Humphry Morice to Lawrence Prince, July 20, 1719, and Lawrence Prince to Humphry Morice, October 17, 1719, both letters quoted in Mitchell, Prince of Slavers, 123. 47. On this process, see also Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 33–64. 48. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 39. 49. Douglass B. Chambers, “Runaway Slaves in Jamaica: Eighteenth Century” (unpublished manuscript, 2013), 5. 50. Merrick Robinson, “Branding in Eighteenth-Century Runaway Advertisements” (unpublished manuscript, 2020), 17. 51. Advertisement, Weekly Jamaica Courant, July 30, 1718. 52. Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century, University of Glasgow, accessed July 13, 2022, https://‌www‌.runaways‌.gla‌.ac‌.uk. 53. Stephanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 97–99.

Following the Trail of the Slave Trade 54. Thomas Clarkson, The Argument “That the Colonial Slaves are better off than the British Peasantry,” Answered from the Royal Jamaica Gazette of June 21 (London: Kieght & Bagster, ca. 1824), 27; quoted in Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death, 97–98. A copy of the original tract is available at Wellcome Collection, accessed July 13, 2022, https://‌well comecollection‌.org‌/works‌/y99ef8cr. Clarkson’s math is interesting, as, in fact, he only describes eight letters, but he writes in italic-emphasized letters about ten capital letters present. 55. Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death, 98. 56. Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 202. 57. William Rawlin, The Laws of Barbados (London, 1699), 161. On the first offence of petty larceny, enslaved Africans were to be “publickly and severely whipped, not exceeding Forty Lashes.” 58. Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death, 61–62. 59. Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil During the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 122. 60. Pinto and West, “Accounting, Slavery and Social History,” 154. 61. Mariana P. Candido, “African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal

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Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830,” Slavery and Abolition, 32, no. 3 (2011): 447–59, at 450. 62. Linda Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491–1800,” Journal of African History 50, no. 1 (2009): 1–22, at 4. 63. José C. Curto, “Experiences of Enslavement in West Central Africa,” Histoire sociale 41, no. 82 (2008): 381–415, at 404. 64. John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa in 1845 & 1846 (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 1:143, quoted in Law and Lovejoy, Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 150. 65. João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 112. 66. High Court of Appeals for Prizes: Papers, Loose printed prize appeal from the Vice-Admiralty Court of the Cape of Good Hope, Captured ship: Elizabeth, HCA 42/534/33, National Archives, UK (TNA). 67. Ibid. 68. Manolo Florentino, “Aspectos sociodemograficos da presenca dos escravos Mocambicanos no Rio de Janeiro (c.1790–c.1850),” in Nas rotas do Império: Eixos mercantis, tráfico e relações sociais no mundo português, ed. João Fragoso et al. (Vitória: EDUFES, 2014), 177–224.

pa r t i i

M a r k s of Faith

Chapter 4

Jerusalem Under the Skin The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos

Mordechay Lewy

The goal of this essay is to elucidate the phenomenon of the Jerusalem tattoo—in particular, its role as a religious mark for European pilgrims in Jerusalem—beginning in the sixteenth century.1 Before the Polynesian term tatau was introduced to Europe in 1769 by reports from the Cook voyage, the Jerusalem tattoo was still called a “Jerusalem mark.” Travelers such as Gabriel Sagard, Engelbert Kaempfer, and William Dampier cited the Jerusalem mark as a familiar reference point for their readers when they described the tattoos they observed among the peoples of North America, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines.2 Until recent decades, research on tattoos has remained almost solely in the domain of anthropologists, who have focused on their role in tribal communities outside of the European continent. From the middle of the nineteenth century, research on tattooed Europeans focused on the fields of criminology and forensic medicine. Both fields associated the practice of tattooing with “criminal subcultures” and lower societal strata.3 More recent research has shown that the tattoo is a much broader phenomenon. From the sixty-one tattooed marks on the mummified body of the prehistoric alpine iceman Ötzi to the popular phenomenon of the present day, the tattoo is associated with a global range of cultures across much of human history.4 Evidence from mummies and frescos indicates

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that tattoos played a role in ancient Egyptian culture, especially among female Nubians.5 They were also present in ancient Greek and Roman culture, albeit for a different purpose—slaves and criminals were tattooed with stigmata to ensure that they could not escape from captivity or from their masters (branding with a hot iron was reserved for livestock).6 Tattooing became widely disseminated in the ancient Orient and among the communities at the periphery of the Roman Empire, mostly as a coercive—not a voluntary—practice.7 Centrally organized political administrations in antiquity used tattoos to mark slaves, soldiers, and other officials as subordinates.8 Tattoos also indicated religious affiliation, social status, and identity in antiquity but lacked an association with sacrality. In addition, they were thought to have magical powers and healing properties.9 Their wide popularity prompted monotheistic religions, which sought separation and distance from pagan cultures, to adopt a normative position on their administration. In biblical Judaism, a set of prohibitions was initiated against pagan practices, including tattooing: “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor imprint any marks upon you: I am the lord” (Leviticus 19:26–28).10 The Mishnah Tractate Makkot asserts that he who writes upon his skin and then inscribes into his skin what he wrote should be flogged. Other sages of the Mishnah, however, offer more moderate views: Rabbi Shimon, for example, states that only those who tattoo themselves in the name of a pagan deity should be punished.11 What had remained ambiguous in Rabbinic Judaism became a general ban in the medieval era. Maimonides attributed the prohibition of tattooing to pagan tattoo rituals. His argument in the Mishne Tora (book 1:12) is more ethnocentric than theological since tattooing had not been a matter of sacrality. The catechism Shulchan Aruch followed Maimonides, and, hence, Jewish Orthodox law (Halakha) is clear on the matter, even if it is not always followed in practice.12 In the Vulgate, the term stigma appears once in the New Testament, in Paul’s letter to the Galatians 6:17: “For I bear on my body the marks [stigmata] of Jesus.”13 It remains an open question whether the stigmata are a metaphor for Paul’s allegiance to Jesus or, as is more likely, a reference to the wounds that were inflicted on him, as described in 2 Corinthians 4:10–11, 6:4–6, and 11:23–27. Some English-language Bibles have translated stigmata as “branding marks,” but this is not accurate.14 As early Christianity spread through the Middle East, it began to reach populations with ancient tattooing traditions. The desire to remain distinct from the pagans, as well as to enable missionary efforts to convert them, contributed to the development of an ambivalent and pragmatic approach toward tattooing in early Christianity.15 When Christianity was elevated to the official state religion of the late Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine promulgated an edict in 316 CE that substantially limited Caligula’s practice by disallowing the tattooing of the faces of condemned persons. Tattoos imprinted on the feet and arms of the condemned were still permitted. The reason given for this new

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attitude reflected Christian and Hellenistic inclinations alike: “Tattooing the face should be restricted, since it is shaped in heaven’s beautiful image.”16 It is interesting to note that Islamic prohibitions of tattooing adopted a similar approach. In the Sura 4:119 (al-Nisˉaʾ, Women), Satan states, “I shall command them, and they will change Allah’s creation.” A common interpretation of this verse is that tattoos harm God’s creation with indelible markings. The hadith collection of Sahih al-Bukhari includes almost sixty sayings (with duplications) cursing women who practice tattooing and who receive tattoos.17 The tattoo (wasm) was intended solely as a method for marking animals. It appears, however, that tattooing customs persisted despite Islamic prohibitions, spreading among Bedouin women and in rural communities. The farther we progress into the Middle Ages, the more the meaning of the term stigma changes. It eventually becomes associated with the wounds of Christ’s passion.18 Comparable marks, real or imagined, abounded since the High Middle Ages, beginning with the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi. Latin terms characterizing body markings in Europe include cicatrices (scars), signa (signs), and sphragis or characteres (seals). There was no term for tattooing as such— describing indelible, deliberate marking on the body with pigment inserted into the skin—because this practice had fallen into oblivion in Europe beyond the Alps after the fall of the western Roman Empire. It was standard for crusaders to have the cross sewn onto their gowns, in accordance with Pope Urban II’s call to crusade in 1095. Some crusaders cut or branded their flesh in the form of a cross; others claimed that such marks were imprinted miraculously, as a divine sign that they had been chosen by God as martyrs.19 In the years 1464 and 1498, we find in the registers of Durham Priory evidence of branding pilgrims with a cross, “as is the custom,” before they depart for Jerusalem.20 In 1483, the Dominican friar Felix Fabri met a pilgrim who had a wheel of Saint Catherine branded onto his right shoulder.21 A Dutch autopsy report for the corpse of Jan van Aerts, from Mechelen, who traveled twice to Jerusalem (1484 and 1488), cites brand marks on his shoulders and chest.22 As the practice of pilgrimage to various sites grew in all parts of Christendom, it became common to make one’s destination visible through the use of badges or tokens, often pinned onto the brim of a hat or attached to pilgrimage robes.23 The end of the Middle Ages saw a change in the symbol associated with pilgrimage to the Holy Land.24 This change took place gradually and was brought about by the continuous presence of Franciscan monks at holy sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem beginning in the fourteenth century. The Franciscans stationed in the Holy Land were known as Custodia terrae sanctae, and their emblem was the Jerusalem cross, a large Greek cross with four smaller crosses in its quadrants. In heraldry this cross is known as a cross potent. The Franciscans interpreted the five component crosses of the Jerusalem cross as symbols of the five wounds inflicted upon Christ during his Crucifixion. Their emblem

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Fig. 4.1  Coat of arms of the Franciscan Custodia terrae sanctae, 2008. Digital image © Custodia Terra Santa.

also references the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi, the order’s founder. In the coat of arms of the Custodia, the stigmatized arm of Saint Francis, interwoven with the wounded arm of Jesus, stands above the Jerusalem cross (fig. 4.1).25 To secure their influence over European pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Franciscan custodians promoted the Jerusalem cross as the quasi-official symbol of European pilgrims coming to Jerusalem. Their success can be seen, for example, in a 1541 painting of a fraternity of Jerusalem pilgrims from Utrecht that displays the Jerusalem cross (fig. 4.2). The first European pilgrim known to have been tattooed with a cross was Alexander von Pappenheim. During his pilgrimage from 1563 to 1564, he asked an Arab in Jaffa to prick his skin with a needle in such a way that the wound formed the shape of a small cross, a service for which he paid one medin.26 The account of English traveler Fynes Moryson (1566–1630), who visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem in 1596, provides, to my knowledge, the second-earliest reference to these European pilgrim tattoos. As a proud Protestant, Moryson did not receive a pilgrimage tattoo nor did he become a Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, a related tradition. In the fifteenth century, the Franciscan custodians had developed

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Fig. 4.2  Jan van Scorel, Portraits of Five Members of the Utrecht Jerusalem Brotherhood, ca. 1541. Oil on panel, 78.5 × 164.1 cm. Centraal Museum Utrecht, 2376. Photo © Centraal Museum Utrecht.

a ceremony in the church of the Holy Sepulcher for bestowing this knighthood. With time, the Jerusalem cross also became a symbol of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher.27 Moryson justified his refusal of the traditions by explaining that he did not wish, upon returning to England, to be seen as having submitted to Catholic customs.28 From this, we can surmise that the Franciscan control over pilgrimage to certain important sites in the Holy Land, as well as the practices associated with it—such as the receipt of a pilgrimage tattoo and the ceremony of induction into the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher—was well known in Europe at the time. This control was a thorn in the side of many Protestants.29 A third tattoo account comes from the German pilgrim Martinus Seusenius, from Franconia, who visited Jerusalem and the surrounding areas from August 13 to 28, 1602.30 On August 20, Seusenius visited Bethlehem. Five days later, a “Trucheman” (i.e., a dragoman) from Bethlehem tattooed a cross onto his arm for the price of three medin.31 It is highly probable that Seusenius acquired the tattoo in Jerusalem near the pilgrims’ hostel—travel to Bethlehem was considered dangerous at that time.32 What is new in this account is that the tattoo was given by a dragoman from Bethlehem, whose job it was to act as a guide for pilgrims. As will become clear in the following discussion, the Bethlehem dragomans maintained a close relationship with the Franciscans. The important question, however, is where the idea of tattooing European pilgrims arose.33 It is obviously a departure from any coercive body marking known throughout medieval Europe. We should bear in mind that marks of pilgrimage, be they tattoos or brand marks, are voluntary acts. For anyone who attempts a structural explanation of

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Fig. 4.3  Illustration of tattoos of Arab women from Palestine. From W. M. Thompson, The Land and the Book (New York: Harper, 1868), 92.

the origin of pilgrim tattoos, it is tempting to look to the wounds of Jesus—especially considering the physical pain involved in receiving a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross. And it is true that such an association is reasonable and is presupposed by some scholars—without specific evidence, however.34 In my own research, I have found only one account that would substantiate this notion: Thomas Coryate (1577?–1617), the erudite jester of King James I’s oldest son Henry, reports that he received a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross (in Jerusalem) during his pilgrimage to Palestine from 1612 to 1614. Edward Terry, the chaplain of the English ambassador to the Mughal Empire (later who witnessed Coryate’s death), noted of Coryate that “this poor man would pride himself in beholding of those [tattooed] characters, and seeing them would often speak those words of Saint Paul, written to the Galatians, ‘I bear in my body the marks of Lord Jesus.’”35 But this reference to the suffering of Jesus is, at most, indirect. In Palestine, as well as in other regions of the Middle East, tattooing traditions endured among Eastern Orthodox Christians and expanded in the Muslim population. Figure 4.3 shows tattoo designs used by Arab women in Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Indeed, the practice of body marking with tattoos, alongside branding, piercing, and cutting, remained in the East through the Middle Ages and into the beginning of the modern era.36 In 1534, shortly before the appearance of pilgrimage tattoos on European skin, the French traveler Greffin Affagart summed up the phenomenon of body marking in the Orient as follows: “They [the Ethiopians] understand the fire materially and for this reason they imprint with a hot iron a certain sign on the forehead. At present, the Ethiopians take it as well, but they no longer esteem it as a sacrament of baptism; rather, it is seen as a sign of distinction between themselves and the nonbelievers. Other Christians do the same. The Turks and Moors also bear certain marks or signs on their foreheads, hands, and arms, which represent something of their beliefs. Similarly, the Christians have a cross, Jesus, or Maria.”37 On the one hand, Affagart does not specifically mention any body-marking practice other than branding (like all European travelers to the Middle East before the sixteenth century). On the other hand, the motifs he mentions include not only crosses but also figures, such as Jesus and Mary. These figures are impossible to create through branding because of their contours, which had to remain identifiable after the branding process. Branding remains a crude method of body marking, which can produce only clear geometric forms like a cross or letters. This suggests that Affagart was describing tattoos as brands, in part because tattooing was so unfamiliar to northern Europeans as that time. The culture of body marking in the Middle East did not have ethnic or religious limits, so mutual influence and the cross-cultural adaptation of body-marking practices during this crucial period should be no surprise. The problem the Europeans faced was how to describe the marks, such as tattoos, that they saw in the Middle East. They lacked an adequate vocabulary to name the marks because the technique had been all but forgotten in Europe. European Pilgrims Tattooed in Jerusalem: The Sources Christian pilgrimage tattoos were long overlooked in historical research due to a paucity of sources. In one sense, of course, the lack of sources is understandable—though a tattoo lasts a lifetime, its wearer takes it to the grave, at which point it is lost to subsequent generations. Furthermore, pilgrimage tattooing rarely appears in historical photographs of Palestine; the oldest known photographic documentation of the practice shows the Armenian tattooist known as Nerses the Goldsmith at work in Jerusalem around 1910 (fig. 4.4). Like this photo, early modern textual or pictorial evidence of Jerusalem tattoos is rare but revealing. As mentioned earlier in this essay, seventeenth-century discovery literature shows that Jerusalem pilgrimage tattooing was familiar enough to serve as the point of reference for the description of other tattoo practices (at least for the learned). And, in fact, published travel literature describing

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the Holy Land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides eleven sources of varying length that attest to the existence of pilgrim tattoos.38 We also learn of tattoos given to other seventeenth-century travelers through indirect references and from several painted portraits.39 In the eighteenth century, documentation of the practice of tattooing becomes scarcer. The first two decades yielded only secondary accounts from Swedish sources concerning tattoos borne by Swedish travelers during the reign of King Charles XII.40 The French statesman Baron Constantin François Volney also mentions tattoos in a book recounting his travels in Syria and Egypt from 1783 to 1785.41 The number of sources describing pilgrimage tattoos increased during the second half of the nineteenth century: missionaries, researchers, and curious travelers took increasing note of them when visiting Jerusalem and the surrounding areas.42 Thus, the tradition of pilgrimage tattoos is unusually persistent—uninterrupted for almost five hundred years, it continues to this day. The Dragomans of Bethlehem: Tattoo Artists of the Seventeenth Century The meaning of the Akkadian term turgu manu, from which the word dragoman (interpreter or translator) is derived, has remained unchanged through the ages—a testament to how essential the act of translating from one language into another was in a region such as the ancient Orient, the locus of so many intercultural encounters. Under Ottoman administration, the dragomans could reach the highest level of the diplomatic hierarchy in the Sublime Porte. In Bethlehem, the dragomans’ duties were more modest, although they were still instrumental in mediating communication between the Franciscan monks and various other groups. For this reason, the monks took care to educate the dragomans in their own European language: Italian. The dragomans’ most important clientele were European pilgrims, for whom they served as guides.43 One of the first of these guides known to us by name is John Baptista, who is mentioned by Johannes Cotovicus in 1596. Approximately sixteen years later, he was praised by the traveler William Lithgow for his expertise as a guide. Unlike other members of his group, the idiosyncratic Scotsman was able to communicate well with Baptista in Italian. “The dragoman (trenchman) Baptista lived in Jerusalem for twenty years,” Lithgow writes, “and even the monks acquired their knowledge from him.”44 Lithgow adds that monks generally rotated in and out of the Holy Land every three years. The dragomans’ knowledge of the area and ability to speak the local language were invaluable when it came to working with pilgrims. But the dragomans were also involved in another activity. The aforementioned German pilgrim Seusenius describes how the dragoman who accompanied him in Bethlehem tattooed a cross onto his arm.45 An English traveler, George Sandys, gave his guide, Atala Drogarman, four thaler before leaving Jerusalem at

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Fig. 4.4  Photograph of Nerses the Goldsmith tattooing a female pilgrim next to his shop in front of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, 1900–1910. Matson Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-00710, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

the end of the Easter season in 1611. According to Sandys’s report, his arm was tattooed by the “friers servants,” who were under a vow of poverty. The guardianus, the head of the Custodia, therefore investigated how much his servants received for administering tattoos. It turns out that Sandys was mistaken: the servants, unlike the monks, had not taken a vow of poverty.46 We do not know exactly where the monks’ servants lived. Lithgow, however, expressly mentions the fact that the dragoman who tattooed him in Jerusalem—a certain Elias Areacheros—was Christian and lived in Bethlehem. Lithgow adds that he was responsible for the monks’ provisioning (“purveier for the Friers”).47 In searching for more details about Elias Areacheros, I came upon the writings of Pietro Verniero di Montepeloso, a Franciscan chronicler in the Holy Land, who claims to have known a Christian in Bethlehem between 1612 and 1632 who went by this name and who worked as a dragoman. In 1627, Montepeloso names “Elia e Catasso, nostri antichi torcimanni bethlehemitici” among the long-established dragomans from Bethlehem.48 Elias is mentioned here in the context of a ceremony held for his son’s wife, Aziza, as she converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism. At that time, Catholic brides were scarce. Even Elias had no other

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choice than to marry a young Greek Orthodox woman, whom he eventually persuaded to convert. Elias is named in the same chronicle in 1632 because he was forced to flee Bethlehem on account of Muslim rioting. He is referred to as the senior dragoman but was also known in the common tongue as dottore.49 The same individual deemed the leader of the dragomans in 1632 and a longtime resident in 1627 also appears to have been active fifteen years earlier, in 1612. One can therefore assume that this person was none other than Elias— the dragoman who tattooed Lithgow’s arm. From the sources available, it seems that the dragomans performed a variety of functions in service of the monks, one of which was their side job of tattooing pilgrims. Tattoos were administered not only in Jerusalem but also on the grounds of the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, near the Franciscan monastery. A Catholic pilgrim from Moravia, Laurentius Slisansky, reported about the practice of tattooing during his pilgrimage from 1660 to 1661.50 The Frenchman Jean de Thévenot, who visited the country in 1658, wrote of the Catholic inhabitants of Bethlehem who came to Jerusalem during Easter and administered tattoos to pilgrims.51 After his pilgrimage from 1667 to 1668, Franz von Troilo, a Catholic nobleman from Upper Silesia, reported that among the Catholic inhabitants of Bethlehem, there were eight to ten dragomans (turcelmannen) who administered tattoos to pilgrims for a negotiable fee.52 The Brandenburg adventurer Otto Friedrich von der Groeben noted in 1675 that a Christian from Bethlehem came to the monastery in Jerusalem in order to administer pilgrimage tattoos.53 At the end of the sixteenth century and under the influence of the Franciscan monks, Bethlehem developed into the center of the Holy Land’s souvenir industry. The tattoo artists, it seems, comprised a specialized subset of Bethlehem’s Catholic population. They would often visit pilgrim hostels in Jerusalem during peak pilgrimage season leading up to Easter, shortly before the pilgrims departed. The vendors who made and sold religious memorabilia did not administer tattoos. This practice was reserved for those closest to the monks—the dragomans. The Technique of Administering Pilgrim Tattoos Administering a tattoo as a series of small skin pricks is a technique that has existed since antiquity. In any historical account of tattooing practices, it is necessary to determine whether a needle was used since the technique of tattooing relies on stitching, puncturing, or pricking the skin. In the eighth of his sixteen-volume medical encyclopedia Libri medicinales, from the sixth century, often called the Tetrabiblon, the Byzantine physician Aëtius of Amida describes the process of tattooing, provides recipes for ink, and even discusses tattoo removal.54 The first in-depth description of tattooing techniques in Jerusalem was written by Thévenot in 1658.55 A few years later, in 1667/68, Troilo described tattooing practices in Bethlehem in unusual length:

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They mix ox gall, charcoal, and the rich smoke that rises from lamps to produce a viscous ink, which they put into a small leaden dish which they carry with them. They also have over sixty different wood-carved templates and models. . . . Thus, a traveler who wishes to receive such a mark on his arm can select which, and how many, he desires. The turcellmann powders the template with the bag of charcoal dust and presses it against the patch of skin where the customer wishes to be marked, making the image appear as if sketched with a charcoal pencil. His instrument is made of two thin sewing needles tied together with cotton so that only the tips, but a fair portion, protrude. The needles are secured from behind by a small handle made from delicate wood, which makes them easier to hold and control. When all preparations have been made, he takes the customer’s arm rather forcefully and begins to prick the skin along the lineaments of the template. When he is finished, he cleans the area with a sponge soaked in wine to see if anything is missing or needs correction. He then stretches the skin to open and expand the needle holes and applies the ink mixture over the entire image in vertical and horizontal strokes. The wound is then bound in linen cloth and must remain bound for eight days. . . . The skin eventually begins to peel from the wound—not once, but usually twice or three times— leaving the image behind, where it remains as long as its wearer lives.56 In 1675, Groeben described the process in similar terms and noted the risk of illness and death associated with it.57 During an Easter visit in 1697, the Englishman Henry Maundrell described tattooing as a painless process.58 However, Ratge Stubbe, a Lutheran pilgrim from Hamburg, who was tattooed in 1669, is quoted by Johannes Lundius as saying that tattooing is accompanied by a “not insignificant amount of pain as the flesh is pierced.” The process was so painful, in fact, that “a count from England with whom he had come could not bear to have any more than one figure tattooed on his arm.”59 The Use of Woodblocks Travelogues from the second half of the seventeenth century allow us to reconstruct the working environment and techniques associated with tattooing. The use of woodblocks to transfer an image onto the customer’s arm is of particular note. The images carved into the blocks, made from olive wood, were Christian motifs commonly associated with the Holy Land. Pilgrims had a plethora of images from which to choose. The image was first applied to the customer’s skin, in most cases to the arm. To do so, the woodblock was moistened, coated with charcoal powder, and pressed against the area to be tattooed. To my knowledge, this technique first appeared in association with the Jerusalem pilgrimage

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tattoos. Further studies could potentially establish earlier use of woodblocks— especially regarding in a possible interconnection between textile printing and tattoo marking, which might have used the same motifs.60 Various piercing instruments have been used in tattooing throughout history—some were shaped like a comb with many teeth and others like a tube with protruding needles. The number of needles is determined largely by the pattern to be tattooed—namely, by how ornamental it is.61 Small tubes containing five or seven needles have been used by rural communities and the Bedouins in Egypt and Palestine.62 Pilgrim tattoos, however, required only two needles, because they are figurative, not ornamental, and rely on a well-known and desirable iconographic canon. In the seventeenth century, tattooing was understood to be a widespread custom, almost a routine affair. As Thévenot writes, “We spent our time having our arms marked, in accordance with the old pilgrim custom.”63 Or, as Groeben puts it, “as is the custom of all pilgrims.”64 Pilgrimage was seasonal, with most activity taking place around Easter. During peak times, it was not uncommon for pilgrims to wait in long lines to receive a Jerusalem mark, and the tattoo artists themselves were always looking for ways to expedite the process. The use of woodblocks meant that an image did not need to be drawn on the customer’s body—it could simply be stamped. Tattoos functioned as documentation of the pilgrimage, using the language of well-known symbols. Upon returning home, pilgrims displayed these marks with pride. Troilo notes that the pilgrimage tattoos also functioned as a kind of passport: “These marks in particular are more useful and are more likely to guarantee safe passage, for if a traveler encounters difficulty along his way, those who recognize the mark he wears will soon understand he has come only to visit the holy sites. Otherwise, travelers are spotted easily by the Turks and stopped, and those who arouse even the slightest suspicion are subjected to harsh punishment.”65 Travelers marked by Jerusalem tattoos were less likely to encounter problems with Ottoman authorities or be suspected of espionage.66 The tattoo artist incurred little risk, therefore, in amassing a large collection of woodblocks. The preparation and application of tattoos required materials and skills that were well suited to inhabitants of Bethlehem. Mastery of woodcarving was just as useful for creating religious memorabilia as it was for carving images into woodblocks. The powdered charcoal used to stamp the image onto the arm was plentiful in Bethlehem, given that it was also used in gunpowder.67 Wine, used for disinfecting, was part of the Christian ritual tradition in Bethlehem and had been specially permitted by the Muslim authorities since the fourteenth century, as the monk Niccolo di Poggibonsi reported.68 The woodblock technique was still in use in the eighteenth century, as described in a 1729 letter by the German traveler Johann Georg Keyssler.69 The process of administering tattoos in this manner likewise attracted the attention of Ermete Pierotti, who worked for the Ottomans as an engineer in the city of Jerusalem for eight years in the mid-nineteenth century:

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Another custom of Palestine adopted not only by most of the natives of both sexes, but also by many pilgrims from abroad, is that of tattooing. . . . The Mohammedan Arabs, and especially the women in the country, consider them to be an ornament, and their example is followed by many in the towns. The Christians and the pilgrims generally imprint upon their arms or breasts the five crosses of Jerusalem or figures of the Savior, the Virgin, or their patron Saints. This practice is very ancient, for it was not uncommon among the heathens. . . . We have no positive evidence that this custom was ever in vogue among the Hebrews, but it is not impossible, for we find it forbidden by Moses, and we know that they generally disobeyed his precepts.70 Was Pierotti correct to claim that not only the pilgrims but also the locals received tattoos using woodblocks? Were the inhabitants of Bethlehem the ones responsible for carrying the tradition of pilgrimage tattooing forward? In the following, we will see how Bethlehem locals lost their importance in the tattoo trade as the woodblock technique passed from them to the Armenians and Copts living in Jerusalem’s Old City. Armenian and Coptic Tattooists and Templates in Jerusalem In 1956, John Carswell, a connoisseur of Islamic art, reported that in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, he came upon an undertaker’s shop displaying a sign advertising color tattoos.71 Asked about the curious combination of these two lines of business, the owner, Hagop (Jakob) Razzouk, explained that tattooing was seasonal, with most business being done around Easter, while the production of coffins brought in revenue all year round. Carswell’s encounter with Razzouk raises a larger question: who were the traditional tattoo artists of Jerusalem in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries? We can identify some important Coptic and Armenian individuals and families. As noted above, the Armenian tattooist Nerses the Goldsmith worked in Jerusalem around 1910 (see fig. 4.4). Alexander Hairabedian, who began to work at Nerses’s shop in 1898, helped him in silversmithing and also in tattooing. His son Barouyr inherited the trade and administered tattoos to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and British soldiers during their service in Palestine during World War II. Rumor has it that Barouyr, on the advice of a British officer who had grown tired of the tedium associated with manual tattooing, bought an electric doorbell and repurposed the mechanism as an electric tattoo machine. Members of the Hairabedian family left Palestine for New York soon after the war.72 Another Armenian tattooist of the time named Basmaijan worked as a shoemaker in the offseason.73 It became clear from Carswell’s conversation with Jakob Razzouk that his family is of Coptic origin. According

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Fig. 4.5  Photograph of a Jerusalem tattoo, including the year of the pilgrimage (1968). Collection of the author.

to the stories told in their family, they moved from Upper Egypt to Jerusalem in the mid-eighteenth century.74 Razzouk primarily tattooed Coptic pilgrims (around two hundred in a season), but his clientele also included members of the Eastern churches, as well as a few Europeans. He frequently used tattoo blocks carved from olive wood, and when Carswell visited Razzouk, he had 184 tattoo templates carved in wood (some with images on both sides) at his disposal. He had inherited them from his father, Jiries (George). Unfortunately for Razzouk, after 1967, the demand for tattoos began to decline. Coptic pilgrims from Egypt were no longer coming to Israel. With the unresolved conflict with the Ethiopians regarding ownership of Deir Al-Sultan Monastery in Jerusalem and his opposition to the peace agreement with Israel in 1979, the Coptic patriarch Shenouda III banned Coptic pilgrimages to Jerusalem outright. Following Shenouda’s death in 2012, the ban was not lifted but was also not enforced. This enabled thousands of Copts to travel once again to Jerusalem. They resumed the Coptic custom of receiving pilgrimage tattoos, with religious images and the year of the pilgrimage tattooed on the pilgrim’s forearm (fig. 4.5). Such markings thus served as proof that their wearers had made the journey to the Holy Land—a custom important for both Copts and Armenian pilgrims. To

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Fig. 4.6  Sign of Wadia Razzouk’s shop, Jerusalem, 1998. Collection of the author.

this day, Hagi is a term in Greek or Armenian for someone who has visited the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The English journalist Steven Graham accompanied a group of Russian Orthodox pilgrims to Jerusalem in 1912. After his return, he met an old Armenian woman in Russia and told her of his journey, whereupon she promptly demanded that he show her the tattoo on his arm. Because Graham had not received a tattoo, the woman did not believe that he had in fact made the journey.75 Jakob Razzouk’s son Anton told me he remembers an incident from 1964 in which a young Coptic woman from Egypt had to cancel her return flight to Cairo because her pregnancy was near term. After her son was born, as she was waiting for her return flight, other pilgrims asked her if she had had her infant tattooed with the symbol of the pilgrimage as well. Anton Razzouk remembered well how the mother came straight away to his grandfather’s shop to have her son tattooed before departing. Jakob’s son Wadia carried on the family tattooing tradition in his father’s shop on Saint George Street in the Christian Quarter (fig. 4.6), but as Coptic pilgrimage declined, so did the business. His other son, Anton, carried on with their Citadel Souvenir Shop (near the Jaffa Gate). His sister Georgette resumed the family tradition of tattooing in the family flat on Christians Street, which looks out on Hezekiah’s Pool. One day she left for Beth Jala, a Christian townlet next to Bethlehem, which is under Palestinian jurisdiction. She took with her, for reasons unknown to me, the original woodblocks, so that when Anton’s son Wassim decided to reopen a tattoo studio in his grandfather Jakob’s shop, he had to make copies of the original templates out of rubber (fig. 4.7).

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Fig. 4.7  The reopened shop of Wassim Razzouk, Jerusalem, 2019. Collection of the author.

Fig. 4.8 (left)  Woodblock with the decapitated head of Saint James Major brought by two angels to Mary, mother of Jesus. Torossian collection. Photo courtesy of Dickran Torossian. Fig. 4.9 (right)  Photograph of Kevork Torossian, the Armenian Muhkhtar of Jaffa, early twentieth century. Torossian collection. Photo courtesy of Dickran Torossian.

There are only two dated templates in Carswell’s catalogue of the Razzouk templates. The older has Armenian initials, and Carswell deciphers the date as 1749.76 The younger template is from 1912 and depicts Jesus’s Ascension.77 Both of these motifs are of Armenian origin, as the tradition of having the head of Saint James in Jerusalem was developed by the Armenians in Jerusalem, who named their cathedral after both saints who carry the name James. When Carswell catalogued the Razzouk tattoo templates, he mistook twelve of the woodblocks as depicting Saint Veronica’s veil with its imprinted image

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of Jesus Christ.78 It seems odd that Veronica would be venerated in Jerusalem when her cult began in Rome in the late Middle Ages, and she remained a Roman saint. This mistaken identification led me to investigate the interrelationship between Saint James Major in Compostela with the Armenians in Jerusalem and to correct the identification of the twelve woodblocks thought to depict Saint Veronica.79 Figure 4.8 shows an Armenian template with the severed head of Saint James Major. It would be difficult to determine, however, which templates were created by the Copts themselves and which ones were acquired from Armenian tattooists. Some Armenians closed their studios in Jerusalem and emigrated to the United States during the economic crisis that followed the outbreak of World War I. Others left Jerusalem because of the riots in 1948, which broke out toward the end of the British mandatory regime in Palestine. After the first version of this study of pilgrimage tattoos appeared in 2000, I was approached by an Armenian tour guide from Jerusalem named Dikran Torossian. He revealed that he possessed a collection of approximately twenty-five wooden tattoo blocks. His collection came from his great-grandfather Kevork Torossian, who was the head (mukhtar) of the Armenian community in Jaffa—the main port for pilgrims at the end of the nineteenth century (fig. 4.9).80 Dikran told me that in the early twentieth century, well-to-do Armenians stopped in Jaffa on their way to celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem in January.81 Returning to remote Armenia and then traveling back to Jerusalem in April to celebrate Easter would be almost impossible given the transportation available during the winter at those times. The Armenians were much more inclined to await the Easter season in Jaffa, which has a more moderate climate in winter than Jerusalem. While waiting in Jaffa, they had time to get tattooed. The Torossian collection resembles the Carswell catalogue of the Razzouk templates. Both tattoo-block collections show holes drilled in the woodblocks— likely a way of stringing them together for storage. This could be further evidence of the mobility of tattoo artists, who tattooed pilgrims at their hostels and even at the holy sites. But the Torossian collection also reveals an important transition in the Holy Land’s tattooing trade. Shortly after sources describing the dragomans’ work tattooing pilgrims in Bethlehem began to wane (at the start of the eighteenth century), evidence of the use of Armenian motifs and templates began to appear in Jerusalem. It would seem, then, that Copts from Jerusalem (perhaps including the Razzouk family) and Armenians replaced the Bethlehem dragomans as tattoo artists. The vast majority of their traditional clientele remained Christians from Eastern churches, but an analysis of the woodblock motifs also reveals some that seem to have been in high demand among European pilgrims. I turn now to the practices and images documented in European accounts.

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Pigments, Process, and Side Effects As described in the above, the ink used in pilgrim tattoos was made from a mixture of black material (lamp soot, ground charcoal, or gunpowder) and ox gall. Bovine gall, and especially ox gall, acts as a binding agent and facilitates infiltration of the ink without causing the color to fade.82 Baron Volney writes that the ink for tattooing pilgrims is composed of gunpowder or antimony chalk. No evidence exists for the use of indigo.83 Ox gall is unique to Jerusalem tattoos; it is absent from the tattooing practices of other cultures. Sources provide varying accounts of the duration of the tattooing process. Troilo writes that it took four hours to complete a tattoo; if the arm began to swell and the body temperature rose, however, the process had to be delayed for twelve days.84 This time frame is not entirely plausible, however, because pilgrims only stayed in Jerusalem for an average of ten days. Groeben notes that tattoos took two days to complete, including the time that the arm was bound.85 Several accounts emphasize the risks and side effects—high fever and swelling—and note that receiving a tattoo was a potentially life-threatening process. The pilgrim Slisansky needed two days to receive his four tattoos.86 Thévenot recounts that the entire process, including the accompanying swelling, came to an end after about three days. He did add that his arm swelled up to three times its normal size.87 According to Maundrell, being tattooed was quick and painless.88 Keyssler recalls an encounter with the Swedish theologian Michael Eneman after his return from the Holy Land: Eneman’s arm was covered in pilgrimage symbols. Eneman told Keyssler that he had seen a Catholic who nearly died from a high fever after receiving tattoos of all twelve Apostles on his torso and Judas Iscariot on his bottom.89 Volney emphasizes the pain associated with being pricked and reports meeting a man whose arm had to be amputated on account of an injury to the central nerve.90 In 1879, the German traveler Rudolf Kleinpaul wrote that tattooists in Jerusalem advertised painless tattoos for pilgrims.91 This was, in fact, the experience of the Frenchman Gabriel Charmes in 1880. He writes that, while receiving his tattoo, he felt no pain whatsoever and enjoyed a water pipe, a cup of tea, and a pleasant conversation with the wife and daughter of the Armenian tattoo artist Francis Souvan.92 It is not possible to produce a comprehensive assessment of the image quality, typical duration of the procedure, or the level of pain associated with traditional Jerusalem pilgrimage tattooing. The side effects experienced most certainly depended on the skill of the tattoo artist. It should also not be overlooked, however, that accounts written by male travelers tended to heroize their suffering and approach the tattooing process, to a certain extent, as a test of manhood. The desire to imitate Christ’s painful passion should not be discounted, but it should also not be overestimated. Given the subjective nature of the experience, it is useful to remember the words of Pierotti: “There are some who claim

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that tattooing is not associated with any pain, and there are some who claim the opposite. Given that I have never experienced it, I can offer no opinion one way or the other.”93 Tattoo Motifs: Sources and Iconography To understand pilgrim-tattoo motifs, we must decipher their symbolic language, which has its roots in the long tradition of Christian iconography. Every iconographic analysis must be undergirded by pictorial sources. Given that these sources are scant, we must resort to information in written form. The motifs found in pilgrim-tattoo stamps draw from the well-known Christian iconographic canon. The long-term use of the same woodblocks further cemented the consistency of the imagery. Further questions deserve scrutiny. To what degree are the motifs used today the same as the ones that were common among pilgrims during the seventeenth century? Do the woodblocks from Armenian and Coptic tattooists contain motifs common from the middle of the eighteenth century onward? We know of six images from the seventeenth century that depict tattoos. Three are engravings that pilgrims added to their accounts of travel to the Holy Land, and three are extant oil portraits of pilgrims who display the marks on their arms. A fourth oil portrait, which depicts a tattooed Dutchman bearing a Jerusalem cross on his forearm, seems to have been lost.94 A systematic survey of the formidable corpus of prints in European books—especially travel accounts— from this period would undoubtedly yield more examples. The Travel Diary of Scottish Adventurer William Lithgow

In the first edition of Lithgow’s travel diary from the year 1632, there are two illustrations of pilgrim tattoos.95 Lithgow entitled the first “Armes of Jerusalem.” This image contains the Jerusalem cross above the Christogram ihs—the Greek acronym for Jesus’s name. One line below is the name ierusalem, and below that is the date 1612, the year in which Lithgow made his pilgrimage. Together, these components can be understood as documentation of the journey: a symbol of religious affiliation, the destination of the pilgrimage, and its date. This was the format of the most common mark to be tattooed among European pilgrims. But when Lithgow was attacked by thieves on his return home and forced to plead for his life, he showed them the certificate of pilgrimage he had received and not his tattoo. In addition to the cross, Lithgow, a fervent Protestant and dedicated supporter of the king of England and Scotland, had asked to have the symbol of King James (Jacob I) tattooed on his arm. He also received the motto “I[acobus] Vivat R[ex]” (Long live King James). Lithgow’s sympathies for the Protestant king not unexpectedly brought ire from the head of the Franciscan monastery. After his temper had cooled, however,

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the guardianus did not pass up the opportunity to speak to Lithgow about conveying to the king his request for financial support for maintaining the holy sites.96 In his travel diary, Lithgow states that he also received a tattoo of the Holy Sepulcher. This image is not included in the illustrations in his book, but another source shows us how this motif was rendered in pilgrim tattoos. The Copper Engraving of the Hamburg Pilgrim Ratge Stubbe’s Tattooed Arms

In scholarship there are occasional references to a copper plate made by the engraver H. Winterstein, who was active in northern Germany from 1652 to 1682.97 The engraving depicts two forearms marked with pilgrim tattoos from Jerusalem. At first the arms were believed to have belonged to an unknown pilgrim, who traveled to the Holy Land in 1669. The German anthropologist Robert Herbert Bellmann (1903–1961) mistakenly asserted the arms were those of Groeben, although he visited the Holy Land in 1675.98 It was, however, Otto Meinardus, the researcher of Coptic church history, who was first able to confirm the pilgrim’s true identity as Ratge Stubbe, a member of a well-known merchant family from Hamburg.99 Stubbe’s arms are richly decorated with pilgrimage motifs, of which the following are recognizable on the right arm, from bottom to top: the year 1669 (the year of his visit); the Jerusalem cross, adorned at the bottom with palm leaves and the inscription “ierusalem”; three crowns (symbolizing the Three Magi); the Star of Bethlehem; and, at the top, the decorative inscription “bethlehem” (fig. 4.10). Taken together, these images present a confluence of emblems linked to the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. These same emblems were also of central importance in the context of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Four motifs are recognizable on the left arm. The bottom motif is the skull of Adam, the first man, and above it is Jesus on the cross. This corresponds to the skull’s placement in Adam’s chapel below Golgotha. According to tradition, Jesus’s cross was placed on top of Golgotha. Above Jesus’s head is the inscription “inri,” which was affixed at the command of Roman governor Pontius Pilate.100 Meinardus expresses his wonder that in the tattooed image of the Crucifixion, Jesus’s head is turned toward his left hand, whereas in the iconographic canon, his head is traditionally turned to the right.101 My explanation for this discrepancy is that the tattoo artist likely used a woodblock to stamp Stubbe’s arm in which Jesus’s head was oriented correctly, which meant that the stamped image was reversed. The copper engraver, then, must have retained the inversion— with the exception, of course, of the letters. (All references to directions, such as right or left, in the following correspond to the orientation of the image and not to the perspective of the reader.) Above the Crucifixion scene is a rectangular titulus displaying the letters “lucfu.”102 This panel symbolizes the Stone of Unction, located next to the present entry to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, between Golgotha and Jesus’s

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Fig. 4.10  H. Winterstein, tattooed arms of the pilgrim Ratge Stubbe, including the year 1669, 1676. Engraving from Johann Lund, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten (Hamburg: Liebernickel, 1701), 732.

tomb. Above the titulus is an image of Jesus’s Resurrection, in which he holds the flag of victory. To Jesus’s left is the side view of the church of the Holy Sepulcher, comprised by the Angels’ Chapel and the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher. The scene is bordered by the words “Resurexit propter iustificationem” (He was raised again for our justification), a quotation from Romans 4:25. Above the Resurrection motif is the Ascension. Below the figure of Jesus are his footprints on the Mount of Olives. Bordering this image are the words “Et ascendit in caelum” (And he ascended to heaven). The quality of the tattoo must have been high. Lundius writes of the image: “It was so well pricked it could have been in copper.”103

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Fig. 4.11  Groeben’s 1675 tattoo of the Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa). Engraving from Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, Reisebeschreibung (Marienwerder: S. Reiniger, 1694), between pp. 284 and 285.

The Tattoo Prints of the Brandenburg-Prussian Officer Otto Friedrich von der Groeben

In his travel account, Groeben describes the Jerusalem tattoos he received and includes plates showing the images (figs. 4.11 and 4.12). On his right arm are three motifs. The first contains the abbreviations on the Stone of Unction, which we know from Stubbe’s forearm. The Crucifixion scene is depicted above the stone, though Groeben does not mention the Crucifixion in his text. As in Stubbe’s tattoo, Jesus’s head is turned toward his left hand, not his right. This is likely because the image was reversed when the stamp was applied to Groeben’s arm and when the copperplate was applied to the paper. The second motif is a depiction of the Way of Sorrows,104 the various stations of which are coded using the following abbreviations: 1. LF = L[ocus] F[lagellationis]: The building in which Jesus was scourged by Roman soldiers (John 19:2–3). Today, the church of the Flagellation is regarded as the second station. 2. DP = D[omus] P[ilati]: The house of Pontius Pilate, the praetorium in which Jesus’s trial took place (Mark 15:16). Today this is considered the first station.

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3. DH = D[omus] H[erodii]: The house of Herod, the place where, in accordance with tradition, the priests vilified Jesus, and Herod and his soldiers taunted him and clad him in a “crimson robe” before sending him to Pilate (Luke 23:9–12). This location is not considered part of the Way of Sorrows today. 4. AP = A[rcus] P[ilati]: This is the arch known by the name Ecce Homo, a reference to Pilate’s utterance of the phrase (John 19:5). It was originally built as a triumphal arch for Emperor Hadrian to celebrate his victory in 135 CE. Although the Way of Sorrows passed through the arch, it is not considered a station today. 5. LV = L[abitur] V[irgo]: The place where Mary fainted from the pain of seeing her son suffer under the burden of the cross. This is also the location of the church Our Lady of the Spasm, which is the fourth station. 6. CC = C[ecidir] C[hristus]: The place where Jesus fell to the ground for the first time as he carried the cross. Today this is the third station. 7. SC = S[imon] C[ireneus]: The place where Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus shoulder the cross after he fell (Luke 27:26). Today, this is the fifth station, located on the corner of Hagai Street. Groeben’s tattoo places it near the Damascus Gate. 8. DP = D[amascena] P[orta]: The Damascus Gate, which is not on the Way of Sorrows. 9. DE = D[omus] E[pulonis]: The house of the rich man who, in the New Testament, did not rush to Lazarus’s aid (Luke 16:19–22). According to tradition, this house is on Hagai Street, near the fifth station. 10. DL = D[omus] L[azari]: The house of Lazarus, where, according to the Gospel of Luke, Lazarus was stretched out on the ground at the entrance to the rich man’s house (Luke 16:20). There is no other information provided about the house of Lazarus in the New Testament. 11. SV = S[ancta] V[eronica]: The place where Saint Veronica threw Jesus a cloth to dry his face while he was carrying the cross. Today this is the sixth station. The Roman legend of Veronica is not older than the fourteenth century. The name Veronica is likely derived from vera icon (true image). 12. PI = P[orta] I[udicalis]: Gate of Judgment; it was here that Jesus fell for the second time. Today it is the seventh station. 13. FI = F[ilii] I[erusalem]: The place where Jesus spoke to the daughters of Jerusalem (Luke 23:28). Today this is the eighth station. The next stations, leading to Golgotha where Jesus was crucified, are not depicted among Groeben’s tattoos. Today, as then, there is no direct path from the eighth station to Golgotha, because the church of Saint Charalambos stands in the way. The tattooed image depicting the Way of Sorrows is also reversed, meaning that

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Fig. 4.12  Groeben’s 1675 tattoo of the Resurrection. Engraving from Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, Reisebeschreibung (Marienwerder: S. Reiniger, 1694), between pp. 286 and 287.

the Damascus Gate and the praetorium are to the right of the via dolorosa, not to the left. The inscriptions, however, are not reversed. The third motif on Groeben’s right arm depicts Jesus carrying the cross above the inscription “sequere me” (Follow me). There are two motifs on Groeben’s left arm. The first of these is a combination of the Jerusalem cross with the Star of Bethlehem, which is like the image found on Stubbe’s forearm (fig. 4.11). According to Groeben, the palm leaves adorning the Jerusalem cross symbolize the settlement of Beit Pagi, at the base of the Mount of Olives on the way to Jericho.105 Groeben interprets the five crosses that comprise the Jerusalem cross as the symbol of the knights of Jerusalem (“The five crosses [are] the sign of the knights”).106 This identification establishes a direct connection between the reported knighting ceremonies in the church of the Holy Sepulcher and the tattoo motifs that were common among pilgrims. The second motif on Groeben’s left arm depicts the Resurrection of Christ (fig. 4.12). Jesus holds a flag in his hand, and to his right is the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher. The same motif is found on Stubbe’s arm, but here the chapel is on Jesus’s left side. It is difficult to determine which was the original side because the reversal may or may not have appeared on the template (Vorlage) for printing the copperplate. The same is true of the woodblocks used for the administration of tattoos. There is an oil portrait, however, depicting the very same motif, but

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with the chapel on Jesus’s right side. Because the tattoo was painted, and therefore did not need a Vorlage, it is my belief that the print in Groeben’s travelogue presents the image in its correct orientation. Portraits as a Source for Jerusalem Pilgrim Marks: Heinrich W. Ludolf (1699) and Duke Siegfried von Kollonitz (1700)

During preparations for an exhibition on the history of the study of Palestine by institutions in Halle an der Saale during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I was shown the portrait of a nobleman (fig. 4.13). The painting had been held unnoticed in the collections of the Francke Foundations for almost three hundred years, and the person portrayed had remained unidentified.107 Marks characteristic of pilgrims to Jerusalem are recognizable on his right forearm. The year of pilgrimage, 1699, is also visible. Above the year is an image of Christ’s Resurrection, with the chapel on the right side. Above this motif are images of the Crucifixion and, at Jesus’s feet, the skull of Adam. There is an obvious resemblance between these tattoos and the ones found on Stubbe’s arm, even though Jesus’s head is pointed toward his right hand—the standard orientation in Christian iconography—in the oil portrait’s rendering of the Crucifixion. It appears, then, that the Crucifixion scene was reversed in the 1669 template. The woodcarver from Bethlehem who brought the blocks from 1669 (Stubbe) and 1675 (Groeben) into circulation was not aware that both the inscriptions and the images themselves had to be carved in reverse. This comparison points to a higher degree of artistic skill in carving and engraving, perhaps on account of the involvement of European monks, who were better versed in such techniques. Is it possible to identify this pilgrim, who has rolled up the right sleeve of his robes to reveal his tattooed forearm? Was there a pilgrim to Jerusalem in 1699 who can be connected to the Francke Foundations? During the preparations for the exhibition in Halle, I also found a letter in the Francke Foundations archives that bears the date 1699 and is addressed to the Foundations’ founder, August Herman Francke.108 The fact that this letter resides under the same roof as the portrait of a pilgrim who traveled to Jerusalem during the same year is likely not a coincidence. The letter’s author is the scholar Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655– 1712), and in my opinion, this is the same person who looks proudly down at us from the painting, bearing his tattooed arm.109 This kind of identification seems to be a methodological innovation in historical research.110 In 2009, some years after I had identified and published the portrait of Ludolf, I was contacted by Nina Trauth, who was kind enough to inform me that, while preparing her dissertation, she found another gentleman whose portrait revealed Jerusalem marks on his forearm (fig. 4.14). His pilgrimage tattoo included the date 1700, following the custom of pilgrims to Jerusalem.111 The person was Duke Siegfried von Kollonitz, who, like many of his ancestors, fought against the Turks in the service of the Habsburgs. Beyond the date,

Fig. 4.13  Unknown artist, portrait of Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf as a tattooed pilgrim, 1699. Oil on canvas, 114 × 85 cm. Francke Foundations. Photo © Halle, Franckesche Stiftungen: AFSt/B G 0098.

Fig. 4.14  Attributed to Frans von Stampart, portrait of Duke Siegfried von Kollonitz bearing a Jerusalem tattoo dated 1700, ca. 1701. Oil on canvas, 90.3 × 70.3 cm. Princely Oettingen-Wallerstein collection, Schloss Harburg.

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one can recognize on his arm a depiction of a two-story construction, which may be identified as the base of the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, as well as the lower part of Jesus’s flag, as depicted in the Resurrection scene of many pilgrimage tattoos, including Groeben’s (see fig. 4.12). Both Kollonitz and Ludolf hold what I first mistakenly identified as a bottle of holy water. I have learned, however, that it is a bezoar stone.112 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the bezoar was considered an antidote to poison and recommended to travelers as protection.113 From the various pictorial sources available to us, the following motifs can be identified as common pilgrimage tattoos: the Jerusalem cross (as part of the coat of arms of the Franciscan Custodia of the Holy Land, as a symbol of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, or as a supposed symbol of the city of Jerusalem), the Star of Bethlehem and the crowns of the Three Magi (symbolizing the city of Bethlehem), the Resurrection of Jesus together with the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Stone of Unction, the Way of Sorrows (schematic depiction), the Bearing of the Cross, Jesus’s Ascension, and the year of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The written sources describe other motifs as well, but pictorial evidence is lacking. Troilo, who mentions sixty different tattoo templates in his travelogue, made a substantial contribution to research in this area, although his book does not include a single illustration.114 Among the motifs he describes are Mary’s Visitation, the symbol of the city of Nazareth, other stories of the Passion, the Holy Cross, and the Terebinth tree. Slisansky added Golgotha and Mount Zion.115 It should also be mentioned that members of Cornelius Loos’s 1711 expedition bore five tattooed images on their arms, of which all are known to us from other pictorial sources.116 This provides evidence that the motifs did not change markedly over the course of fifty years and that the selection of tattoos offered to pilgrims was limited by the templates available. While the Jerusalem cross was the motif that achieved the widest distribution over the course of more than two hundred years, I have the impression that compound scenes—for example, the Resurrection together with the Ascension and Crucifixion—became less common among European pilgrims. Were the templates from the seventeenth century so heavily used that they had to be taken out of rotation? Did the fact that the work of tattooing transitioned from the hands of the Bethlehem tattooists (who were predominately Catholic) to members of Eastern Churches (Armenians, Copts, and others) from Jerusalem during the eighteenth century reduce or alter the selection of templates offered to pilgrims? There are no clear answers to these questions, but a breakdown of the iconography of the tattoo woodblocks and images may supply some answers. By bringing together the Razzouk Coptic collection from Carswell’s catalogue, the Armenian Torossian collection of twenty-four templates, and the early modern texts and images described above, we can try to assess the popularity and

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Table 4.1  Iconography of Tattoo Woodblocks from Seventeenth-Century Bethlehem to Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem Motif/source

Lithgow 1612

French/ Stubbe Dutch 1669 pilgrim 166? (see Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body)

Groeben 1675

Ludolf 1699

Jerusalem cross incl. X three crowns with a star

X

X

X

-

Crucifixion

-

-

X

X

Resurrection

-

-

X

X

Kollonitz 1700

Razzouk collection=

Torossian collection=

Total 183

Total 24

-

X (2)

X

X

-

X (7)

-

X

X

X (48)

X (5)

=26%

=21%

Ascension

-

-

X

-

-

-

-

-

Via dolorosa

-

-

-

X

-

-

-

-

Carrying the cross

-

-

-

X

-

-

-

-

Stone of Unction

-

-

X

X

-

-

X (2)

-

Annunciation

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (8)

-

=4.4% Nativity

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (4)

-

Baptism

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (9)

X (2)

=4.9% Mary with Child

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (8)

X

=4.4% Holy lamb

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (5)

X

St. John’s head on a chalice

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (5)

X

Mary with St. James Major’s head on corporale

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (12) =6.6%

X (3)

Church or shrine

-

X

-

-

-

-

X (4)

X

Floral ornament

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (3)

X (3)

St. George fighting the dragon

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (10)

X

=5.5% Saint (?) riding on horse with a holy child

-

Angels

-

-

-

-

-

-

X (9)

X (2)

=4.9%

Others

-

-

-

-

X

-

X (10) =5.5%

-

-

X (37)

-

Not identified

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

(3)

Year of pilgrimage

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

-

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chronology of certain tattoo motifs. Furthermore, we might be able to establish a distinction between Latin and Eastern Orthodox Christian motifs and, later, between Coptic and Armenian preferences. Table 4.1 reveals that the Resurrection achieved the widest distribution of the Coptic templates. The Resurrection is closely linked to the Easter season, which is celebrated much more in Jerusalem than in Bethlehem. It appears in 48 of 184 total templates, but often in a different rendering than the one that was common among European pilgrims. Instead of depicting the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher next to Jesus, the Coptic version has him arising from an open tomb. He holds a flag in one hand and is flanked by an angel on both sides. Above him is the dove of the Holy Ghost. In most of the Coptic renderings, the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher is entirely absent or, at the very most, suggested. Two versions of the Resurrection motif published by Alessandra Boroni are of particular interest.117 In the first template, Jesus is seen at the entrance to the Angels’ Chapel (fig. 4.15). In his right hand, he holds a flag, and to his left is a building with a dome and a cross. The dome most likely represents the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher. The suspicion that this is a copy of the template distributed widely among European pilgrims turns to certainty upon studying the inscription that surrounds the image. The letters have the appearance of a Latin script, but they are nonsense. What they truly communicate is a failed attempt to copy inscriptions found in seventeenth-century templates, such as the one used for the image of the Resurrection on Ludolf’s arm (see fig. 4.10). We recognize this inscription from the templates that were offered to pilgrims during that time. The failure to produce an accurate copy stems from the fact that the engraver was unable to read the text.118 It appears to me that this copied template was produced by an engraver who was not among the Franciscans’ close collaborators in Bethlehem. This image attests to the transition of tattooing from Latin Bethlehem to Eastern Christian Jerusalem—a transition that was likely complete by the middle of the eighteenth century. The second woodblock exhibits an even greater departure from the Resurrection template common among European pilgrims (fig. 4.16). Here, there is no attempt made whatsoever to recreate the Latin script. The dove of the Holy Ghost, which is characteristic for Coptic depictions of the Resurrection, shines from above. The building appears to be the dominant component of the image, whereas Jesus is somewhat compressed. He still holds a staff with a cross, which resembles the traditional flag. Of note in this depiction are seven incense burners along the vaults of the ceiling, which allude both to the interior of the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher and the Angels’ Chapel. Stylistically, this woodblock appears to have been created later. Do the other images in the catalogue reflect the style and motifs characteristic of European pilgrim tattoos? The Torossian woodblock depicting a coupling of the Jerusalem cross and the emblem of Bethlehem is worn from long use, and

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Fig. 4.15 (above left)  Early Eastern depiction of the Resurrection for tattooing. From Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 99. Courtesy of Alessandra Boroni. Fig. 4.16 (above right)  Later Eastern depiction of the Resurrection for tattooing. From Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 100. Courtesy of Alessandra Boroni. Fig. 4.17 (left)  Woodblock depicting the Jerusalem cross with a damaged inscription. Torossian collection. Photo courtesy of Dickran Torossian.

the l in “Jerusalem” has broken off (fig. 4.17). This could be understood as additional proof of the high demand for this woodblock among European customers. For Eastern Christians, the Jerusalem cross was not as significant. One important and unexpected observation can be made from the data provided in the table. As has been mentioned before, the woodblocks depicting Saint James Major’s head refer to a genuine Armenian tradition—namely, the burial of his head in a niche inside the cathedral of Saint James, in the Armenian Quarter. This relic was a focal point of Armenian pilgrims’ devotion. Of the fifteen extant woodblocks referring to this Armenian tradition, a majority (twelve) came, surprisingly, into the hands of Copts. But how? It seems to me that Armenian tattooists preceded the Copts, as one can infer from the oldest dated woodblock (1749) in Carswell’s catalogue, whose inscription is in Armenian.119 Armenian

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tattooists who left Jerusalem, such as Souvan who went to America, also sold their tattoo blocks to Coptic colleagues before leaving; one of them was from the Razzouk family. The demand for tattoos depicting the Jerusalem cross remained steady through the end of the nineteenth century. The French traveler Charmes reported in 1880 that Souvan tattooed him with the Jerusalem cross in the Old City. In Souvan’s shop, Charmes recounts, there were two hundred framed testimonials, including one with the following text: “This is to certify that Francis Souvan tattooed the Jerusalem Cross onto the arm of His Majesty the Prince of Fig. 4.18  Tattoo design depicting of the Western Wall with the Temple Mount in the background Wales [son of Queen Victoria, later and a Hebrew inscription. From Alessandra Boroni, King Edward VII]. May this statement Jerusalem Tattoos (Alberto Niro Editore, 2020), 114. of recommendation serve to express Courtesy of Alessandra Boroni. His Majesty’s degree of satisfaction with the result. Signed Vanne, Adjutant to His Majesty the Prince of Wales. Jerusalem, April 2, 1862.”120 And indeed, Edward VII recommended Souvan to his sons when they visited Jerusalem in 1882. As a result, the Jerusalem cross came to grace the arm of the Duke of York, later King George V. There are also accounts that the Prussian crown prince who became Emperor Friedrich III for ninety-nine days received a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross during a visit to Jerusalem in 1869 (en route to attending the opening of the Suez Canal).121 There is one woodblock that is unique on account of its Hebrew script (fig. 4.18). It presents a partial depiction of the Temple Mount, with the Wailing Wall visible in the foreground. The Hebrew inscription reads “Jeruschalem.” The existence of this woodblock suggests that there were also Jews who received tattoos, as is corroborated by the recollections of the famous tattoo artist George Burchett. In his youth, Burchett deserted from the British Navy while his ship lay anchored at Jaffa. When he came to Jerusalem, likely in the early 1890s, he opened a tattoo stand near the church of the Holy Sepulcher. A posthumous “memoir” compiled from newspaper articles, family lore, and outright fabrications with the assistance of his wife and son claims that Burchett described the Jerusalem of his youth as “already the center of the tattooing world fifty years

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ago. Among the tattooists who practiced here were Greeks, Maronites, Syrians, Frenchmen, Jews, and Italians. The tattooists in Jerusalem always had their hands full with pilgrims and tourists.”122 Conclusion The practice of tattooing pilgrims in the Middle East arose from a tradition rooted in the pagan culture of the ancient Orient. In contrast to Judaism, Christianity did not forbid tattooing outright. Instead, it focused on the intention underlying the receipt of a tattoo. As the Lutheran theologian Lundius explained pragmatically in 1680: “It is still common today for many Christians who come to the Holy Sepulcher to have various symbols cut into their skin—not out of pagan foolishness, but as a curious gesture of devotion, and to show that they have been there.”123 Pilgrim tattoos thus became a practice that Christian churches tolerated but did not officially encourage. The beginning of tattooing European pilgrims in Bethlehem is linked to the growing production of religious memorabilia, spurred on by the Franciscan monks of the Custodia. Tattoos became a way of commemorating a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The first tattoo artists were the dragomans who served as guides to European pilgrims and worked closely with the Franciscan monks. By the mid-eighteenth century, the locus of the pilgrim-tattoo trade moved from Latin Bethlehem to the Eastern Christian Jerusalem. This was also when the number of European pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem reached its nadir. There is no doubt that, in terms of the woodblock technique and the specific motifs used, pilgrim tattooing was a phenomenon unique to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The collections of templates owned by the Razzouk and Torossian families makes it possible to study these motifs and to differentiate between Latin and Eastern Christian motifs. Furthermore, by examining the skill with which the Latin letters were rendered, we can infer to what extent the tattooists were still in Bethlehem, before the hub of the tattoo business moved to Jerusalem. The extent of the phenomenon of European pilgrim tattooing—be it at the end of the sixteenth century or at the practice’s zenith in the second half of the nineteenth century—is difficult to gauge. What can be said, however, is that Jerusalem pilgrim tattoos quickly became known and recognized well beyond the confines of the Holy Land. Considering this, we should remember that before the Polynesian term tatau was introduced to European languages by English and French accounts of Polynesia, the Jerusalem mark was the fundamental reference point for all European accounts of deliberate, permanent, and decorative marking on the body with ink. And the tattooing of European pilgrims in Jerusalem remains an unbroken tradition of almost five hundred years—one that continues to the present day.

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Notes Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 1. This article is a revised and updated edition of the German version, which appeared under the title “Jerusalem unter der Haut: Zur Geschichte der Jerusalemer Pilgertätowierung,” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 55 (2003): 1–39, published by Brill and included here with permission. The original version appeared in Hebrew as “Towards a History of Jerusalem Tattoo Marks Among Western Pilgrims,” Cathedra 95 (2000): 37–66. 2. Gabriel Sagard, a Franciscan Recollect, published the mission reports of his brothers in Canada during the years from 1615 to 1630. The reports describe tattoos worn by the Wyandot people (Sagard called them Hurons) and compare them to the body markings worn by pilgrims returning from Jerusalem. See Gabriel Sagard, Histoire du Canada et voyages que les Frères mineurs Récollects y ont faits pour la conversion des infidels depuis l’an 1615 (Paris: Librairie Tross, 1866), 2:347. In 1690, Kaempfer, a physician from Lemgo, traveled to Japan in service of the Dutch East India Company. On the way, he stayed in Ayuttaya, then the capital of Siam. In his account of the journey, he compares the tattoos worn by the palace guards with marks that were engraved in the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Engelbert Kaempfer, A Description of the Kingdom of Siam (Bangkok: Orchid, 1988), 46. And in 1691, the English buccaneer William Dampier returned to England from his Pacific expedition, bringing with him a tattooed Philippine native person, whom he introduced into English society as Prince Giolo. Dampier writes that Prince Giolo’s tattoos were marked in a manner resembling the Jerusalem cross. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (New York: Dover, 1968), 344. See also Geraldine Barnes, “Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier’s Painted Prince,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 31–50. 3. The Italian forensic scientist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) asserted that tattooing practices in Europe revealed the criminal character of lower classes (“The Savage Origin of Tattooing,” Popular Science Monthly [April 1896]: 793–806). 4. Aaron Deter-Wolf, Benoît Robitaille, Lars Krutak, and Sébastien Galliot, “The World’s

Oldest Tattoos,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 5 (February 2015): 19–24, http://‌www‌.sciencedirect‌.com‌/science‌/article‌ /pii‌/S2352409X15301772. 5. R. S. Bianchi, “Tattoo in Ancient Egypt,” in Marks of Civilization, ed. A. Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1988), 21–28. For a critical view, see Geoffrey J. Tassie, “Identifying the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt and Nubia,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 14 (2003): 85–101. 6. W. Mark Gustafson, “Inscripta in fronte: Penal Tattooing in Late Antiquity,” Classical Antiquity 16, no. 1 (1997): 79–105, and Christopher P. Jones, “Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987): 139–55. 7. Mordechay Lewy, “Der Alte Orient: Wiege der abendländischen Tätowierungen / The Ancient Orient: Cradle of Western Tattooing,” Jewish Museum Berlin Journal 10 (2014): 60–66. 8. The best account of tattooing for the purpose of punishment or marking property in antiquity is Luc Renaut, “Marquage corporel et signation religieuse dans l’Antiquité” (PhD diss., École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2004), 1:311–404. 9. See the many contributions to this subject by F. J. Dölger in his Antike und Christentum (Münster: Aschendorf, 1974), vols. 1–4. 10. Unless otherwise indicated, scriptural quotations from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003). Present-day scholarship assumes such practice was prohibited for one of two reasons: because it was a ritual for expressing devotion to a pagan deity or because the Hebrews disliked the idea of marking slaves with tattoos. See John Huehnergard and Harold Liebowitz, “The Biblical Prohibition Against Tattooing,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 59–77. See also Bartlomiej Sokal, “‘Thou Shalt not Tattoo Yourself’ (cf. Lev 19:26–28),” (paper posted on adacemia.edu): 1–22, https://‌www ‌.academia‌.edu‌/17124598‌/Thou‌_Shalt‌_not‌ _Tattoo‌_Yourself‌_cf‌_Lev‌_19‌_26‌_28_. 11. Mishnah Makkot deals with questions of whether and how many lashes a transgression deserves. Chapter 3:6 states, “One who imprints a tattoo, by inserting a dye into recesses carved

Jerusalem Under the Skin in the skin, is also liable to receive lashes. If one imprinted on the skin with a dye but did not carve the skin, or if one carved the skin but did not imprint the tattoo by adding a dye, he is not liable; he is not liable until he imprints and carves the skin, with ink, or with kohl [keh.ol], or with any substance that marks. Rabbi Shimon ben Yehuda says in the name of Rabbi Shimon: He is liable only if he writes the name there, as it is stated: ‘And a tattoo inscription you shall not place upon you, I am the Lord’ (Leviticus 19:28).” Translation from the William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, accessed July 8, 2022, http://‌www‌ .sefaria‌.org‌/Mishnah‌_Makkot‌.3. On the permissible exegesis, see also Meir Bar-Ilan, “Body Marks in Jewish Sources: From Biblical to Post-Talmudic Times,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 21, no. 1 (2018): 57–81. 12. Encyclopedia Judaica (1971), s.v. “Tattoo.” 13. “Ego enim stigmata Iesu in corpore meo porto.” See also O. Betz, “Stigma,” in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), 7:657–64. 14. See the list at https://‌www‌.biblegateway ‌.com‌/verse‌/en‌/Galatians‌%206:‌17. 15. The author of the pseudo-canons of Basil challenged the tattooing practices of the Orient. The text survives only in Arabic: “No men should make tattoos as the pagans do, who are therefore condemned and sin in their thoughts as followers of Satan. Do not be pleased [by tattoos] and do not sit in front of those who fix them with thorn and needle until your blood runs down to the ground.” My translation of article 27 is based on W. Riedel, Die Kirchenrechtsquellen des Patriarchats Alexandrien (Leipzig: Deichert, 1900), 245. Procopius of Gaza took the opposite stance in describing how “many people carry tattoos on their palms and arms with a cross or the name of the Lord” (my translation). See Procopius of Gaza, Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam, in Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 87.2 (Paris: apud Migne, 1860), col. 2680. 16. The edict is preserved in the Codex Theodosianus of 438. The quotation is taken from the Codex Iustinianus 9.47.17. 17. Sahih al-Bukhari, 5948, accessed January 2, 2021, https://‌sunnah‌.com‌/bukhari‌/77‌/164. 18. Pierre Adnès, Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1990), 14: cols. 1211–43, s.v. “Stigmates.” See also Mordechay Lewy, “Did Burning Mirrors

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Cause Body Marks on St. Francis of Assisi? A Material View on Medieval Stigmata,” Mediaevistik 34 (2021): 99–127. 19. William J. Purkis, “Stigmata on the First Crusade,” in Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 99–108. 20. William J. Purkis, “Zealous Imitation: The Materiality of the Crusader’s Marked Body,” Material Religion 14, no. 4 (2018): 438–53, at 443. 21. The Book of the Wandering of Brother Felix Fabri, trans. Aubrey Stewart, Palestine Pilgrims Text Society 7 (London: London Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1896), 1:317. 22. Jiry Hasecker, Die Johanniter und die Wallfahrt nach Jerusalem (1480–1522) (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2008), 100 n. 359. 23. Hartmut Kühne, Lothar Lambacher, and Konrad Vanja, eds., Das Zeichen am Hut im Mittelalter: Europäische Reisemarkierungen; Symposion in Memoriam Kurt Köster (1912– 1986), Europäische Wallfahrtstudien Band 4 (Frankfurt: Lang, 2008). 24. In this chapter, I use the terms Holy Land, the Land of Israel, and Palestine as synonyms. 25. Franciscus Quaresmius, Elucidatio terrae sanctae, trans. S. Sandoli (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1989), 67. On the genesis of the Jerusalem cross, see Mordechay Lewy, “Cinque ferite nel simbolo della Cita Santa,” L’Osservatore Romano 28, no. 8 (2009): 4–5. 26. R. Röhricht and H. Meisner, Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem Heiligen Lande (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880), 426. 27. J. P. de Gennes, Les chevaliers du Saint Sépulchre de Jerusalem (Cholet en Anjou: Éditions Herault, 1995), 270–90. 28. Juliet Fleming, “The Renaissance Tattoo,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (London: Reaktion, 2000), 61–82, at 80. 29. Mordechay Lewy, “Religious Ambiguity at the Periphery of the Habsburg Mediterranean: Protestant Plgrims and Their Interactions with Franciscan Friars in Jerusalem in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Habsburg Mediterranean, 1500–1800, ed. Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Science Press, 2021), 201–27.

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30. Bertrand Zimolong, “Zu der Pilgerbescheinigung in Martinus Seusenius’ Reise in das heilige Land, 1602/3,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 65 (1942): 212–23. 31. Ferdinand Mühlau, “Martinus Seusenius’ Reise in das Heilige Land im Jahre 1602/1603,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 26 (1903): 1–96, at 49–50. 32. B. Bagatti, ed., Bernardo Amico: Plans of the Sacred Edifices of the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1977), 13. 33. Beyond the Holy Land, only the pilgrimage to Casa Santa in Loreto, Italy, bears evidence of tattooing customs from the eighteenth century on. See Guido Guerzoni, “Notae divinae ex arte compuntae: Prime impressioni sul tatuaggio devozionale in Italia (secoli XV–XIX),” in “La Peau humaine / La pelle humana / The Human Skin,” special issue, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 13 (2005): 409–37, and Guido Guerzoni, “Devotional Tattoos in Early Modern Italy,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 6 (2018): 119–36. 34. Robert Ousterhout, “Permanent Ephemera: The ‘Honourable Stigmatisation’ of Jerusalem Pilgrims,” in Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel, ed. Renana Bartal and Hanna Vorholt (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 94–109, at 104. See also Maria Schaller, “‘Stich bey Stich’ auf dem ‘schmertzliche[n] Kreitz Weg Christ’: Die tätowierten Pilger-Zeichen des Otto Friedrich von der Groeben und seine Orientalische ReiseBeschreibung (Marienwerder, 1694),” in Wege: Gestalt—Funktion—Materialität, ed. Debora Oswald, Linda Schiel, and Nadine Wagner (Berlin: Reimer, 2018), 58–77, and Gabriele Leschke, “Representations of the Tomb of Christ in Works Written, Designed, and Commissioned by Otto Friedrich von der Gröben,” in On the Way to the “(Un)Known”? The Ottoman Empire in Travelogues (c. 1450–1900), edited by Doris Gruber and Arno Strohmeyer, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 129–46, here 142–43. 35. Edward Terry, quoted in Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo,” 79–80. 36. See Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina, vol. 1 (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1943). In Cerulli’s list of sources, I found twenty-one travel reports from Europe between 1219 and 1556 that mention tattooing customs among the Ethiopians—whether in the form of brand marks or cuts made to the skin. On tattooing practices under the Fellahs and the Copts in

Upper Egypt, see W. S. Blackman, The Fallahin of Upper Egypt (London: Harrap, 1927), 51–56. On the reception of Ethiopian tattooing practices among European travelers in the Middle Ages, see Otto Meinardus, “Some Observations of Ethiopian Rituals by Medieval Pilgrims,” Publication de l’Institut des Études Orientales de la Bibliothèque Patriarcale d’Alexandrie 13 (1964): 129–36. On the tattoo as an identifying symbol for religious minorities, see E. Wakin, A Lonely Minority: The Modern Story of Egypt’s Copts (New York: Morrow, 1963), 138. Tattooing assumes a similar function for the Catholic minority in Bosnia. See M. E. Durham, Some Tribal Origins and Customs of the Balkans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928), 104–5. Tattoos from the Fatimid period appear in a drawing of a dancer. See D. S. Rice, “A Drawing of the Fatimid Period,” Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 21 (1958): 31–39. On tattooing among the Bedouins and Fellahs in Palestine, see Gustav Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1937), 5:273–74 and 346–47. See also W. M. Thomson, The Land and the Book: Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (London: Nelson and Sons, 1872), 64–67. 37. Greffin Affagart, Relation de Terre Sainte, ed. J. Chavanon (Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre, 1902), 80–81. 38. The writers are Alexander von Pappenheim (1563–64), Fynes Moryson (1596), Martinus Seusenius (1602), George Sandys (1611), William Lithgow (1612), Thomas Coryate (1612–14), Jean de Thevenot (1658), Laurentius Slisansky (1661–62), Franz von Troilo (1667–68), Otto Friedrich von der Groeben (1675), and Henry Maundrell (1697). 39. We know of portraits of Cornelis van Wevelinchoven (1657–59), Ratge Stubbe (1669), Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1699), Siegfried von Kolonitz (1700), and an unidentified French or Dutch gentleman (166?) held in a private collection in the United States, reproduced and examined by Katherine Dauge-Roth in Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020). 40. See Mordechay Lewy, “Cornelius Loos’ Map and His Expedition to Palestine” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 66 (1992): 85–86. The two other tattooed officers in his 1710 expedition were Conrad Sparre and Hans Gyllenskepp. Two Swedish theologians got tattoos during their pilgrimages—Michael Eneman (1712) and Henrik Benzelius (1715).

Jerusalem Under the Skin 41. Constantin François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte pendant les anneés 1783, 1784 et 1785 (Paris: Desenne and Volland, 1787), 2:287–88. 42. These sources include the missionary W. M. Thomson (1857), the Italian engineer and archaeologist Ermete Pierotti (1864), the French traveler Gabriel Charmes (1880), the German marine painter C. W. Allers (1891), the English tattoo artist George Burchett (1892), the English journalist Steven Graham (1912), and the Islamic art connoisseur John Carswell (1957). 43. Bagatti, Bernardo Amico, 12. 44. William Lithgow, The total Discourse of the rare Adventures and painefull Peregrinations (London: Okes, 1640), 244. 45. Mühlau, Martinus Seusenius’ Reise. 46. George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey (London: Barren, 1615), 200. 47. Lithgow, Total Discourse, 185. 48. Pietro Verniero di Montepeloso, Chroniche o Annali di Terra Santa, ed. G. Golubovich (Quarracchi: Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1930), 2:133. 49. Ibid., 2:261. 50. Laurentius Slisansky, Newe Reisebeschreibung nacher Jerusalem undt dem Heiligen Land (Leipzig: Voigtländer Quellenbuch, 1914), 40. 51. Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Billaine, 1665), 403–4. 52. Franz von Troilo, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung (Leipzig: Leschen, 1717), 389. 53. Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung (Marienwerder: S. Reiniger, 1694), 283. 54. Aëtius of Amida, Libri medicinales 8.12, in Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (CMG), ed. A. Olivieri (Berlin: Teubner, 1950), 417–18. 55. Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage. 56. Troilo, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 389–92. 57. Groeben, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 285–86. 58. Henry Maundrell, “A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697,” in Early Travels in Palestine, ed. Th. Wright (London: Bohn, 1848), 445–46. 59. Johannes Lundius, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheit (Hamburg: Brand, 1738), 732. 60. The correspondence between wooden textile blocks from the Fatimid epoch held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of

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Art in New York City (1971.87) and the tattooed motif on the breast of a Fatimid dancer suggests an interconnection. The drawing is published in Rice, “Drawing of the Fatimid Period.” 61. H. Schiffmacher and B. Riemschneider, 1000 Tattoos (Cologne: Taschen, 1996). 62. Blackman, Fallahin of Upper Egypt, 51; Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte, 347. 63. Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage. 64. Groeben, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 483. 65. Troilo, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 392. 66. Ibid. 67. S. Ben Yosef, “Artisanship and Traditional Industries in Bethlehem,” in Bethlehem and the Church of Nativity [in Hebrew], ed. E. Shiler (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1980), 43–46, at 43. 68. Nicola di Poggibonsi, A Voyage Beyond the Seas (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1993), 51. 69. Johann Georg Keyssler, Neueste Reisen (Seventh Letter from June 13th, 1729) (Hannover: Nicolai Förster, 1751), 1:40 n. 2. 70. Ermete Pierotti, Customs and Traditions of Palestine (Cambridge: Deighton, 1864), 150–51. 71. John Carswell presents a catalogue of 184 wooden templates of tattoo motifs that were owned in 1958 by the Razzouk family (Coptic Tattoo Designs [Beirut: Faculty of Arts and Sciences, American University of Beirut, 1958]). In 2020, numerous rubber copies of the original wooden templates were published by Alessandra Boroni, Jerusalem Tattoos: Tradition and Designs (Wroclaw: Albero Niro Editore, 2020). 72. The story of the Hairabedian family of tattooists is told in Arthur Hagopian, “The ANZACs and the Tattoo Artist of Jerusalem,” accessed July 9, 2022, https://‌armenian‌-jerusa lem‌.org‌/tattoo‌.htm. 73. “Basmaijan” derives from basmaçi, an occupational name for a maker or seller of textiles (basma). Over time, the term came to be associated with tattoos as well. 74. The claim that the family tattooing business extends back more than four hundred years is advertised by Wassim, the present owner of the Razzouk tattoo studio; it, however, lacks evidence. This is not to say that pilgrimage tattoos were not administered in the Holy Land since the middle of the sixteenth century but not necessarily by Copts.

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75. See Blackman, Fellahin of Upper Egypt, 54. See also S. Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London: Macmillan, 1913), 258–59. 76. Carswell, Coptic Tattoo Designs, template 68. 77. Ibid., template 145. 78. In Carswell’s catalogue, there are twelve woodblocks that he mistook as Saint Veronica. All of them depict the decapitated head of the apostle Saint James Major brought by two angels from Jaffa to Mary, mother of Christ, whose house was at Mount Zion. Carswell was not aware of the Armenian tradition of this devotion. 79. Mordechay Lewy, “Body in ‘Finis Terrae,’ Head in ‘Terra Sancta’: The Veneration of the Head of the Apostle James in Compostela and Jerusalem; Western, Crusader and Armenian Traditions,” Hagiographica 17 (2010): 131–74. 80. Kevork was a postmaster and also the representative of the Banker Valero in Jaffa. 81. On the Armenian calendar, Christmas falls two weeks after it does on the Julian calendar (which is followed by the Greek Orthodox and Eastern churches) and almost one month after it does on the Gregorian calendar (followed by Catholics and Protestants). 82. The yellow of the bovine gall takes on a dark-brown tint over time. In the seventeenth century, gall was used by bookbinders to marble paper and to color copper prints and lithographs. 83. Volney, Voyage en Syrie. Antimony is a metalloid element with a blueish tint, used for casting type. Indigo was frequently used as a dye in the Middle East. When added to tattoo ink, it imparts a blue color. See J. Balfour-Paul, Indigo in the Arab World (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), 164–65. 84. Troilo, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 389–90. 85. Groeben, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 283–84. 86. Slisansky, Newe Reisebeschreibung, 40. 87. Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage, 404–5. 88. Maundrell, “Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem,” 445–46. 89. Mordechay Lewy, “Two Letters from Michael Eneman’s Journey to the Holy Land” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 53 (1989): 75–84. Cf. Keyssler, Neueste Reisen. 90. Volney, Voyage en Syrie.

91. Rudolf Kleinpaul, Die Dahabiye: Reiseskizzen aus Ägypten (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1879), 191. 92. Gabriel Charmes, Voyage en Palestine: Impressions et souvenirs (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1884), 91. 93. Pierotti, Customs and Traditions of Palestine. 94. Cornelis van Wevelinchoven traveled in between the years 1657 and 1659 and entered Jerusalem, according to the Franciscans’ guestbook, on April 13, 1658. The unpublished manuscript of his travel account, “Journaal v.e. reis naar Jerusalem,” is held by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LC 2010714092). For a photograph of the lost portrait of Van Wevelinchoven, see Representations of Jerusalem Pilgrims, MeMO project, accessed July 9, 2022, https://‌staticweb‌.hum‌.uu‌.nl‌/me mo‌/jerusalem‌/pages‌/73‌.shtml. 95. Lithgow, Total Discourse, 252–53. 96. Ibid., 254. 97. We know of this plate primarily through its use in Lundius, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, facing p. 732. 98. Robert Herbert Bellmann, “Die Tatauierung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, ed. W. Pessler (Potsdam: Athenaion, 1938), 3:57–65. See also Stephan Oettermann, Zeichen auf der Haut: Die Geschichte der Tätowierung in Europa (Frankfurt: Syndikat/EVA, 1979), 16. The author counts himself among those who have made this mistake. See Lewy, “Cornelius Loos’ Map,” 86. 99. Otto Meinardus, “Jerusalemer Pilgerstätten auf Hamburger Armen: Zur Tätowierung eines Hamburger Jerusalempilgers, 1669,” Beiträge zur deutschen Volks- und Altertumskunde 26 (1988–91): 117–22, at 121. 100. I[esus] N[asarenum] R[ex] I[udaeorum]: “Jesus the Nazerene, king of the Jews.” 101. Meinardus, “Jerusalemer Pilgerstätten,” 120. 102. L[apis] U[bi] C[hristus] F[uit] U[nctus]: “The stone where Christ was anointed.” 103. Lundius, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer, 825. 104. “Der schmertzliche Kreitz Weg Christi,” also known as the via dolorosa. According to Maurice Halbwachs, the via dolorosa was introduced in Jerusalem in the fifteenth century by European pilgrims who sought to satisfy their devotional zeal to imitate Christ (La

Jerusalem Under the Skin Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte [Paris: PUF, 1941], 81–89). 105. The masses celebrated Jesus’s arrival in Bethfage on his way to Jerusalem with palm leaves in their hands (John 12:13). Since the seventh century at the latest, palm leaves from Jericho were highly prized as mementos of pilgrimage. See “The Piacenza Pilgrim,” in Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades, ed. J. Wilkinson (Warminster: Aris & Philips, 2002), 137. Since the twelfth century, the term palmarius (bearer of palm leaves) has been used to refer to pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. 106. Groeben, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung. 107. Mordechay Lewy, “Die tätowierten Pilgerzeichen aus Jerusalem,” Von Halle nach Jerusalem: Ein Zentrum der Palästinakunde im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Budde and M. Lewy (Halle an der Saale: Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalts und Generalkonsulat des Staates Israels, 1994), 75–76. 108. Reinhold Röhricht mistakenly believed that he located the letter at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (Bibliotheca Geographica Palestinae [London: John Trotter Reprints, 1989], 288). 109. For the letter’s text, see D. Sturm, “Ein Brief aus Jerusalem: Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf an August Hermann Francke,” in Budde and Lewy, Von Halle nach Jerusalem, 68–74. His visit to Jerusalem was intended to open an ecumenical dialog between Pietist Lutherans and the Greek Orthodox Church. His efforts failed. 110. Paul Raabe, In Franckes Fußstapfen: Aufbaujahre in Halle an der Saale (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 174. 111. Nina Trauth, Maske und Person: Orientalismus im Porträt des Barock (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 255–59. 112. Anne Schröder-Kahnt, “‘Beym Ümgange mit allerhand nationen und religionen ein und ander Vergnügen bescheret’: Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolfs Reise in den Orient,” in Durch die Welt im Auftrag des Herrn: Reisen von Pietisten im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Anne Schröder-Kahnt and Claus Veltmann, Kataloge der Franckeschen

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Stiftungen 35 (Halle an der Saale: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2018), 161–85, esp. 171–72. 113. The word bezoar derives from the Persian ba¯dzahr (ba¯d meaning “against” and zahr meaning “poison”). It consists of a hard mass, such as a stone or hairball, formed in the stomach or intestines of animals, especially wild goats from Central Asia. See Peter Borschberg, “The Euro-Asian Trade in Bezoar Stones (approx. 1500–1700),” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400– 1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, ed. Michael North (London: Routledge, 2010), 29–44. 114. Troilo, Orientalische Reisebeschreibung, 390. 115. Slisansky, Newe Reisebeschreibung, 40. 116. Lewy, “Cornelius Loos’ Map,” 85. In contrast to Ludolf, the Swedish nobleman Conrad Sparre chose not to display his tattooed arm is his portrait (75). 117. Borroni, Jerusalem Tattoos, 100. 118. Cf. the inscriptions in figs. 4.10 and 4.12. 119. Borroni argues for Coptic seniority by noting that a Coptic template of the Resurrection was used in the portrait of Ludolf in 1699 (Jerusalem Tattoos, 47), but this argument seems to be mistaken. This template is similar to the images tattooed on Stubbe’s and Groeben’s arms, which include Latin inscriptions. 120. Charmes, Voyage en Palestine, 92. 121. Kleinpaul, Die Dahabiye. 122. George Burchett, Memoirs of a Tattooist: From the Notes, Diaries, and Letters of the Late “King of Tattooists,” George Burchett, ed. Peter Leighton (London: Oldbourne, 1958), 52. On the authenticity of this memoir, see Matt Lodder, “Burchett, George (1872–1953), tattoo artist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2016, https://‌doi‌.org‌/10‌.1093‌/REF‌:ODNB‌ /100995, and Jon Reiter, King of Tattooists: The Life and Work of George Burchett (Milwaukee: Solid State, 2012). 123. Lundius, Die alten jüdischen Heiligtümer.

Chapter 5

Stigmata and the MindBody Connection

Allison Stedman stigmata, s. m. p. Marks of the wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Francis has been honored with the glorious stigmata of Jesus Christ. —Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694)

In the late nineteenth century, Dr. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre embarked on a crusade to prove to his medical contemporaries affiliated with the Parisian mental hospital La Salpêtrière that stigmata were a real supernatural phenomenon, as opposed to a nervous disorder caused by hypnosis or hysteria. He began by compiling a catalogue of all known European stigmatics from the Middle Ages to the present, and he came upon a surprising discovery. Of the 321 documented cases he had been able to uncover in Western Europe since the stigmata’s first known occurrence in 1224 to Saint Francis of Assisi, only six cases had been reported in France prior to the turn of the seventeenth century, the lowest incidence of any other Western European country.1 Things would change dramatically, however, in the century that followed. As Imbert-Gourbeyre would learn, during the rise of political absolutism and orthodox Catholicism over the course of the seventeenth century, stigmata rates in France would increase by nearly 80 percent, boasting at least eighty-five different occurrences to some forty-six different

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people between 1600 and 1700 alone, a level of incidence that was higher than in any other country except Italy.2 About a century later, when religious historian Joachim Bouflet set out to undertake a revised edition of Imbert-Gourbeyre’s work, he discovered that although his predecessor had overlooked a number of reputable stigmatics and included others whose cases Bouflet found dubious, the bell curve over the 1600s in France remained the same.3 Approximately twothirds of all known incidents of stigmata that had occurred in France between the Middle Ages and the turn of the twentieth century had transpired there during the seventeenth century.4 In recent decades, scholars have sought to look more deeply into how early modern people perceived the phenomenon of stigmata, examining both the mechanics behind it and the range of ways in which such marks could be interpreted. Eric Suire and André Vauchez have investigated the role of stigmata in early modern determinations of a person’s eligibility for sainthood.5 Moshe Sluhovsky has illuminated the efforts of religious officials to create parameters for distinguishing stigmata and other exterior signs of mystical encounters from the physical changes associated with demonic possession.6 Katherine DaugeRoth has investigated the relationship between divine stigmata and miracles, pilgrim tattoos, the devil’s mark (the material sign impressed upon a witch’s skin by Satan himself), and demonic marks observed on the body in the wake of an exorcism.7 In Dominique de Courcelles’s edited volume Stigmates, a number of scholars have investigated the phenomenon from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including literary criticism and theory, history, art history, sociology, gender studies, and religion. In his important contribution to that volume, Jacques Le Brun provides an overview of how discourses on the stigmata evolved in Western Europe over the course of the seventeenth century, revealing that while some constituencies maintained the medieval, Franciscan perspective that stigmata were visible marks of divine benediction and as such should be read as the imprints of divine favor, others endeavored to look more deeply into the matter, questioning not only the origins of such marks but also the mechanics behind their formation.8 As we shall see, mechanical explanations for the formation of stigmata during the early modern period were heavily influenced not only by the rise of Cartesian dualism but also by a shift in beliefs about the ability of the imagination to alter the conditions of the body and of its surrounding material environment, a shift that John D. Lyons documents in detail in his seminal study Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau. As Lyons describes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the imagination had been largely perceived as an “active, inward-turning and independent” mental process that enabled the mind of an individual to produce images and other sensory representations at will that were different from the world immediately present and that could, in turn, have an impact on altering the material environment. By the

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end of the seventeenth century, however, the imagination had become more or less synonymous with the eighteenth-century notion of “sensibility,” a “passive, outward-turning and receptive” mode of thinking that, in being activated exclusively by an external stimulus, made the individual who permitted himself to imagine vulnerable to having his mind controlled by receiving the mental imprints of whatever the exterior environment chose to present to it.9 In keeping with this shift in beliefs about the power of the imagination, over the course of the early modern period, the idea that the imagination could play a foundational role in transforming intangible, spiritual realities into visible markings on a person’s flesh would gradually give way to the early Enlightenment tendency to view stigmata as an exteriorized phenomenon, in which the mind of the individual stigmatic is either completely alienated from the process or rendered powerless by an onslaught of emotions triggered by an exterior stimulus. Stigmata and the Power of the Imagination (1585–1640) Although powerful mental and emotional states had been associated with the stigmata since the time of Saint Francis of Assisi, the idea that the imagination could play a distinctive, intermediary role in the conversion of mental images into material realities was a concept that French humanist philosophers of the sixteenth century had found particularly intriguing. In his essay “On the Power of the Imagination,” for example, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) hypothesized that the imagination was responsible for a range of unusual physical transformations, including the spontaneous appearance of scars, wounds, and other lacerations associated with stigmata.10 Montaigne thus placed the medieval Merovingian king Dagobert (r. 628–39), whose body reportedly became covered in scars as a result of his imagination being gripped by a fear of gangrene, in the same category as Saint Francis of Assisi, whose imagination played a similarly undisclosed role in the manifestation of his stigmata.11 As Montaigne describes: “Some people attribute to the power of the imagination the scars of King Dagobert and of Saint Francis.”12 When it comes to the imagination, “everyone feels its impact, but some are overthrown by it.”13 Montaigne’s ideas about the imagination’s role in the formation of stigmata were carried into the seventeenth century by influential thinkers including Saint François de Sales (1567–1622) and René Descartes (1596–1650). While de Sales goes into substantial detail about how various mental faculties collectively contributed to the phenomenon in his 1616 Treatise on the Love of God, Descartes presents a more nuanced perspective in his private correspondence with Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) during the 1630s and 1640s. De Sales and Descartes penned their sentiments nearly twenty-five years apart, and unlike de Sales, Descartes refuses to entertain the possibility that a supernatural entity may be able to act upon a natural entity in any

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capacity. However, both men ultimately agree that stigmata could not occur unless the stigmatic ardently desired them, pictured them in the imagination, and sustained active meditation on them for an extended period of time. As we shall see, de Sales’s and Descartes’s perspectives on the formation of stigmata are at odds with the way in which the phenomenon would be explained during the second half of the seventeenth century, a teleology that is in keeping with what Lyons has observed about the decline of belief in the power of the imagination in other areas of society. Saint François de Sales: Stigmata and the Mystical Imagination De Sales’s 1616 Treatise on the Love of God, a devotional manual designed to outline the path to finding mystical unity with God through prayer, presents one of the earliest and most influential seventeenth-century discussions of the role of the mind in the production of stigmata.14 In the context of this treatise, de Sales advocates that the cultivation of a particular kind of mental, interior prayer life could enable Christians to achieve true holiness because inspirations fed to a person during prayer would, in turn, determine the nature of their works, making them more saintly, more compassionate, and more charitable than if the person were not being fed by divine inspiration. Although many people during de Sales’s time believed that true holiness could only be attained by people in religious life, by members of the clergy, or by contemplative hermits who withdrew from active participation in the world, de Sales taught that holiness and worldliness were not necessarily incompatible and that all Christians were called to lead devout lives regardless of their station. De Sales maintains that, as a general rule, the primary physical side effect of praying to the point that one’s mind became consumed by love for the divine creator was the sensation of the body taking on “new vigor and energy.” This state of being was so much more “spirited, energetic and invigorating” than what the person had experienced previously that it was often perceived as constituting a “new life” altogether.15 But the saint also acknowledges that in certain situations, the profound mental apprehension of God’s love during contemplative prayer could result in physical side effects that went beyond the mere invigoration of one’s heart and mind. These side effects were more immediate, more physically apparent, and more difficult for the mind to control once they were set in motion because they manifested as a sensory experience in addition to an emotional one. As de Sales explains, the most common seemingly paranormal physical repercussion from the experience of divine love is that of “ecstasy,” a state of intense and overwhelming pleasure that captivates a person’s mental and emotional faculties with such force that the sensory system is shut down, leaving the person in a rapturous, trancelike faint.16 This state of mental and physical elation is so

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pleasurable and so intense that if it is interrupted for any reason, it can quickly be infused with a second paranormal side effect of divine love—that of “agony,” a phenomenon that de Sales explains as the physical experience of “incomparable pain,” in which “the heart is wounded as if by an arrow,” and the person is overwhelmed by suffering to the point of becoming a virtual invalid, sometimes for extended periods of time.17 In order to explain the relationship between ecstasy and agony, de Sales gives the example of a baby who, while in the bliss of being nursed to sleep (ecstasy) is suddenly detached from his mother and left to cry alone in his cradle (agony).18 While it is possible to experience ecstasy without agony, one cannot experience agony without ecstasy, since agony, by definition, is the experience of having ecstasy interrupted. By far the most dramatic physical side effect of thoughts that intervene during the course of a spiritual ecstasy is the appearance of the stigmata, however, a phenomenon that de Sales considers to be a “wondrous thing,” in which “Sweet Jesus allows [a person] to [share in] his loving and precious pain.”19 Although de Sales concedes that he has never experienced the stigmata for himself, he hypothesizes that the phenomenon occurs as a result of the mental apprehension of the divine being combined with the powerful sensory apprehension of the same entity, an apprehension that, in making itself apparent to the senses as well as to the mind, sets in motion an amalgamation of mental processes and emotional responses that combine to produce one of the most dramatic physical manifestations of mind-body interaction ever witnessed. As de Sales describes, in the case of Saint Francis of Assisi, the phenomenon occurred not only because of the saint’s perception of God’s love but also because he was able to vividly imagine Christ’s suffering while being simultaneously “filled to the brim” with divine love, a coalescence that caused him to experience a powerful vision on the mountain of La Verna—a vision that revealed the object of his love to him so vividly that he perceived it not only with his mind but also with his eyes. This vision, which de Sales describes as the “living image of his crucified Savior, in the form of a shining Seraph,” had a profound effect on Saint Francis’s emotions. First, his heart was touched with such “supreme consolation and compassion” that he momentarily “fainted from the sweetness [of] contentment.” After coming to, however, Saint Francis was able to take a closer look at “the live representation of the scars and wounds of his crucified Savior,” a sight that penetrated his mind and passed from there to his heart with such force that he was able to feel those wounds “with as much interior pain as if he had been crucified along with his dear Savior.”20 As de Sales describes, the fact that the image of the crucified body of Christ appeared to Saint Francis precisely at the moment that his heart was “softened, touched and almost completely melted away in this loving pain” made it so that he was “extremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of his supreme lover.”21 The reason for this is that the living image of

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Christ’s suffering heightened Saint Francis’s perception of it to the point that this perception pervaded each of his individual mental faculties in rapid succession, coalescing around the visual impression of Christ suffering before him while at the same time retaining their previous emotional coalescence around divine love. As de Sales describes, after penetrating Saint Francis’s heart with agony to the point that an onlooker was convinced Saint Francis was being murdered, the image of the suffering Christ went on to infiltrate Francis’s mind, saturating his memory with recollections of Christ’s divine love, seizing his imagination with images of Christ’s crucifixion wounds, and sending all of these images and concepts directly to his intellect so that Francis, in comprehending the depths of the sacrifice, would will himself to emulate Christ in this experience as an act of love—a desire that would ultimately be realized with the appearance of the stigmata: As such, [his] soul, in this way softened, touched and almost completely melted away in this loving pain, through these means found itself extremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of his supreme Lover. For [his] memory was completely saturated with the memory of this divine love; [his] imagination was applying itself so strongly to represent to him the [same] wounds and bruises that his eyes were seeing so perfectly well expressed in the present image; [his] understanding was receiving the images [espèces] that the imagination was providing for it, and finally love was infusing all the power of [his] will [with the desire] to fully embody and experience the Passion of the Beloved: thus [his] soul without a doubt was finding itself completely transformed in a second Crucifixion. For the soul, which is responsible both for forming and for retaining mastery over the body, exercised its power over [the body], imprinting upon it the same pains and abrasions of which it had itself been wounded, in the corresponding places to those where his Lover had endured them.22 Although de Sales credits a coalescence of mental faculties for the dramatic appearance of the stigmata, he goes on to describe that when it comes to making an immaterial phenomenon or concept manifest physically, a person’s imagination nevertheless bears slightly more responsibility than do the other mental faculties. This is because, although memory and understanding must be equally captivated in order for the necessary preconditions of stigmata to be met, it is ultimately the imagination’s ability to be swayed by emotions and to generate emotions in return that make the physical manifestations of Christ’s wounds possible. As de Sales describes: “Love is admirable for sharpening the imagination to the point that it affects the exterior. . . . It was thus [by way of the imagination] that love made the interior torments of this great lover St. Francis manifest on the exterior, wounding the body with the same arrow that it had used to wound the heart.”23

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De Sales is convinced that Saint Francis’s imagination played an important role in his ability to manifest the stigmata because, as he describes, the idea that the imagination can have dramatic physical effects upon the body is an obvious and long-standing article of common knowledge. As de Sales reminds his readers, we need look no further than the book of Genesis for proof that the colors of objects that animals see before them while mating can affect the colors of their offspring’s coats.24 Everyone knows that the imaginations of pregnant women, whose minds are similarly softened by love for their unborn babies, can inadvertently imprint the marks of their desires on the bodies of their infants.25 And it has also been amply demonstrated that the vivid imagination of terrible circumstances can cause “a person’s hair to turn white overnight, can ruin his health and disrupt all of his humors.”26 The reason for this is that, unlike our other mental faculties, the imagination is the form of mental processing that we use when we want to think about material things, conjuring up thoughts and ideas that take the form of images and pictures with corresponding material counterparts in the physical environment. De Sales did not venture into the territory of fortune, and, as a spiritual person who had taken a vow to renounce all forms of worldly pleasure, he could not comment on whether or not a positive mental outlook would, in fact, attract materially beneficial circumstances to a person, in addition to improving his physical health. However, he did acknowledge that in moments of extreme mental quintessence during prayer, the power of the praying person’s mind seemed to take on the dramatic ability to manipulate the exterior spiritual environment in accordance with the praying person’s desires and will, both by attracting saints or other angelic beings to the person’s vicinity and by mobilizing these entities to execute the praying person’s desires and will in instances where the realization of such desires exceeded normal human capabilities. As de Sales describes, it was this exaggeration of one’s normal mental abilities that allowed Saint Francis not only to cause a seraph to manifest the exact replica of the crucified Christ that he had been imagining in his mind at that moment but, more important, to compel the seraph to assist Francis in realizing his ultimate desire to imitate Christ by receiving his wounds in a physical manner. For although Saint Francis had been able to generate “interior pain” in the exact same places in his body as those that he saw represented on the body of Christ, his mental processes were not sufficient to make these wounds become visible on the exterior.27 For this reason, the power of Saint Francis’s mental quintessence had to be directed to an element beyond the body, compelling the seraph to complete what Saint Francis himself was unable to achieve through mental discipline directly: Love [for his Savior] thus made Saint Francis’s interior torments pass to the exterior, and wounded [his] body with the same arrow of pain that

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it had [used to] wound his heart. But in order to make impressions in the flesh from the outside, the love which was inside [of him] could not do it very well: this is why the ardent Seraph, coming to the rescue, cast off rays of such a penetrating clarity, that it actually made the exterior wounds of the crucifix, on the flesh, which [Saint Francis’s own] love [for his Savior] had imprinted interiorly on [his] soul.28 Although as a general rule, celestial beings such as angels or seraphs answer only to God, de Sales maintains that these beings can nonetheless be summoned to the aid of mortals if a person’s mental and emotional states are powerfully coalesced and heightened enough to warrant it. As he describes, in the case of Saint Francis, the energy of the imagination in synergy with that of the saint’s other mental and emotional faculties generated such a powerful desire that the seraph, who would otherwise have been in a position of superiority, instead became compelled by the attracting power of Francis’s mind to play the role of his servant, being inexplicably moved to help the saint manifest the kinds of wounds he so ardently desired. René Descartes: Stigmata and the Mechanical Imagination On March 8, 1640, the Dutch physicist Huygens penned a letter to Descartes, who was living in Santpoort, Holland, to invite him to travel with him to the coastal town of Saint-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany in order to examine the body markings of an anonymous girl (Marie-Amice Picard [1599–1652]), whose “living martyrology” had resulted in her spiritual directors becoming concerned enough to call in doctors to examine her symptoms.29 Picard had been experiencing religious ecstasies accompanied by visions for six years. However, when these ecstasies occurred on the eve of the feast day of a martyred saint, Picard received more than just a vision of the saint’s persecution; marks consistent with the martyr’s experiences became visible upon her body. As a later biographer would summarize: The patient would feel as though all of her limbs were being dislocated from her body, as if on a sawhorse, flagellated, burned alive, riddled with piercing arrows, burned on a grill, plunged into boiling water, even decapitated like a Saint Cyriacus, a Saint Bartholomew, a Saint Sebastian, a Saint Lawrence, a Saint John the Evangelist [or] a Saint John the Baptist. Up to one hundred and seventeen wounds were counted on her body on the occasion of a feast of Saint Sebastian (1641). On the night that preceded the mass of Saints Marcellinus, Peter and Erasmus, she was whipped with lead-sealed whips, then rolled over broken glass [and] boiled in a cauldron full of oil and resin. In the morning, her whole body

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was mangled and coated with these materials: her clothes were steeped with them (July 1, 1641).30 Picard’s first experience with the physical repercussions of mysticism had occurred on August 7, 1635, when a vision of the martyrdom of Saint Cyriacus reportedly resulted in the excruciating and visible dislocation of her arms and legs.31 At the time of her death, it was claimed that, apart from the communion host, she had not taken anything to eat or drink in eighteen years. Unable to remain in the Ursuline convent of Saint-Pol-de-Léon on account of the distractions posed by the dramatic nature of her symptoms, Picard was relocated by church officials to a small private room in town, where vast numbers of people came to visit her, lending eyewitness testimony to her plight. By the time Huygens contacted Descartes for his opinion on the matter, the news of Picard’s condition had spread widely throughout France, the Low Countries, and other parts of Western Europe. Huygens, who was living in The Hague, had learned of the phenomenon from the mathematician Mersenne, who was living in Paris at the time. On April 22, 1639, Picard had received the stigmata in a way that, from the perspective of eyewitnesses, was clearly a question of the direct operation of the immaterial upon the material. As her original biographer Julien Maunoir (1606– 1683) describes it, Picard’s participation in the passion of the Christ began on the morning of Good Friday and was accompanied by loud hammering sounds that could be heard by everyone around her: “All who were in her bedroom heard banging, as if nails were being thrust into wood, and they saw blood trickling on her forehead and on her body.”32 A half an hour before noon the banging ceased, and Picard appeared crucified: “Her arms and legs [were] extended, immobilized and stiff. Blood was coming out of the wounds in her hands, in the form of foam.”33 As with her other mystically inspired physical symptoms, Picard’s stigmata disappeared within a couple of days, but in March of 1640, when Huygens wrote to Descartes, Good Friday was only five weeks away, and it was hoped that the phenomenon would repeat itself for the benefit of medical observation.34 Descartes’s response to Huygens, in a letter dated March 12, 1640, reveals that Descartes was both aware of Picard’s experiences and saw no reason to investigate them further. Dismissing the matter as “a fantastical story,” Descartes assures Huygens that the girl was faking, having clearly taken her inspiration from another girl from Meurs who was similarly “pretending not to eat anymore” and from one in Cologne who “was bearing on her body the marks of all the wounds of Jesus Christ.”35 As Descartes describes, in addition to imitating these other women, whose symptoms were likewise self-created, Picard had taken matters even further, claiming to manifest the wounds of various martyrs in addition to those of Christ, such that “on St. Steven’s Day her flesh appears completely bruised from being hit with stones, on St. Lawrence’s Day she appears

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to have been grilled, on the day of St. Denis one can see a red circle around her neck as if her head had been cut off, and so on and so forth.” Descartes assures Huygens that the spiritual cannot operate upon the material in this manner and offers hope that “these extravagances should suffice to assure that you will not believe any of it.”36 However, although Descartes is clear that the marks and other physical abnormalities should not be interpreted as authentic signs of divine benediction, he only offers a mechanical explanation for how such fraudulence can occur with respect to the girl from Meurs, who had the reputation of being able to survive without eating, implying to Mersenne that the girl does, in fact, eat secretly. With respect to the stigmata, Descartes declines to go into detail about how the mechanics of the faking could occur, leaving it unclear as to whether he believes that the girls were stigmatizing themselves by manipulating the material environment, as in the case of false fasting, or whether the marks were, in fact, being realized by other human means. In a letter to Mersenne penned the day before he composed his reply to Huygens, Descartes offers a clue about how he believes that Picard’s unexplained physical symptoms have most likely taken place, stating: “The story of the girl from lower Brittany is worthy of having been recounted by Sir Petit, for it is assuredly a fable.”37 The Pierre Petit to whom Descartes refers had recently made himself the object of Descartes’s ire by criticizing the portion of the Discourse on Method in which Descartes lays out his proof of the existence of God, subsequently claiming to Mersenne that his own arguments against Descartes are so solid that they have even been upheld by the Capuchins.38 Descartes responds to this assertion as follows: “There is absolutely no indication that the devotion of these good religious men has made them so simpleminded that they are unable to perceive the impertinences and errors of judgment in every single line of [Petit’s] address, nor that they would approve of his impious claims.”39 Descartes goes on to inform Mersenne that Petit is a libertine whose ideas have been “borrowed from atheists for the most part, and . . . piled one upon the other without judgment,” adding that “if he were in a country where the inquisition were a bit severe, Petit would have reason to fear being burned at the stake.”40 Although it is not possible to know exactly what Petit’s reply contained, Descartes’s estimation that it resembles the works of “atheists” in both form and content evokes qualities associated with the writings of another well-known libertine, the controversial Italian theologian Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619), who had been famously burned at the stake in Toulouse in 1619 when his own attempt to prove the existence of God fell flat. Descartes had offered similar criticisms of Vanini and had sought to distance himself from the theologian on multiple occasions.41 With respect to the stigmata, Vanini posits that such a thing could occur not because an exterior spiritual entity acted directly upon the body but rather because the person’s imagination was responsible for transmitting a thought, in material form, to a particular place on the body by way of the blood.42 However, for Vanini,

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the imagination’s ability to produce physical symptoms as dramatic as the stigmata does not necessarily mean that the phenomenon should not be considered a sign of divine election for the person who received it. In the case of Saint Francis of Assisi, for example, Vanini maintains that the fact that the mind of Saint Francis was able to cause lesions resembling the crucifixion wounds to appear on his hands, feet, and side offers a powerful confirmation not only of the power of the imagination but also of the deep and genuine nature of the saint’s identification with Christ’s suffering, since only an imagination that was strongly and sincerely seized could have the capacity to generate physical changes of that magnitude. As Vanini describes in his Ampitheatre (Lyon, 1615), the work that preceded the treatise for which he was eventually burned: “Saint Francis, my most honored patron before God, was able to be marked by the stigmata of Christ, because of the intensity of the way in which he thought about it.”43 In evoking the “libertine” beliefs of another one of Descartes’s sworn enemies in order to explain the cause of the stigmata both for Picard and for the girl from Cologne, Descartes appears to imply that the phenomena are caused by the women’s imaginations. This would not be the first time that Descartes had given a nod to the power of the imagination to create otherwise unexplainable physical symptoms. In a letter to Mersenne penned earlier that year, for example, Descartes tells the story of a man named Hortensius who had learned, from having his horoscope read in Italy, that he would die in 1639 and that two of the Italians with whom he was traveling would die soon thereafter. As a result, not only did Hortensius die in 1639 but also “the two young men have had such apprehension from it, that one of the two is already dead; and the other, who is the son of Heinsius, is so languishing and so sad, that he seems to be doing everything in his power to make it so that astrology did not lie.”44 As Descartes explains to Mersenne, in the case of Hortensius and the other two men, the only reason that the astrologer was proved correct is because his predictions were able to capture the men’s imaginations, convincing them of their impending deaths to the point that their minds actually caused their deaths to manifest. For Descartes, both astrology and stigmata thus appear to offer confirmation of his twelfth rule for the direction of the mind, wherein he defines the imagination as “a genuine part of the body” that is simultaneously “large enough to allow different parts of it to take on many different figures and, generally, to retain them for some time.”45 Descartes maintains that the imagination is sometimes passive and sometimes active, stating that when the imagination is active, its relationship to the body can be compared to that of a seal that leaves the imprint of its image on wax— the imagination being the seal and the wax being the body.46 It is for this reason that when pregnant women find their imaginations seized by the desire for a particular fruit, the imprint of this fruit can often be found afterward upon the body of the baby in the form of a birthmark.47

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Stigmata and the End of the Imagination (1670–1710) As the seventeenth century progressed, the role of an individual’s mental agency in the formation of stigmata would be increasingly downplayed. In part three of the 1673 edition of the Chronicles of the Ursuline Order, for example, a nun from Rennes by the name of Toussainte Josse (1574–16??) is surmised to have acquired invisible stigmata not because her imagination and other mental faculties had become synergistically activated during her seven hours of daily prayer but, rather, because the ecstasies, visions, voices, and heavenly music that accompanied these periods of contemplation had acted directly and independently upon her senses, causing her heart to be struck with unusually strong emotions: “The mysteries of the passion of our Lord made such a strong impression on her heart, that it was believed that she bore the stigmata of Jesus interiorly.”48 Accounts of both mental and emotional coalescence are absent from the 1686 description of the stigmata of the Ursuline nun Suzanne de Richon (d. 1633), however, whose stigmata had been interior during her lifetime but had become spontaneously visible upon her death. As the author of the third volume of the Journal of the Illustrious Nuns of the Ursuline Order describes, although Suzanne’s death was reportedly brought about by an illness resulting from the excessive mortifications she had performed in honor of the feast day of her patron saint Susanna in August of 1633, Richon reportedly gave no indication that her mental or emotional faculties were unusually affected at any point between the onset of the illness and the appearance of the stigmata: In the last year of her life she did so many mortifications on the day of St. Susanna her patron saint, that she fell deathly ill from them, but disregarding her excessive pains, she spoke privately with all of the nuns, illustrating until the end of her life that charity is stronger than death; she inquired at all times if those who were assisting her had taken their meals and their rest. To Monsieur Vital de l’Étang, her prelate, having honored her with his visit, she commended the community with such an energetic spirit that he could not believe that she should die from this sickness; nevertheless she left this world pronouncing the sacred name of Jesus, the year 1633. There appeared on her deceased body some marks on the feet and the hands resembling the stigmata that are painted in the portrait of St. Francis.49 At her funeral, a Minim priest confirmed from the pulpit, that “while [Suzanne] was alive, she had told him that every Friday she had felt great pains in these parts [of her body],” but a corresponding description of her thoughts and emotions at the time that these physical sensations occurred is conspicuously absent.50

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The writings of French mystics at the end of the seventeenth century reveal that the shift in perception about the power of the imagination that Lyons describes not only affected the way in which eyewitnesses accounted for the onset of stigmata, but it also affected the prayer habits of the mystics themselves. In the spiritual autobiography that she penned between 1695 and 1703, for example, the well-known French mystic Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la MotteGuyon (1648–1717) describes her own shift in opinion about the role that the imagination should take during spiritual contemplation. She recalls that in 1660, when she initially tried to practice the kind of mental prayer that, according to de Sales, could serve as the precursor to mystical experiences involving stigmata, she was unable to succeed because her confessor refused to train her in the process, and her imagination on its own was not strong enough: “I tried to do it alone as best as it was possible for me. I was unable to succeed at it, as far as it seemed to me at the time; because I was unable to imagine, and I had persuaded myself that one could not undertake mental prayer without forming images [espèces], and without rationalizing a lot. For a long time, this difficulty gave me a great deal of pain.”51 Frustrated by her inability to cultivate the mental state needed for a mystical encounter to take place, Guyon resorted to stigmatizing herself by writing the name of Jesus in large letters on a piece of paper and attaching it to the flesh of her chest: “I decided to write this sweet and sacred name on a piece of paper; with ribbons and a fat needle I attached it to my skin in four places.” However, as Guyon describes, this physical mortification did not bring her any closer to her mystical goals, despite the fact that the sign she had made “remained attached in this manner for a long time.”52 Nearly a decade later in 1668, Guyon would develop the ability to enter into the contemplative, unitive state that de Sales had outlined. However, by this point, Guyon had come to a different understanding of the role of the imagination in prayer, specifying that during her periods of recollection, she was careful to make sure that her imagination was not active at all, assuring her readers that “my prayers were from [that] moment on empty of all forms, images [espèces] and pictures; nothing about my prayer was happening in my head . . . it was a prayer of faith that excludes all distinction.”53 Guyon reveals that she banished the imagination along with her other mental faculties while praying out of a concern that her imagination, being passive, could be just as easily manipulated by demonic entities as it could be stimulated into action by angelic ones. She describes to her readers that, although contacts with angelic beings through visions, ecstasies, and voices are certainly possible and can result in powerful mystical experiences, such occurrences are also risky because they allow a contemplative mind to be excessively influenced by external spiritual entities that are perceived in a sensory way. As Guyon describes, “These graces are very subject to illusion; because that which has form, image and distinction, the devil can counterfeit, just as [he can manipulate our] senses

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and desires: but that which is free from all forms, images [and] pictures, and above the things of the senses, the devil cannot enter into.”54 Guyon concedes that Saint Francis of Assisi did indeed receive the stigmata as the result of contact with an angelic being, but she reminds her readers that such is not always the case, particularly if the person praying allows the imagination to become involved: “St. Francis of Assisi, very enlightened about visions, never even attributed the impression of his stigmata to Jesus Christ, but rather to a Seraph, who as the effigy of Jesus Christ imprinted them upon him. The imagination also imprints [the mind] with phantoms and other holy representations: some of [these impressions] are even corporeal: both sorts are the most vulgar and the most subject to illusion.”55 Although during the early decades of the seventeenth century, both mystics and philosophers alike had been optimistic that the imagination’s capacity to transform the immaterial into the material was ultimately dependent on a person’s will, by the dawn of the French Enlightenment, the suspicion that the imagination was less reliably stimulated by the will than by the external material (or spiritual) environment contributed to the general decline in the use of imaginative practices during prayer that Guyon describes. Conclusion The rise of stigmata rates over the course of the seventeenth century is generally associated with the evangelical efforts of the Catholic Reformation, which had begun during the previous century in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and sought to slow the spread of the Protestant Reformation through a combination of education, proselytization, and spectacle. In France, Catholic Reformation efforts did not reach their height until the 1600s, when an end to the Wars of Religion (1562–98) allowed the battle for the throne to be supplanted by a battle for the hearts and minds of the French people. In an effort to revive the affective Catholic piety that had characterized the spiritual landscape of the Middle Ages, French Catholic Reformers appealed both to reason and to the emotions, providing theological justifications for a number of traditional beliefs and practices that Protestantism had abandoned and corroborating the validity of such positions not only through doctrine but also through a reliance on visible signs that the supernatural and the miraculous continued to intervene on behalf of the “one true faith” in the context of the everyday world. Along with curative miracles and other unexplained preternatural phenomena (such as inedia, levitation, and the odor of sanctity), the spontaneous appearance of sores, lacerations, and other body markings corresponding to the wounds of crucifixion or to those of the martyrdoms of various saints were widely publicized by French Catholic Reformers because of the ability of such markings to be read as signs that God had seen fit to impart divine benediction on the religious beliefs of those who experienced, witnessed, and publicized the phenomena.

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The decline of the Catholic Reformation in the late 1640s coincided with the rise of a new absolute monarchy, whose desire to centralize both church and state would eventually result in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, thus putting an end to religious tolerance for Protestants on French soil. With the threat of Protestantism thus greatly diminished, the Jesuit priests who had previously been associated with the Catholic Reformation turned their attention instead to combatting schisms within the Catholic Church. The most notable of these was Jansenism, whose rise had coincided with the evolution of the Catholic Reform and which had received its first papal condemnation in 1642. Although Jansenists deplored ostentatiousness and spectacle, in other respects they relied on conversion strategies that resembled those of the Jesuits, and their reliance on visible signs of the miraculous and the supernatural as a way to affirm the validity of Jansenist doctrine made it imperative for the Jesuits to gain better control over the appearance and the interpretation of these phenomena. Training individuals to use their imaginations to aid in the material appearance of outward signs of holiness, such as miracles and stigmata, would thus no longer have been in the interests of the Jesuits, since such signs now had the potential to attach themselves to Catholic individuals indiscriminately, regardless of whether the person’s sect was approved by the monarchy and the reigning religious authorities. It is perhaps for this reason that in 1660, Guyon’s confessor refused to train her in the process of forming mental images during prayer. Whatever the reason, it is clear that although the decline of the Catholic Reformation did not coincide with a decline in reported incidents of stigmata, it did coincide with a shift in the way that these types of paranormal religious phenomena were reported. When the value of reporting exterior signs like stigmata declined, the value of the role of the mind-body connection in producing such markings declined along with it.56 Notes Epigraph from Dictionnaires d’autrefois public access collection, vol. 2, ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, accessed June 2018, https://‌artflsrv03‌.uchicago‌.edu‌/philologic4‌ /publicdicos‌/query‌?report‌=‌bibliography‌& ‌head‌=‌stigmates. The research for this chapter was made possible by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 1. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation—L’extase divine et les miracles de Lourdes—Réponse aux libre-penseurs, 2 vols (Clermont-Ferrand: L. Bellet, 1894). Imbert-Gourbeyre’s statistics are drawn from the annals of various religious orders and from

the death records of persons of holy repute. It should be noted that seventeenth-century sources on the phenomenon uncover a significantly lower number. Rayssius, for example, accounts for only twenty-six cases in all of Europe since the late Middle Ages (Hierogazophylacium belgicum [Douai: Gérard Pinchon, 1628]) while Théophile Raynaud, generally acknowledged as the first historian of the phenomenon, cites a total of twenty or twenty-one cases (De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco [Grenoble, 1647; 2nd ed., Lyon: Antoine Cellier, 1654]). 2. For the period between 1600 and 1700, Imbert-Gourbeyre uncovered forty-two stigmatics in Italy, thirty-nine in France,

Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection twenty-one in Spain, three in Portugal, and seven in Belgium and Germany combined (Stigmatisation [1894]). Joachim Bouflet’s additional discoveries a century later brought Italy’s number up to fifty-six, France to forty-six, Spain to forty-one, Portugal to nine, and Germany and Austria combined with Belgium and the Low Countries to a total of ten. Some people experienced more than one type of stigmata. See Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation, ed. Joachim Bouflet (Grenoble: Millon, 1996). 3. Imbert-Gourbeyre, Stigmatisation, ed. Bouflet. 4. Bouflet and Imbert-Gourbeyre uncovered only four cases of stigmata in the eighteenth century. See Joachim Bouflet, “Stigmatisés (XIIIe–XIXe siècles) ayant présenté des extériorités,” in Imbert-Gourbeyre, Stigmatisation, ed. Bouflet, 25–27. By the end of his study, Bouflet’s revised list of European stigmatics included 283 as opposed to 321, having eliminated 187 stigmatics from Imbert-Gourbeyre’s original list (because the marks were not visible) and replaced them with an additional 149 findings of his own. Modern estimations of the number of stigmatics vary widely, with some historians claiming that there have only been between fifty and sixty authentic cases over the past seven centuries (Thurston), and others estimating “more than 360” (Höcht). On Thurston and Höcht, see Pierre Adnès, “Stigmates,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1990), 14: col. 1215. This disparity is largely due to how the phenomenon is defined. Imbert-Gourbeyre, for example, accepted eight different types of stigmata and did not stipulate that the marks had to be visible to the eyes. See further Imbert-Gourbeyre, Stigmatisation, 1–5. 5. Éric Suire, La sainteté française de la Réforme catholique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): D’après les textes hagiographiques et les procès de canonisation (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001), 124–26; André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981). 6. Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. 169–205.

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7. Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), esp. 15, 36–37, 81–82, 90, 98–99, and 196–97. 8. Jacques Le Brun, “Le discours sur la stigmatisation au XVIIe siècle,” in Stigmates, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2001), 103–18. 9. John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xvi. 10. See, for example, the description of the process by Saint Francis’s first biographer, Tommaso da Celano (1185–1260), Vita Prima (1229) 2.3.94–96, in Vita Beati Francisci, accessed June 15, 2018, http://‌www‌.franciscaans ‌-studiecentrum‌.nl‌/wp‌-content‌/uploads‌/2017 /03‌/HLE‌_1‌.doc, and in Thomas of Celano, First Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christopher Stace (London: Triangle, 2000), 95–98. 11. The incident is recounted by Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 1.64, ed. John Mark Ockerbloom, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, bk. 1, https://‌web‌.archive‌.org/‌web /‌20180127073148/‌http://‌www‌.hermetics‌.org‌ /pdf/‌magic/‌Agrippa1‌.pdf. Like the other Merovingian kings of the Franks, King Dagobert was reputed to have a red birthmark in the shape of a cross between his shoulder blades. However, in this description, Montaigne appears to be referring to a specific incident involving Dagobert I in which the spontaneous wounds that appeared on his body were believed to have been brought about by a fear of gangrene. On Dagobert’s birthmarks, see Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ’s Sacred Bloodline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 276. On his fear of gangrene, see Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press), 102. 12. Michel de Montaigne, “De la force de l’imagination,” Essais, bk. 1, ed. André Tournon (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1998), 182; trans. Donald Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 69. 13. Ibid., 180; trans. Frame, 68. 14. François de Sales, “Traité de l’amour de Dieu,” 7:6–7, in Œuvres, ed. André Ravier (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 682–86. All further citations refer to this edition, listing book

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number and chapter number, followed by page numbers. 15. Ibid., 7:7, 686. 16. Ibid., 1:10, 382. For the full discussion of ecstasy, see pp. 381–83. 17. Ibid., 6:13, 650; 6:13, 647–51. 18. Ibid., 7:3, 674. For more on de Sales’s comparison of the experience of a nursing baby to the experience of achieving intimacy with God, see Suzanne Toczyski, “‘Blessed the Breasts at Which You Nursed’: Mother-Child Intimacy in Saint Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 15, no. 2 (2015): 191–213. 19. Ibid., 6:15, 657. De Sales is referring to Saint Francis of Assisi. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 6:15, 658. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 6:15, 658–59. 24. Ibid., 6:15, 658. In this instance Jacob causes black and brown goats to give birth to white striped and speckled offspring by manipulating the animals’ imaginations. Genesis 30:25–43. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 6:15, 657. 28. Ibid., 6:15, 659. 29. Christaan Huygens to René Descartes, March 8, 1640, printed in René Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes: Publiées par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, ed. Paul Tannery and Charles Adam (Paris: Libraire philosophique J. Vrin, 1996), 3:744 (letter 52). [Henceforth the Œuvres de Descartes will be abbreviated as AT.] Huygens’s request would have coincided with the period in which M. Guillerme, grand vicar of the cathedral of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, was seeking outside opinions to respond to rumors that Picard’s wounds were secretly self-inflicted. Guillerme subsequently resigned as Picard’s spiritual director in 1640, during holy week, and when her new church-appointed directors (M. de Funtunspeur and M. Laminot, a scholastic) subsequently launched an official inquiry into the phenomenon, the marks were found to be authentic. See further Jean-François de la Marche, Abrégé des vies de Marie Dias, Marie-Amice Picard et Armelle Nicolas dite la Bonne Armelle (Nantes: Joseph Vatar, 1756), 88–95. On the “martyrologe vivant,” see Hippolyte Le Gouvello, Armelle Nicolas, dite la Bonne Armelle, servante des hommes et amante

du Christ (1606–1671) (Paris: Pierre Téqui, 1913), 251. 30. Le Gouvello, Armelle Nicolas, 251–52. Le Gouvello cites Picard’s first biographer, the Jesuit father and missionary Julien Maunoir (1606–1683), who was an eyewitness to her encounters and who was himself beatified in 1951. The original manuscript is housed in the municipal library of Brest: La vie de Marie-Amice Picard: Par le P. Julien Maunoir de la compagnie de Jésus, ca. 1670. Picard’s extraordinarily theatrical interactions with the supernatural are evocative of the well-known exorcisms that had been performed at Loudun a few years earlier (1632–37). See further Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 73–120. 31. Le Gouvello, Armelle Nicolas, 250. Cyriacus had been tortured before his death by having his limbs torn off. See further Saija Isomaa et al., Imagining Spaces and Places (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 234. 32. Julien Maunoir, quoted in Le Gouvello, Armelle Nicolas, 252. 33. Ibid. Picard would have been disqualified as a genuine stigmatic according to modern Catholic standards because her blood is suppurate as opposed to being clean and pure. 34. In 1640, Easter Sunday fell on April 8 (Petko Yotov, “Side-by-side Easter Calendar Reference for the 17th Century,” accessed June 2018, http://‌5ko‌.free‌.fr‌/en‌/easter‌.php‌?y‌=‌17). 35. Descartes to Huygens, March 12, 1640, AT 3:746 (letter 53). 36. Ibid. 37. Descartes to Mersenne, March 11, 1640, AT 3:41 (letter 185). See also Descartes to Mersenne, March 1 and 31, 1638), AT 2:30, 86, 96–97 (letters 112 and 119). 38. Pierre Petit (1598–1677) was a French astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and instrument maker who later served as intendant des fortifications under Louis XIV. Petit and Descartes would later reconcile with Petit’s conversion to Cartesianism in the mid-1640s. See further Adrien Baillet, Vie de M. Descartes (Paris, 1691), 353–55; quoted in Charles Adam, “Pascal et Descartes: Les expériences du vide (1646–1651),” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 25 (1888): 71–75. 39. Descartes to Mersenne, July 27,1638, AT 2:266–67 (letter 131). 40. Descartes to Mersenne, May 27, 1638, AT 2:144 (letter 123); Descartes to Mersenne, July 27, 1638, AT 2:266–67 (letter 131).

Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection 41. On this, see the entry on Vanini in Roger Ariew et al., The A to Z of Cartesian Philosophy (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2010), 254, and Richard Watson, Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (Boston: Godine, 2002), 225–27. See also Descartes to Beekman, October 17, 1630, AT 1:158 (letter 24). I am grateful to David Rhody for his assistance in helping me translate a portion of this letter from Latin into English. 42. Giulio Cesare Vanini, “Dialogi,” in Le Opere di Giulio Cesare Vanini e le loro Fonti, vol. 2, De Admirandis Naturae Arcanis Ristampa Fotomeccanica, ed. G. Papuli and F. P. Raimondi (1934; repr., Lecce: Congedo Editore, 1990), 502:451–503:451 [abbreviated henceforth as PR]. Blood flow to the tongue, for example, is how Vanini explains the fact that a mad dog foams at the mouth, the foam being the material incarnation of the dog’s mental rage, transported from the mind to the tongue by way of the mouth. Vanini also uses the brain-blood connection to account for why a mother’s cravings for fruit during pregnancy can result in the images of the fruits she pictures in her mind being imprinted on the skin of the unborn child in the form of a birthmark. See Vanini, “Amfiteatrum,” in PR, 191:71. 43. “Divi Francisci, patroni mei apud Deum colendissimi, stigmata ex vehementissima Christi Domini vulnerum apprehensione / effici potuisse contendat.” Vanini, “Amfiteatrum,” PR 189:68. Vanini cites Pomponazzi with the aim of disputing Protestants who argued that Saint Francis had used hot irons to stigmatize himself while in the throes of ecstasy, an idea advanced by Martin Luther (190:70). Vanini feels justified in attributing stigmata to the power of the imagination because the Catholic Church had yet to take an official position on them, assuring the reader that were the Church to take a stand on such phenomena, he would defer to its position (191:72). In addition to the stigmata, Vanini acknowledged that other paranormal religious phenomena, such as ecstasy, were also a result of the power of the imagination, but he was more skeptical about such things as signs of a person’s holiness. See further, Vanini, “Dialogi,” PR 505:457–506:458. 44. Descartes to Mersenne, January 29, 1640, AT 3:15 (letter 182). 45. Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” AT 10:414; trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (London:

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Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:41–42 [henceforth abbreviated as CSM]. Descartes goes into detail on the mechanics of this process in his “Treatise on Man,” AT 11:119–202; CSM 1:99–108. 46. Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” AT 10:414; CSM 1:41–42. For a summary of Descartes’s opinions of the imagination and of the evolution of the term, see Lyons, Before Imagination, xi–xiv. 47. Descartes to Mersenne, July 30, 1640, AT 3:120–21 (letter 199). For more on Cartesian mechanist beliefs about the formation of birthmarks, see Rebecca M. Wilkin, “Essaying the Mechanical Hypothesis: Descartes, La Forge, and Malebranche on the Formation of Birthmarks,” Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-Modern Period 13, no. 6 (2008): 533–67. See also Rebecca M. Wilkin, “Descartes, Individualism, and the Fetal Subject,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 96–127. 48. Marie de Pommereuse, Les chroniques de l’ordre des Ursulines recueillies pour l’usage des religieuses du même ordre, part 1 (Paris: Jean Henault, 1673), 3:197. Josse had entered the convent in 1618 at the age of forty-four. See also B. de Vienne, La vie des saints inconnus des bienheureux, et des personnes illustres (Brussels: François Foppens, 1708), 4:410–11. 49. Jeanne de Cambournet de la Mothe, Journal des illustres religieuses de l’ordre de Sainte Ursule avec leurs maxims et pratiques spirituelles (Bourg-en-Bresse: Joseph Ravoux, 1686), 3:384–85. 50. Ibid., 3:385. 51. Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la MotteGuyon, La vie de Madame J. M. B. de la Mothe-Guyon, écrite par elle-même (Paris: Libraires Associés, 1791), 1:33–34. The memoirs were not published until the end of the eighteenth century. The 1694 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines espèce as follows: “The word also refers to the images, the representations of objects apparent to the senses, which are received by the senses and from there brought to the imagination. [For example] visual images, images received from touching, from smelling, distinct images, clear images, confused images, intermingled images, the difficulty is to know how the images are received, receive one another, enter into the senses,” (ARTFL project, University of Chicago, accessed June 2018, https://‌artflsrv03‌.uchicago

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‌.edu‌/philologic4‌/publicdicos‌/query‌?report‌=‌bib liography‌&‌head‌=‌espèce‌&‌start‌=‌0‌&‌end‌=‌0). 52. Guyon, Vie, 1:34. Here, Guyon ironically imitates an action undertaken by de Sales’s close confidant and spiritual disciple Saint Jeanne de Chantal. De Sales would later criticize this action and others like it in the context of their correspondence. See further Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal: Letters of Spiritual Direction, ed. Wendy M. Wright and Joseph F. Power, trans. Péronne Marie Thibert (New York: Paulist Press, 1988). In her memoir, Guyon states that she was twelve years old at

the time, so the incident would have taken place around 1660. 53. Guyon, Vie, 1:81. 54. Ibid., 1:82. 55. Ibid., 1:83. 56. According to Bouflet, that decline would not occur until the following century; only four instances of stigmata were documented to have occurred in France between 1700 and the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. See also n. 4 above.

Chapter 6

The Invisible Mark Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy

Ana Fonseca Conboy

Early modern Catholics believed that baptism marked the Christian. Just what form this marking took had long been debated. Saint Augustine of Hippo famously compared the mark of baptism to the indelible tattoo of a soldier or slave, whose commitment to a commander or master was signified by a dermal mark: “Let him also consider the analogy of the military mark [notae militaris], which, though it can both be retained, as by deserters, and, also be received by those who are not in the army, yet ought not to be either received or retained outside its ranks; and, at the same time, it is not changed or renewed when a man is enlisted or brought back to his service.”1 Military and baptismal marks were both indelible and signified belonging to their respective communities. However, the Church Fathers held that the baptismal mark, unlike a tattoo, was of an interior and spiritual nature, imprinted not on the skin but on the soul of the newly minted Christian and therefore invisible. In his brief analogy, Augustine exposes the problematic nature of the baptismal mark: it was real but invisible, indelible but immaterial, identifying but noncorporeal. No visible corporeal sign would set the baptized apart, though the receipt of the mark was accompanied in the baptismal ceremony by exterior material components that gave tangibility to the interior marking process: immersion in water and signing of the cross on

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the forehead of the neophyte with sanctified oil. Some early Christians surely sought in the baptismal rites a materiality to the mark that helped to reify the sacrament, as did some later early modern thinkers. However, baptism’s immateriality, associated with the forging of a new identity, eventually prevailed. The tension between the affirmed immateriality of the mark of baptism, on the one hand, and the need for a concrete and visible sign associated with it, on the other, continued to inspire debates among early modern theologians, notably those in France, where confessional conflict and instability continued in the first half of the seventeenth century after decades of religious war. At a time when Protestants vehemently criticized Catholic materialism and the Catholic Reformation tendency to integrate more sensorial practices and beliefs, debates surrounding the visibility/invisibility or materiality/immateriality of the mark of baptism played out in the aesthetic productions of the period, namely in theater. Drama, as Michael Meere suggests, could “effectively transmit Counter-Reformation attempts to combat Protestantism in early modern Europe to a general public, not just to the more educated or clerical audiences,” and offer its own solutions to theological quandaries.2 This chapter will address the problem of staging an invisible sign—baptism and its indelible internal mark—and examine how dramaturges writing in the hagiographic genre in mid-seventeenth-century Paris responded to contemporary debates on the topic in their attempts to render it visible to audience members. Early Christian Theorization of Baptism Augustine saw baptism as a mark, “a spiritually real signification that identified to whom a person belonged and from whom it [the mark] was received.”3 The baptismal mark was a sign of belonging, a mark of distinction and of identity, as well as a sign of service to the Christian God. It was also a sign of the change occurring within newly minted Christians.4 Augustine made a clear distinction between the outward material signs of the rite and the thing signified: inward transformation.5 For him, the baptismal mark sealed the faith of the baptized, granting eternal life. The spiritual and invisible side of baptism was therefore essential for its power and efficaciousness, but baptism could not succeed completely without some form of visible sign. In the struggle to render something invisible material, tangible elements become necessary. The first is water. A transliteration from the Greek, the term baptism refers to the cleansing act of immersing in water.6 Besides water, the baptismal ritual traditionally includes the laying on (imposition) of hands as well as the anointing with consecrated perfumed oil (chrism), as the officiant draws the sign of the cross on the catechumen’s forehead. While the original external rites of baptism appear to have derived from pagan ceremonies, the immaterial and invisible “gift of the Holy Spirit” and the “forgiveness of sins” originated

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in biblical accounts: “Peter [said] to them, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38).7 It is difficult to reconstruct early rites of Christian initiation, but Christians would likely have been baptized by immersion in water with little preparation or formality.8 This may have been conducted in the name of the three persons of the Trinity, with the officiant signing the cross on the catechumen’s forehead, as indicated in scripture: “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).9 These, then, constitute the material, visible aspects of baptism: the oil makes visible the spiritual branding of the newly baptized and creates a material trace on the forehead symbolizing the immaterial marking of God’s grace upon the Christian’s soul. While the baptized are not corporeally marked, elements of the ritual attempt to render their new identity tangible, and its visible components reify the invisible and ineffaceable seal that strengthens the commitment to a Christian life.10 The materiality of its sign and the immateriality of what is signified give the baptismal mark its ambiguity and duality.11 It is an interior sign of the mystery of divine grace bestowed upon the baptized, as well as an exterior sign of social belonging.12 Even with the emphasis placed on its immateriality, the mark was real in the eyes of early Christians and was often referred to in more physical terms. For instance, in addition to comparing it to military marks of allegiance made on the skin, in the first of his Three Sermons, Augustine refers to the “cross of Jesus Christ on our foreheads” borne by all baptized Christians.13 Receiving baptism was thus akin to being branded with the spirit of life or grafted to the Christ figure, while its mark remained inaccessible to the eyes. Early Modern Theorization of Baptism Early modern theologians, influenced by early Christian thinkers, often referred to baptism as a sign, a brand, a character, or a mark. These stigma were meant for recognition and to signify belonging, whether they were visible brands on slaves or invisible marks on Christians. In the Dictionnaire chrétien of 1691, we read that “Saint Basile tells us that we should always carry in our hearts the idea of God printed like an ineffaceable mark. . . . [T]his mark should be as if stamped on a diamond.”14 Regardless of confessional perspective, the baptismal character set the Christian apart. The definition of the term caractere in the 1690 Dictionnaire universel points to its role in identification: “Character, is also said of certain marks and imprints that the Ancients placed on the forehead of their slaves, or of criminals in order to recognize them or to mark them with a sign of shame, and perhaps we must explain in this way the mark that God placed on Cain’s forehead to prevent him from being killed during his voluntary exile; and the marks of those of the Tribes of Israel that are mentioned in

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the Apocalypse.”15 The “character” possesses nonetheless a mutable nature, as another definition that grants it the possibility of invisibility suggests: “Character is also said of invisible qualities that we respect in those who have received orders, charges and dignities.”16 Even invisible, then, the character communicates information about the identity, belonging, and accomplishments of its bearer. In 1547, the Council of Trent had addressed the meaning of the sacraments, decreeing that baptism, confirmation, and ordination imprint a character, a “spiritual and indelible sign,” on the soul of the individual, therefore making it invisible.17 In the seventeenth century, debate flourished surrounding the baptismal mark and efficacious baptism among both Protestants and Catholic reformers.18 In his 1647 treatise on stigmata, the theologian Théophile Raynaud reaffirms Catholic doctrine that “in baptism, the faithful are signed with an indelible character.”19 More interesting, however, the Jesuit author disregards the baptismal mark in his work on dermal marks precisely because of its spiritual, noncorporeal nature, thus reinforcing its immateriality. Protestant theologians refined Augustine’s arguments by referring to faith, or the Latin fiducia, as the unbreakable link between the outward sign and the presence and gift of God.20 Following the teachings of early Church Fathers, Lutherans, like Catholics, maintained that baptism was an effectual means of grace that was accompanied by an outward sign. Their Calvinist counterparts, however, refused to confer great importance either to the ritual act or to the baptismal mark.21 In his Institutes, John Calvin asserts that sacraments seal the promise made by the Word of God and are received directly from the hand of God, rather than from the hand of the celebrant.22 Protestant orthodoxy borrowed from patristic and medieval theologians to support its arguments but attempted to describe baptism strictly from scriptural sources, while Trinitarian doctrine allowed an expanded view of baptism’s description.23 In these debates, despite some attention to the material components of the ceremony, the focus lay on the immateriality and invisibility of God’s mark. Christians emphasized this immateriality and invisibility to distinguish themselves from non-Christians. As a sign of belonging and salvation, the character imprinted on them by God existed notably in opposition to the material brand marks on slaves, the corporeal Jewish rite of circumcision, and the character imprinted by the devil on his followers.24 The Christian mark instead mimicked the seal on the foreheads of the tribes of Israel chosen for salvation as recounted by the book of Revelation (7:1–8). Ultimately, the mark of the beast and the mark of baptism, each signs of ownership and belonging, would be recognizable at the time of the Apocalypse. Early modern demonologists describe how the devil competes with God for dominion over humans by imprinting his own mark on them: “Just as God imprints in the soul the light of his face, and the character of his holiness, which is the humility of jesus christ, the devil similarly imprints on those that are

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his and to a greater extent, his character and his seal, which is that of pride, and of revolt against God.”25 Some believed the baptismal mark acted as protection against demons, who could see it upon the Christian.26 Others imagined that the devil could efface or override the Christian character by “etching other barbaric and shapeless ones, that are nothing but characters of death.”27 Contrary to the immaterial baptismal mark, the devil’s mark was construed as material and branded on the human body, a distortion and perversion of the Christian mark, as were most satanic rites. The competition between God and the devil, and between the materiality and immateriality of identifying signs, also emerges in the Capuchin missionary Claude Abbeville’s accounts of the baptisms of Amerindians from Maragnan (current day Maranhão, Brazil), that took place in France in the early seventeenth century.28 His accounts relate how, after observing the French Capuchins, the Tupinamba sought their own baptism, having “the free will to receive the mark and character of true children of God.”29 In one instance, Abbeville describes how the immaterial Christian mark overwrote the material markings on the body of a dying convert, “written Epigrams” (Epigrammes escrites) that told his life story and were signs of identity and bravery. Through the convert’s baptism, the Capuchins performed their duty “to receive him in order to give him a more beautiful mark than that which he had, and to make him a soldier of a new militia; and on his part, to give himself to us to be made Christian.”30 For Abbeville, the imposition of the baptismal mark symbolizes the Tupinamba’s abandonment of prior demonic belonging: “And would that they quickly abandoned all their diabolical impiety and malice [body paintings and piercings] in order to convert to God.”31 More important, a new identity and sense of belonging would be instilled by conversion through the mark of baptism, which replaced any preexisting dermal markings. The dual definition of the Christian mark as immaterial yet necessitating a material element became more equivocal in the attempt to distinguish Christians from their Jewish counterparts, whose sign of belonging—circumcision—was corporeal. Christians sought to distinguish their religion from Judaism by reinforcing the immateriality of the baptismal sign in contrast to the materiality of the Hebrew sign. In its entry for “Bulls,” the Dictionnaire chrétien argues that “since the Jews were a charnel people, they were marked on the skin like animals, to show they belonged to God. As for us, God’s children, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit. All is spiritual among us.”32 The Christian imaginary saw a dichotomy between the materiality associated with the Hebrew tradition of circumcision and the noncorporeality of the spiritual seal received from the Holy Spirit. The demeaning tone in the explanation above, comparing circumcision to the branding of bulls, accentuates the early modern Christians’ sense of superiority and divine favor accorded upon them by the immaterial baptismal mark. This immateriality consequently becomes an element that sets Christians apart.

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Early modern theorization of the baptismal mark, whether by theologians, demonologists, or missionaries, points to baptism’s role in welcoming neophytes to a new community, highlighting the baptismal mark as a sign of new belonging and identity as a Christian, meanings central to recounting the lives of Christian converts. Seventeenth-century French hagiographic theater, with its focus on martyrs and saints, inherits the problem of the immateriality of the baptismal mark that must, at the same time, be made manifest to its spectators. As Meere reminds us, “In the wake of the Council of Trent, the sharp rise of the Catholic cult of the martyrs proved to be a pan-European phenomenon. . . . Revised hagiographies, martyr plays, relics, and images of sufferings saints circulated across the continent,” displaying the “Catholic Church’s politicization of martyrdom and conversion.”33 Since the martyrs portrayed on the early seventeenth-century stage were most often pagans who then converted to Christianity and received the seal of baptism—whether prior to or as a part of martyrdom (through a baptism of blood)—dramaturges wrestled with the problem of how to make the immaterial transformation discernible to the audience, offering multiple solutions to grant visibility to the baptismal mark. Representation of the Baptismal Mark in French Martyr Plays During the 1630s and 1640s, multiple French playwrights created and presented sacred-inspired plays on the secular stage. Most of these plays, grouped in the hagiographic subgenre, told the story of Christian saints and martyrs from antiquity, and they often included the conversion story of the protagonists. Once the converts received the seal of baptism they were inexorably marked for death. The genre struggles with how to make the baptismal mark visible given certain ineluctable restraints: first, like their theological counterparts, early modern dramaturges were trying to represent an invisible, noncorporeal sign; second, they had to heed certain rules of contemporary theater. The neoclassical aesthetic that was slowly burgeoning and being adopted on the tragic stage precluded the representation of baptism. Neo-Aristotelian rules insisted that classical tragedies respect the three unities of time, place, and action, as well as the principles of vraisemblance—the believability of a plotline—and of bienséance—the cultural and social appropriateness of all elements of the plot. Because of these latter two rules, anything belonging to the domain of the merveilleux, or miraculous, was to be omitted from the stage. As Christopher Semk notes, “Christian miracles no doubt challenge the rational framework of Aristotelian dramatic theory, threatening to destabilize the fictional universe constructed by the poet—a universe governed by the principle of verisimilitude—in the same way that they interrupted the order of the physical universe.”34 As it proscribed visibility to the miraculous, the neo-Aristotelian aesthetic therefore banished the mysterious ceremony of baptism—through which the immaterial sign was made material

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and visible—from the stage. Furthermore, while the portrayal of baptism by immersion would not have been impossible, it would have been logistically difficult to accomplish on the seventeenth-century stage, and any visible indication of the sacrament would have gone against John Chrysostom’s admonition that Christians should avoid the baptismal font in the theater.35 The representation of baptism ran the risk of parodying the sacrament and offending church expectations. By omitting it from the stage, dramatists circumvented any potential for sacrilege and avoided distorting the religious rite. As important as the sacrament of baptism was to the hagiographic plot and to forging the new identity of the protagonists, the mark of baptism, along with the outward signs of the rite that pointed to it, remain hidden elements in early modern dramaturgy and invisible to spectators in the theater. Moreover, the invisibility of the sacrament on the seventeenth-century French stage may signal a deliberate choice on the part of the dramaturges to honor the Catholic dogma of the baptismal mark as immaterial and therefore not necessitating material representation. As theologians theorized, God’s mark was immaterial yet deeply transformative, calling Christians to contribute actively to the life of the community through faith and compassionate action rather than through material attachment. While removing any materiality associated with the rite of baptism from the stage, playwrights found other means to make its mark visible. They responded to contemporary religious and aesthetic debates by presenting the sacrament in a manner that would respect both its nature and the restrictions of the theatrical aesthetics of the time. They also honored the importance of the mark of baptism as a noncorporeal imprint, making their protagonists’ transformation exemplary and discernible instead through their actions on stage. By keeping the mark of baptism invisible, playwrights reminded their audience that for the Christian, belonging is determined not solely by the mark but by the journey through life. Whether the hagiographic dramatists’ objective was to counter the corporeality of non-Christian rituals to avoid criticism from Church authorities or to adhere strictly to neo-Aristotelian rules, the early modern French stage remains devoid of the first Christian sacrament. In the context of seventeenth-century French dramaturgy and aesthetics, the baptismal mark thus becomes a doubly invisible mark: the rite leaves no tangible mark on the bodies of its recipients, and the sacrament itself is not represented on stage. Three hagiographic protagonists—Genest in Jean Rotrou’s Le véritable saint Genest, Polyeucte in Pierre Corneille’s Polyeucte, martyr, and Eustache in both Nicolas Desfontaines’s Le martyre de saint Eustache and Balthasar Baro’s Sainct Eustache, martyr—express a holy longing to be marked by baptism as a sign of belonging and entrance into the Christian community. All three narratives begin with an unbaptized protagonist who converts and is baptized during the time frame of the intrigue.36 Baptismal marking occurs with celerity and between

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scenes, thus remaining hidden from the audience’s view. In these narratives, where baptism should, chronologically speaking, be included in the plot, it is pushed aside and occurs off stage, doubly invisible to the audience in its content and in its form. Analysis of these plays illustrates how the baptismal mark, though invisible on stage, was referred to in material terms, following contemporary rhetoric. Spectators understand its occurrence through indirect references and metaphoric allusions to the sacrament, as well as through the protagonists’ changed behavior and speech, as new internal convictions give way to reformed external actions. Though the theological and material vocabulary typically used to describe baptismal marking is echoed in the plays, by keeping baptism off stage and making it manifest instead through the consequences of the protagonists’ behavior, dramaturges reinforce baptism’s immateriality. A close reading of the hagiographic corpus thus emphasizes where the value of the sacrament lies: in hagiographic theater, the seal of baptism is made apparent not as a visible sign but through the actions of the Christian whose identity it marks in opposition to pagan vices, with the goal of inspiring theatregoers to similar moral behavior. Ultimately, the necessity of baptism’s omission from the stage required by neo-Aristotelian constraints responds to contemporary controversies, as it underlines and strengthens the invisible sign of efficacious grace accorded to the protagonists. Baptism of Hagiographic Protagonists: Transformed Identity and Belonging in the Example of Eustache In the Desfontaines and Baro plays dedicated to Saint Eustache, the protagonist convinces his wife and two sons to follow him in the path of Christianity. In the first play, the spectator is led to conjecture that Placide (Eustache’s pre-Christian name) has been asked to seek baptism after the initial scene, which describes a miraculous vision using hypotyposis, a discursive process consisting of a vivid verbal description of events. According to martyrological tradition, Placide follows a stag into the forest during a hunting expedition and is stunned to see a vision of the crucified Christ over the animal’s head.37 Desfontaines begins his plot in medias res, immediately following the divine encounter. Placide declares that his spirit has been enlightened by a celestial flame, likely referring to the Holy Spirit, as reflected by scriptural tradition. The reference mirrors Placide’s experience as related by Baro: “The object disappeared faster than lightning / Filling with light and fire, however / All the faculties that make up my soul.”38 The protagonist becomes open to God, who may now enter and fill him. The vision emboldens Placide, who immediately seeks the Christian rite of initiation. Rendering baptism effective becomes a time-sensitive matter. At the end of act 1, scene 2, in Desfontaines’s play, Placide’s wife urges action, “Let us go,

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dear Husband, let us go, as time persuades us / To effect this illustrious promise.”39 One presumes that the next time we see the couple accompanied by their children, in act 1, scene 4, they have all received the sacrament and are now effectively part of the Christian family. In Desfontaines’s Le martyre de saint Eustache, the omission of the sacrament on stage is moreover reinforced by an omission of the term “baptism” in the characters’ dialogue. It is never mentioned explicitly but only inferred. Expressions such as “this noble project that Heaven inspires in us,” “this holy prescription,” “clear commandment,” or “this illustrious promise” refer to the sacrament of baptism that spectators could deduce takes place in between scenes.40 Baro’s Sainct Eustache, martyr is significantly less ambiguous than Desfontaines’s play with regard to the protagonists’ baptisms, though the event itself is never viewed on stage. In Placide’s vision, Christ invites him to “highlight [his] constancy in the midst of martyrdom.”41 In order to do so, Placide must first receive baptism. In the final scene of act 1, Baro’s protagonist also exhorts his wife and children to fulfill this promise: “But we waste time, let us go forth my dear life, / And learn the mystery to which Heaven invites us . . . / Let us hasten to accomplish such just aims / And so as to render our vows more just and more holy, / Despite persecutors and even affliction / Let us run to Baptism!”42 The first act ends with three repetitions of the term “baptême” by the members of the nuclear family who will be martyred in a burning bull at the close of the play.43 To Placide’s request, Trajane encourages her counterparts “au Baptême,” an injunction echoed by her two sons, who intone in choral unison “au Baptême,” to complete the final tripartite hexasyllabic verse of the scene, reinforcing the unity and belonging found together through the sacramental rite. Just as with Desfontaines’s Eustache, in Rotrou’s and Corneille’s plays, baptism is often described through other, more material terms and by the changes the rite effects on its recipients, underlining the struggle playwrights shared with period theologians to make the invisible mark visible. Le véritable Saint Genest presents a concentration of dramatic terms associated with the term “baptism,” such as “This mysterious seal, with which he [Christ] marks his saints.”44 However, the word appears proffered by Genest in only two instances in act 4.45 In Polyeucte, martyr, the protagonist speaks of the “sacred character / That washes away our crimes through saving water, / And purging our soul and opening our eyes / Gives us the first right that we had in the heavens.”46 The expression “sacré caractère” reappears in act 5, scene 3, of Polyeucte, but in the mouth of the protagonist’s father-in-law, Félix. Having exhausted all possibilities of convincing Polyeucte to retract his Christian faith, Félix exclaims exasperatedly, “Nothing can erase the sacred character,” reinforcing its indelible nature.47 Polyeucte also refers to the “glorious mark” that he is burning to carry.48 The reference to the sacramental character of baptism illustrates the difficulty in defining an immaterial sign without resorting to material terms, reflecting the theological struggle

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to refer to the baptismal mark as an invisible and noncorporeal sign, while still needing to give it visibility. Baro underlines the transformative nature of baptism in the onomastics of his characters’ names, signifying their new identities. Whereas in Desfontaines’s play, the stage directions consistently refer to the protagonists as Placide and Trajane, even after their presumed baptism, in Baro’s Sainct Eustache, the characters’ names shift from Placide and Trajane to their new Christian names of Eustache and Teopiste, in accordance with martyrological tradition. This adoption of Christian names, itself a defining identifier associated with the baptismal mark, begins in act 2, immediately after the protagonists’ baptism, conveniently situated in the inaccessible period between acts 1 and 2. The protagonists are henceforth marked both by baptism and by their new names. The shift in onomastics provides a clear indication that the sacrament has been consummated, though out of the spectators’ visual range. When Teopiste slips and calls her husband Placide after the presumed baptism has taken place, he snaps: “This old name has drowned in the waters of my Baptism / Don’t address me by that name any longer, it fills me with horror.”49 The onomastic change symbolically indicates the change brought on by the invisible seal of baptism and its bearer’s new belonging to the Christian community. The Christian sacrament transforms the protagonists and provides the impulse to move forward toward death, in the final act of their new life of imitatio Christi. Though the outward sign of baptism is invisible to the audience, the element of fiducia (faith) is visibly present in the protagonists’ external manifestations of God’s granted grace. Baptism engenders a state of empowerment and constancy in resisting the material world, as the neophytes journey toward immortality in the celestial realm. After receiving the sacrament, Baro’s Placide, now Eustache, states to his doubting wife, Teopiste: “We ought to obey and not grumble. / We ought to consent to the laws of a power / Which, establishing the difference between good and evil / In the second life on which we should focus, / Has the right to punish and reward.”50 He later exclaims, “All is indifferent to me.”51 Befitting of the ideal of imitatio Christi, which invites a spirit of material detachment and of self-emptying, the vow Placide makes to his newfound God implies unconditional service to the divine and a rejection of all human consideration, of all superficial and fleeting desires. This ethos of material detachment is echoed in the invisibility of the baptismal mark that welcomes the neophytes into the Christian community. Following their baptism off stage, all three protagonists return ready to embark on a new life of service to God, practicing detachment and indifference toward the material world. Baptism thus is described as a promise, a project, a commandment, whose origin is divine and invisible and whose realization is also not visible on stage, though it is omnipresent and discernable through other elements, such as specific identifying name changes and a new sense of unity and belonging. The

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baptismal mark also brings about transformations in the protagonists’ behavior and vocation, resulting from the indelible imprint on the Christian’s soul, and it can provide a model for how baptized Christians should behave. Visible Consequences of the Invisible Mark: Transformed Behavior in Polyeucte, martyr In Polyeucte, martyr, Corneille goes against martyrological tradition to add an explicit treatment of grace and an efficacious baptism to the story. According to Laurentius Surius, whose Latin version of the martyr story (1570–75) inspired the French playwright, Polyeucte received a “baptism of desire” and of blood at the time of his death, after profaning pagan idols in a rage brought on by holy fervor.52 Corneille chose to grant his hero an efficacious baptism during the course of the play in order to legitimate his destructive behavior against the idols in the temple.53 This, as Marie Philip Haley suggests, “brings the action of the tragedy into the more clearly defined realm of theology. It is now grace . . . which inspires the heroism and calls for the conflict of human and divine passions.”54 Polyeucte’s baptism grants him endurance to carry on and sets in motion the tragic action that leads to his death. Yet, just as with Eustache, Polyeucte receives his baptism off stage, between the first two acts, out of view of the spectators. The protagonist addresses his Christian friend and mentor, Néarque, then disappears at the end of the second scene of the play to seek out baptism, with the confidence that, “If I must endure the most cruel punishments, / Find in them their charms, make them my pleasure / Your [Néarque’s] God, who I do not dare call my own yet, / Will give me the strength by making me Christian.”55 After Polyeucte’s abrupt exit, he does not return to the stage until act 2, scene 4, at which point narrative clues indicate he has returned a Christian. When speaking to his wife, Pauline, Polyeucte uses the possessive adjective “vos” to speak of her pagan gods, demonstrating that he no longer identifies with the community that worships pagan gods but instead is now a part of another community that denounces those gods. Moreover, when Néarque is shocked to hear that Polyeucte is headed to the pagan temple, he exclaims, “Have you already forgotten that you are a Christian?”56 The protagonist responds that he will go to the temple not to pay homage to the gods but instead to prove his new allegiance to the Christian God. Polyeucte departs a soldier of the empire in act 1 and returns a soldier of Christ in act 2, filled with a newly baptized Christian zeal to destroy the pagan temple’s idols: “I want to overturn them, / And die in their temple, or bring them down. / Let us away, my dear Néarque, let us go before the eyes of men / Confront idolatry, and show them who we are. / It is the expectation of heaven, we must fulfill it; / I just promised it, I will achieve it. / I give thanks to the God whom you made known to me / For this occasion he quickly bore, / Where his

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generosity, ready to honor me, / Deigns to test the faith that he has just awarded me.”57 Baptism bestows on Polyeucte newfound courage and transforms him. Néarque identifies the neophyte’s zeal with the fire instilled in him by the baptismal mark, reminiscent of the Christian imagery of the Holy Spirit descending as tongues of fire: “You exit baptism and, what drives you, / Is his grace that does not weaken in you any transgression. / As if whole, she [grace] acts wholeheartedly, / And all appears possible to its vehement flame.”58 This ardor is a direct result of the sacrament of baptism and of the grace received. Néarque originally promotes baptism for Polyeucte. However, in the end, it is Polyeucte who teaches his master a lesson in Christian fervor and the spirit of abnegation. Polyeucte’s baptism, though doubly invisible to the audience, has a specific dramatic objective. The development of the plot is an account of the operations of grace and marks the sacramental character of the rite received off stage. After baptism washes away his state of original sin, Polyeucte’s sole desire is to hasten his death in order to maintain his purity and avoid any possibility of incurring sin. The protagonist’s baptism prefigures his own martyrdom and his wife Pauline’s own blood baptism at the end of the play. Baptism grants constancy to Polyeucte. He not only resists the terror caused by Néarque’s death but also remains strong against Pauline’s desperate plea for him to recant and against her subsequent supplication that he pretend to renounce and still secretly practice his new religion. Polyeucte’s constancy is furthermore unyielding against Félix’s deceit and manipulation, as the emperor feigns a desire for conversion to Christianity in order to retard his son-in-law’s martyrdom.59 When Polyeucte is taken to his death, both Pauline and Félix suddenly convert, in stupefaction and admiration of the protagonist’s determination and devotion. During his short Christian life, Polyeucte had urged Pauline and Félix to accept baptism and declared he would have greater influence on them in death than in life. At the close of the play, both take on a new Christian life, in a new community, with the assurance that the empire will now tolerate the practice of the Christian faith. Polyeucte’s baptism and subsequent martyrdom thus effects a change in him but also in others. As such, his martyrdom can be read as sacramental. Pauline witnesses his death, and her eyes are opened. Unmarked by the purifying waters of baptism, she is altered and converted after watching Polyeucte’s courage and sacrifice. Her internal transformation is externalized by her words of devotion and service to God, a result of efficacious grace bestowed upon her through her baptism by blood: “My husband, in dying, left me his light; / His blood, with which the executioners have just covered me, / Has opened my eyes, and has enlightened me. / I see, I know, I believe, I am disillusioned, / Of this blessed blood you see me baptized, / At last, I am a Christian, is that not saying enough.”60 Pauline reemerges from Polyeucte’s death profoundly transformed. She has received the gift of invisible grace through witnessing the spectacle of his passing. Pauline’s conversion is also sacramental in the sense

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that her transformation is the visible sign of the death of her husband, offstage and invisible to the audience. It is through her eyes that the spectators, both internal and external to the plot, are made aware of Polyeucte’s torment and expiration. As Semk proposes, Pauline “articulates a convergence between the visible and the invisible.”61 The baptism of blood traditionally associated with Polyeucte in martyrological accounts becomes Pauline’s blood baptism at the end of the play. It is not water that will cleanse her spirit and wash away her sins to mark her as a new member of the Christian family. Instead, it is her husband’s blood, which may have touched her literally or figuratively, that promotes her metamorphosis. Her indelible mark is of a profound nature, rooted deep in her being, inspired by the martyred Polyeucte’s influence. Like Christ’s blood, Polyeucte’s own shedding of blood is productive, redemptory, and salutary. It also has the power to generate new Christians. Following the model of imitatio Christi, Pauline and Félix are baptized through Polyeucte’s death. Baptism, whether by water or blood, though hidden from the eyes of the spectators, effects discernible change in the catechumens and their entourage through its invisible mark of grace. Visible Consequences of the Invisible Mark: Transformed Vocation in Le véritable Saint Genest Perhaps the most interesting case in our corpus lies in Rotrou’s Le véritable Saint Genest, a play within a play that is simultaneously an apology of theater and of Christianity. It comments on the theatrical nature of theater itself, explores the salvific role of theater, and speaks to the theatricality of martyrdom and conversion drama. It tells the story of actor-turned-martyr Genest, a performer in the court of the Emperor Diocletian largely celebrated for his portrayal and parody of Christian baptism. According to martyrological tradition, the Roman actor converted while performing a parody of the rite of baptism on stage.62 In Rotrou’s play, Genest’s conversion also occurs, but off stage, in accordance with the neo-Aristotelian rules. His conversion is progressive, and though at first he resists its calling, he eventually makes himself available to spiritual regeneration. At the end of the first act, members of the court discuss Genest’s talent as an actor, especially in his inimitable performance of a Christian martyr’s life, from baptism to death, “But they praise, mainly, the inimitable way / In which you feign Christian zeal and enthusiasm / When seeing you marching from baptism to death / The flames appear to be flowers underneath your feet.”63 From the beginning, Genest’s vocation as an actor is identified by his powerful performance of baptism. However, in act 4, it is his performance of baptism in the play-within-the-play that grants him an identity. Given that Genest is portraying the role of Adrian, it is unclear to the audience, both internal and external, when that conversion and transformation

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truly occur. Confusion reigns in the scene, as Genest’s stage counterparts surmise that he is improvising because he has forgotten his lines. Amid the confusion, the courtly audience revels in Genest’s prowess. Maximin declares, “He imitates as if he were enlivened by the graces of baptism,” to which his fiancée, Valérie, replies, “His mimicry would pass for the truth.”64 The repetition and rehearsal of his role as Adrian, a Roman soldier turned Christian martyr, allows Genest to ruminate and think about the symbol of baptism. Consistent with Paul Ricœur’s assertions that “the symbol gives; but what it gives is occasion for thought,” the gift offered to Genest leads to his propositions, and the symbol represented is the starting point of his thinking.65 Genest’s public avowal and the breaking of theatrical illusion are poignantly placed in the internal play at the time of his character’s request for baptism. No directions indicate how to stage this scene, but some representation of the baptismal rite of the internal play must have been present on stage. In this sequence, not Genest but his character, Adrian, would have been marked by “the water of holy baptism.”66 Adrian would have invited Anthyme, the priest character of the internal play, to consummate his baptism with water.67 The theatrical enclosure of the ceremony would have excused the visibility of the baptism that bienséance otherwise deemed unfit for the stage. But Genest claims he does not legitimately receive the sacrament of baptism during the ceremony portrayed by the play-within-the-play: “But Christ did not conduct in your [Lentule’s] profane hands, / This mysterious seal, with which he marks his saints; / A celestial minister, with sacred water, / To wash my crimes, breaks through the blue vault; / The angel’s brilliance surrounds me, and the air everywhere, / Resounds with concerts, and shines for my eyes.”68 The discrepancy between performance and sacramental rite follows J. L. Austin’s suggestion that the ritual of baptism is not correctly performed unless it is administered by a legitimate representative of God.69 According to Genest, Anthyme (or, rather, Lentule, who plays Anthyme), does not have the authority to perform the rite for he is not marked by the “mysterious seal” of baptism that brands, or “marks,” God’s saints. Once again, the impossibility of visualizing the mark of baptism drives the plot of the hagiographic play. Genest rejects the possibility of Adrian’s baptism in Anthyme’s hands and instead seeks a celestial angel, who holds the water from the baptismal font that will bring about his spiritual renewal.70 What appeared to be theatrical illusion has become spiritual reality. Since the staged sacrament is not valid in Genest’s eyes, the actor must exit the stage of the external play, disappear from view for a few moments at the end of act 4, scene 5, and return in scene 7, transformed by true baptism granted by this “celestial minister.” After his efficacious baptism occurs off stage, Genest returns, claiming to have been baptized by the angel: “An angel, by his order, fulfilled my desires, / And with the water of baptism, erased my crimes.”71 Since aesthetic restrictions

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keep the angel from appearing on stage, the performative discourse occurs invisibly, off stage, between scenes. Genest shifts from the earthly stage, the theatrum mundi, to the celestial stage and adapts his vocation as an actor of the empire to become an actor of God. Through the invisible mark of baptism, Genest is doubly transformed and illustrates visibly the consequences of that transformation: his actions until death reveal Christian zeal and strength, as he realizes a new vocation as an actor of God on the celestial and eternal stage.72 Genest’s insistence upon the impossibility of effecting baptism on stage and the necessity to eclipse the sacrament strengthen baptism’s own vocation as an invisible, immaterial mark. The Mark of Baptism: Invisible, Discernible, Transformative Saint Augustine described a sacrament as an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. However, from the Augustinian perspective, the outward sign of baptism was fruitless in itself. The absence of a material mark distinguished the community of Christian believers from their religious or nonreligious counterparts and reinforced their common vocation. Seventeenth-century theologians and demonologists, too, discussed the nature of the invisible mark and made attempts to render the sign visible in some form while insisting on its immateriality. Hagiographic theater interacted with, and responded to, the concerns of contemporary religious culture and to the struggle to reify an invisible mark. The genre advanced that struggle, addressing it directly in its staging of the baptismal mark as something that remains hidden from view but that becomes tangible through other, more discernable means. For hagiographic protagonists, as for early modern Christians, baptism marked the catechumen with an invisible seal of belonging. Though seldom directly referenced, the sacrament was often alluded to with the equivocal theological vocabulary of the period for describing the baptismal mark that used material terms to describe an immaterial mark. Dramaturges’ desire to honor the progressively more restrictive neo-Aristotelian rules highlighted the immateriality of the seal of baptism by keeping it off stage, forcing them to find new ways to make their protagonists’ transformation visible. Though invisible, baptism represented a source of identity, belonging, endurance, and wisdom for those marked by it. It was transformative, effecting a discernable change in the identity and comportment of the hagiographic protagonists. The change brought about by baptism was reflected on stage in the new Christians’ subsequent words and deeds, whether through a name change for Eustache or an adjustment in behavior and vocation for Polyeucte and Genest. Their metamorphoses were manifested in their resistance to pagan rituals, impulse to defy both tyrants and loved ones, and constancy until death. Just as Eustache incited his family to baptism, and Polyeucte’s martyrdom inspired Pauline’s and Félix’s conversions, the

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protagonists’ transformation may also have served as inspiration and edification to those off stage to aspire to Catholic values in a French society wrought by the recent Wars of Religion and anathemas against Protestant sects.73 From the Christian perspective, the aesthetic necessity for the omission of the baptismal mark from the stage reinforced the theorization of the mark as an invisible, ineffaceable, and efficacious sign bestowed upon the neophytes. Baptism’s effects provided visible witness to the mark. Its seal opened the door to a desire for martyrdom and advanced the effort toward the ultimate goal of eternal life, through the fulfillment of a martyr’s death. Notes The author would like to thank Katherine Dauge-Roth, who commented on earlier drafts of this chapter and made extensive and meaningful suggestions. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 1. Augustine of Hippo, On Baptism, Against the Donatists 1:4–5, trans. Rev. J. R. King (London: Aeterna Press, 2014), 7. On the marking of the enslaved in the early modern context, see Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper’s contribution to this volume. 2. Michael Meere, “Theatres of Torture: Martyrs, Pagans, and the Politics of Conversion in Early Seventeenth-Century France,” Early Modern French Studies 37, no. 1 (July 2015): 14–28, at 16. Meere also attests that martyr plays of the early seventeenth century attempted to keep Catholics in their faith or convert Protestants (28). 3. Bradley Mark Peper, “On the Mark: Augustine’s Baptismal Analogy of the Nota Militaris,” Augustinian Studies 38, no. 2 (2007): 353–63. 4. In the Christian imaginary, the mark of baptism begins life, and baptism is viewed as the initial step in a life of imitatio Christi. The 1691 Dictionnaire chrétien indicates that Christ made visible the characters imprinted in his heart through his actions, thus providing a model to humans: “He [Christ] marked all of the characters of his wisdom in his actions, and exposed them visibly to men so to serve as example. . . . Thus he wanted to render them tangible, in marking them in his human actions, in order to infuse them into people’s hearts” (Il [Christ] a imprimé tous les caracteres de sa sagesse dans ses actions, & les a exposées visiblement à la veuë des hommes pour leur servir de regle. . . . Ainsi il les a voulu rendre

sensibles, en les imprimant dans les actions de son humanité, pour les faire passer dans les cœurs). Nicolas Fontaine, Le Dictionnaire chrétien, ou sur differens tableaux de la nature, l’on apprend par l’Écriture et les saints Pères à voir Dieu peint dans tous ses ouvrages: et à passer des choses visibles aux invisibles. Ouvrage tres utile aux Religieux & Religieuses, aux Personnes de pieté, aux Predicateurs & à tous ceux qui étudient ou qui ont à parler en public (Paris: Chez Elie Josset, 1691), 93. 5. Under the entry “Signe,” the seventeenth-century Dictionnaire universel refers to Augustin’s definition: “The Sacraments of the Church are visible signs that confer an invisible grace” (Les Sacrements de l’Eglise sont des signes visibles qui conferent une grace invisible). Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts (Paris: La Haye, 1690), s.v. “Signe.” 6. “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” Vatican, The Holy See, accessed July 1, 2017, https://‌www‌.vatican‌.va‌/archive‌/ENG0015 ‌/__P3H‌.htm. 7. French Capuchin Claude Abbeville describes how “this ceremony [baptism] was taken more so than borrowed from Pagans who were its unlawful owners, and jesus christ did nothing but replace it in its primary usage at the service of his Father” (cette ceremonie [baptême] a esté plustost retirée qu’empruntée des Payens qui en estoient les injustes possesseurs, & que jesus-christ n’a rien faict que la remettre en son premier usage au service de son Père), and he refers directly to the mark on the forehead: “Eight days after so as to bring to the Neophytes the faith of their master, Non in

The Invisible Mark occulto, like the Jews, but on the forehead” (Huict jours apres pourfaire porter à ces Neophytes la foy de leur maistre, Non in occulto, comme les Juifs, mais sur le front). Claude Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines (Paris: François Huby, 1614), ch. 59, fols. 365v–366r, 374v. All biblical references come from the New American Bible, rev. ed. (NABRE), and are taken from usccb.org. 8. Mark Searle, Christening: The Making of Christians (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1980), 4. 9. The Dictionnaire universel makes reference to the material elements: “Baptism is done with water and in the name of the Three persons of the Trinity” (Le Baptesme se fait avec de l’eau et au nom des Trois personnes de la Trinité). Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “Baptesme.” 10. See 2 Cor 1: 21–22. 11. Dominican inquisitor Sebastien Michaëlis insists on this duality: “God . . . marks internally at Baptism with a mark or character inherent to our soul, as said by Saint Paul and Saint John. Secondly, he wants us to be marked externally by Chrism and the sign of the Cross” (Dieu . . . marque interieurement au Baptesme d’une marque ou caractere inherent à nostre ame, comme le disoit Sainct Paul & Sainct Jean par apres. Secondement, il veut que nous soyons marquez exterieurement par le Chresme & signe de la Croix). Sebastien Michaëlis, Histoire admirable de la possession et conversion d’une penitente, part 2 (Paris: Charles Chastellain, 1614), 172. 12. Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989 (London: Routledge, 1990), 32; John Bossy, “Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 129–43, at 132–35. 13. “croix de Jesus-Christ en nostre front.” Augustine, “Premier sermon du nom de Chrestien, par sainct Augustin. Ce sermon est le 215 du temps, au Tome 10,” in Trois Sermons de S. Augustin, non moins doctes que utiles en ce temps. Les deux premiers traictent du nom & devoir du Chrestien, & l’autre est la necessité de payer les dimes. Ausquels il est enseigné que ceux qui adherent aux magies, sorceleries, superstitions & infestations diaboliques, pour

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neant sont Chrestiens & abusent de leur foy, trans. René Benoist (Paris: Jean Poupy, 1579), fol. 3r. 14. “Saint Basile nous dit que nous devons toujours porter l’idée de Dieu imprimée comme un cachet ineffaçable sur nostre cœur . . . ce cachet doit-estre comme imprimé sur le diamant.” Fontaine, Dictionnaire chrétien, 89–90, s.v. “Cachet.” 15. “Caractere, se dit aussi de certaines marques & empreintes que les Anciens mettoient sur le front de leurs esclaves, ou des criminels pour les reconnoistre, ou pour les notter, & peut-estre qu’on doit ainsi expliquer le signe que Dieu mit sur le front de Cain pour empecher qu’il ne fust tué dans son exil volontaire; & les marques de ceux des Tribus d’Israël dont il est fait mention dans l’Apocalypse.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “Caractere.” 16. “se dit encore des qualités invisibles qu’on respecte en ceux qui ont receu des ordres, des charges, & des dignités.” Ibid. 17. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, session 7, canon 9, trans. Theodore Buckley (London: George Routledge, 1851), 52. 18. See David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 97–121. 19. Théophile Raynaud, De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco (Grenoble, 1647; 2nd ed., Lyon: Antoine Cellier, 1654), 352; quoted and translated in Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 34. 20. Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 53. 21. This debate denotes the complexity and ambiguity associated with the question of the baptismal mark, the struggle to define it and how its immateriality was seen as its most important element. See Johann Gerhard, A Comprehensive Explanation of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (1610) (Decatur: Johann Gerhard Institute, 1996), 65; Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1997), 3:362; Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, n.d.), 405.

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22. See John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (London: Anne Griffin, 1634), 4:642–52. 23. See Scott Swain, “Lutheran and Reformed Sacramental Theology: Seventeenth– Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 362–79. 24. This is reminiscent of the Dictionnaire universel’s definition of “caractere” and wearing the cross of Christ on the forehead: “God marked the forehead of man with a certain character, an image of Divinity” (Dieu a empreint sur le front de l’homme un certain caractere, une image de la Divinité). Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “Caractere.” Emphasis original. 25. “comme Dieu imprime dans les ames la lumiere de son visage, & le caractere de sa sainteté, qui est l’humilité de jesus-christ, le démon de mesme imprime encore beaucoup plus sur ceux qui sont à lui, son caractere & son cachet, qui est celui de l’orgueil, & de la revolte contre Dieu.” Fontaine, Dictionnaire chrétien, 90. 26. “C’est ainsi, dit ce saint Pape [Basile], que lors que le démon voit nos cœurs fermez d’un cachet, il se retire, & n’a pas la hardiesse d’y tenter une entrée.” Ibid., 89. On the mark as a protective seal, see also Dauge-Roth’s contribution to this volume. 27. “& en graver d’autres barbares & difformes, qui ne sont que des caracteres de mort.” Fontaine, Dictionnaire chrétien, 93. On the devil’s ability to overwrite the baptismal mark, see Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 35–36. For more discussion on the practice of inverted baptism, which reverts and overturns the indiscernible baptismal mark, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 82–87. 28. See Sara Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 29. “le libre choix de recevoir la marque & caractere des vrays enfans de Dieu.” Abbeville, Histoire de la mission, fol. 114v. The baptismal mark is continuously described in material terms. See also fol. 346r: “Through Baptism . . . the Christian character is imprinted in their Soul” (par le Baptesme . . . le charactere de Chrestien est imprimé en leur Ame).

30. “À le recevoir pour luy donner une plus belle marque que celle qu’il avoit & le rendre soldat d’une nouvelle milice; & de sa part se bailler à nous pour estre fait Chrestien.” Ibid., fols. 348r–349r. On the idea of new identity and honor, see 352v: “This new title of honor he had acquired, gaining victory over all Demons from Hell, enemies of our Souls which he obtained in receiving holy Baptism” (ce nouveau tiltre d’honneur qu’il avoit aquis, remportant la victoire de tous les Diables d’Enfer ennemis de nos Ames ainsi qu’il venoit de faire en recevant le sainct Baptesme). See also Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 137. 31. “Et moins eussent-ils delaissé si facilement toutes leurs impietez et mechancetez diaboliques [peintures du corps et parties du corps percées] pour se convertir à Dieu.” Abbeville, Histoire de la mission, fol. 315v. 32. “Comme les Juifs estoient charnels, ils estoient marquez dans la chair comme des bestes, pour faire voir qu’ils appartenoient à Dieu. Pour nous, comme estant les enfans, nous sommes scellez par le saint Esprit. Tout est spirituel parmi nous.” Fontaine, Dictionnaire chrétien, 69, s.v. “Bœufs.” On the commodification of human beings through branding, see Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper’s as well as Craig Koslofsky’s contributions to this volume. 33. Meere, “Theatres of Torture,” 14–15. 34. Christopher Semk, Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 103. 35. Costas Panayotakis, “Baptism and Crucifixion on the Mimic Stage,” Mnemosyne 50, no. 3 (June 1997): 302–19, at 308. 36. Jean Rotrou, Le véritable Saint Genest, 1647, ed. Emanuelle Hénin and François Bonfils (Paris: Flammarion, 1999); Pierre Corneille, Polyeucte, martyr, ed. Claude Bourqui and Simone de Reyff (1642; Paris: Livres de Poche, 2002); Nicolas-Marc Desfontaines, Le martyre de saint Eustache, ed. Claude Bourqui and Simone de Reyff (1643; Paris: Société des textes français modernes, 2004); Balthasar Baro, Sainct Eustache, martyr (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1649). All references to the Rotrou and Corneille plays include act, scene, and line numbers, while those to the Baro play cite act, scene, and page numbers, as the text does not include line numbers.

The Invisible Mark 37. Placide-Eustache’s conversion story is linked to that of Saint Hubert, discussed by Dauge-Roth in her contribution to this volume. 38. “L’objet a disparu plus vite qu’un éclair / Remplissant toutefois de lumière et de flamme / Toutes les facultés qui composent mon âme.” Baro, Sainct Eustache 1.3.16. 39. “Allons cher Epoux, allons le temps nous presse / De changer en effet cette illustre promesse.” Desfontaines, Martyre de saint Eustache 1.2.121–22. 40. “ce noble projet que le Ciel nous inspire” (1.2.77); “cette sainte ordonnance” (1.2.66); “l’exprès commandement” (1.2.84); “cette illustre promesse” (1.2.129). Ibid. Emphasis added. 41. “Signale[r] ta constance au milieu du martyre.” Baro, Sainct Eustache 1.3.15. 42. “Mais nous perdons du temps, allons ma chère vie, / Apprendre le mystère où le Ciel nous convie . . . / Hâtons-nous d’accomplir de si justes desseins, / Et pour rendre nos voeus plus justes et plus saints, / En dépit des bourreaux et du supplice même / Recourons au Baptême.” Ibid., 1.3.17. Emphasis added. 43. The bronze bull was a form of torture and execution used in ancient Greece. It is believed that the hollow bull would hold the victims inside it, and roast them to death over a fire. Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain: Punishment and Torture Through History (Stroud: History Press, 2008), 37–39. Tradition holds that it was this form of torture that led to the death of Eustache and his family. 44. “Ce sceau mystérieux, dont il marque ses saints.” Rotrou, Véritable Saint Genest 4.5.1250. Emphasis added. 45. Ibid., 4.5 and 4.7. 46. “sacré caractère / Qui lave nos forfaits dans une eau salutaire, / Et qui purgeant notre âme, et dessillant nos yeux / Nous rend le premier droit que nous avions aux cieux.” Corneille, Polyeucte 1.1.45–48. Emphasis added. 47. “Rien n’en peut effacer le sacré caractère.” Ibid., 5.3.1636. Emphasis added. 48. Ibid., 1.1.94. 49. “Ce vieux nom s’est noyé dans l’eau de mon Baptême / Ne me le donnez plus, il me remplit d’horreur.” Baro, Sainct Eustache 2.2.22. 50. “Nous devons obéir et non pas murmurer. / Nous devons nous soumettre aux lois d’une puissance / Qui du mal et du bien faisant la différence / Dans la seconde vie où nous

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devons penser / A le droit de punir et de récompenser.” Ibid., 2.2.24. 51. “Tout m’est indifférent.” Ibid., 2.2.25. 52. The notion of baptism by blood was eventually theorized as another material means to accommodate martyrs who confessed Christ at the time of their deaths but had not received the sacrament prior to martyrdom. Tertullian described baptism by blood as sacramental and a potential substitute for traditional baptism with water, just as the blood shed by Christ during his Crucifixion was a second baptism (Tertullian’s Homily on Baptism, trans. and ed. Ernest Evans [Eugene: WIPF & Stock, 1964], 35). 53. “Abrégé du Martyre de saint Polyeucte” and “Examen de Polyeucte,” in Corneille, Polyeucte, 39–53. 54. Marie Philip Haley, “Polyeucte and the de Imitatione Christi,” PMLA 75, no. 3 (June 1960): 174–83, at 174. 55. “S’il faut affronter les plus cruels supplices, / Y trouver des appas, en faire mes délices, / Votre Dieu [de Néarque], que je n’ose encor nommer le mien, / M’en donnera la force en me faisant chrétien.” Corneille, Polyeucte, 1.1.89–92. 56. “Oubliez-vous déjà que vous êtes chrétien?” Ibid., 2.6.639. 57. “Je les veux renverser, / Et mourir dans leur temple, ou les y terrasser. / Allons, mon cher Néarque, allons aux yeux des hommes / Braver l’idolâtrie, et montrer qui nous sommes. / C’est l’attente du ciel, il nous la faut remplir; / Je viens de la promettre, et je vais l’accomplir. / Je rends grâces au Dieu que tu m’as fait connaître / De cette occasion qu’il a sitôt fait naître, / Où déjà sa bonté, prête à me couronner, / Daigne éprouver la foi qu’il vient de me donner.” Ibid., 2.6.643–52. 58. “Vous sortez du baptême et, ce qui vous anime, / C’est sa grâce qu’en vous n’affaiblit aucun crime. / Comme encor tout entière, elle agit pleinement, / Et tout semble possible à son feu véhément.” Ibid., 2.6.693–96. 59. Ibid., 5.3.1648–53. 60. “Mon époux en mourant m’a laissé ses lumières; / Son sang, dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir, / M’a dessillé les yeux, et me les vient d’ouvrir. / Je vois, je sais, je crois, je suis désabusée, / De ce bienheureux sang tu me vois baptisée, / Je suis chrétienne enfin, n’est–ce point assez dit.” Ibid., 5.5.1724–29. 61. Semk, Playing the Martyr, 105.

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62. In the Roman Empire, pagan mimes would ridicule and parody Christian sacraments on stage. Baptism and the Crucifixion were especially popular subjects for satirical performance on the mimic stage. It is unclear if the mimic actor-turned-Christian Genesius actually existed, though he is celebrated as the patron saint of actors, has a feast day (August 25), and is thought to have died either in 286 or in 300 CE. Mary Ann Frese Witt, “From Saint Genesius to Kean: Actors, Martyrs and Metatheater,” Comparative Drama 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 20. There are reports of multiple mimic actors who converted to the Christian religion and became martyrs, after previously ridiculing them on stage. See also Panayotakis, “Baptism and Crucifixion,” 302–3. 63. “Mais on vante surtout, l’inimitable adresse, / Dont tu feins d’un chrétien le zèle et l’allégresse, / Quand le voyant marcher du baptême au trépas, / Il semble que les feux soient des fleurs sous tes pas.” Rotrou, Véritable Saint Genest, 1.5.293–96. 64. “Il feint comme animé des grâces du baptême”; “Sa feinte passerait pour la vérité même.” Ibid., 5.7.1283–84. 65. Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 348–49. 66. “l’eau du saint bâpteme.” Rotrou, Véritable Saint Genest, 4.5.1232. 67. The priest exempts the use of water for Adrian’s baptism, calling on the possibility of receiving a baptism of blood in martyrdom: “Without the need, Adrian, for this salutary water, / Your blood will imprint on you this sacred character” (Sans besoin, Adrian, de cette eau salutaire, / Ton sang t’imprimera ce sacré caractère). Ibid., 4.5.1239–40. 68. “Mais Christ n’a point commis à vos profanes mains, / Ce sceau mystérieux, dont il marque ses saints; / Un ministre céleste, avec une eau sacrée, / Pour laver mes forfaits, fend la voûte azurée; / Sa clarté m’environne, et l’air de toutes parts, / Résonne de concerts, et brille à mes regards.” Ibid., 4.5.1249–54. 69. This would constitute “hollow and void” discourse, as suggested by J. L. Austin, contrary to performative discourse, which accomplishes something (How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975], 22). According to

the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” anyone, even nonbaptized individuals, can baptize. However, a valid baptism always requires intention. Anthyme and the actor Lentule were performing and simply repeating lines rather than baptizing Adrian/Genest with intent. 70. For Saint Augustine, the state of mind and intent of the baptized was as important as the sign. The bishop of Hippo proposes that even those who may receive baptism as characters in plays, like Genest for example, can be effectively baptized, should they be of the right mindset to receive the sacrament. Augustine, On Baptism, 190. Nevertheless, since Genest appears to reject his character’s baptism, he is only effectively baptized off stage. 71. “Un ange par son ordre, a comblé mes souhaits, / Et de l’eau du baptême, effacé mes forfaits.” Rotrou, Véritable Saint Genest, 4.7.1301–2. 72. Like Polyeucte, Genest remains constant after his efficacious baptism. He is approached by loved ones and asked to feign retraction of his Christian conversion in order to save his life. In the case of Genest, the interest lies beyond his safety, involving his troupe’s survival and the need to avoid financial ruin. Genest is as unyielding as Polyeucte and refuses this sign of weakness. He resolutely rejects Marcelle’s request of retraction, having found through baptism a source of strength and encouragement against any lies or deceit, which his new religion does not condone. Rotrou, Véritable Saint Genest, 5.2. 73. It is plausible that Catholic Reformation audiences also drew “parallels by spontaneous historical allegory” and therefore might interpret hagiographic plots and their treatment as supplements to contemporary events (Louise George Clubb, “The Virgin Martyr and the Tragedia Sacra,” Renaissance Drama 7 [1964]: 103–26, at 111). Meere also states that “the persecuted saints [of icons and theater] offered early modern people past examples of Christian virtues to admire when reflecting upon present life” (“Theatres of Torture,” 16).

Chapter 7

Rabies and Relics Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe

Katherine Dauge-Roth

Late sixteenth-century Europe saw the start of a campaign against popular culture that only intensified over the course of the seventeenth century. In this time of religious and medical reform, elite educated theologians and physicians sought to identify, expose, and expunge what they saw as pernicious practices running rampant among the common people. Works by physicians correcting “popular errors” in medicine joined treatises on “superstition” by theologians in cataloguing, dissecting, and debunking common practices and understandings surrounding the preservation and restoration of health.1 Treatments that marked the skin through inscription, burning, or incision were among the healing methods that drew extensive debate as to their licit or illicit natures. Though surgical therapies such as cauterization, cupping, and cutting, all of which left visible marks upon the patient’s skin, had long been part of mainstream medical practice, healing methods that combined dermal marking with elements tied to spiritual rituals or drawn from the realm of the occult drew suspicion. Magical-medicinal writing on the body, common in both popular and learned natural magical practice in this period, consistently drew fire from Catholic theologians, who extended their condemnation to all sorts of signs made upon the skin for healing or protection.2 Scattered evidence from priests’ visitation reports, prayer

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compilations, esoteric handbooks, and treatises on superstition attest to the use of actual writing, imprinting, or pricking of signs upon the body in ink or blood for combatting everything from nosebleeds and toothaches to life-threatening illnesses such as the plague. For instance, in a visitation report of June 11, 1526, then Bishop of León, Spain, Pedro Manuel (d. 1550), recorded encountering healers who not only uttered suspect incantations over their plague-stricken patients but also wrote magical characters and words upon their buboes: “According to sufficient and honest information, it is well known that in this city and in some other towns and places, this diocese has people who . . . cure various illnesses by means of words that they say over the sick at specific hours, days and times; and they bless them, mixing their words with things contrary to our faith and forbidden by the Church, such as the Seal of Solomon and other characters. They write other things (forbidden words) on the lumps and swellings that the sick have, and are certain that these cure them.”3 Remedies that required the literal signing of the body strike us today, as they did Manuel in the early sixteenth century, as clearly belonging to the realm of magic, readily discredited and discarded as so-called popular superstition. But not all cures that marked the skin were so easily dismissed. Belief in the power of physically marking the skin to bring about inner transformation resonated deeply with mainstream Catholic rituals that punctuated the routines and rhythms of everyday life. Priests conferred grace by drawing a cross upon a supplicant’s forehead in consecrated oil or chrism during baptism and absolution, giving materiality to otherwise invisible grace; that same sign, made upon the bodies of the possessed, protected the afflicted and put demons to flight. Stories of healing and protection conferred through marking the body also had prominence in biblical sources and the cult of the saints. God, even as he banished Cain, had ensured his safety by placing a sign upon his skin, just as he would identify and protect his own at the Apocalypse by marking their foreheads, while the mark of the Beast would condemn sinners to eternal suffering.4 Saint Roch (ca. 1348–ca. 1376), himself bearing a cutaneous mark on his thigh, was widely reputed to have cured victims of the plague by marking them with the sign of the cross, a remedy repeated in seventeenth-century prayer pamphlets published and distributed in times of plague.5 Seemingly straightforward guidelines for identifying superstition, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and the Church Fathers, often proved far less so in practice, where distinguishing inappropriate from appropriate observances was no clear-cut task.6 Nor was the necessity of eliminating certain beliefs and practices universally acknowledged and pursued, even among the clergy. As Jean-Baptiste Thiers (1636–1703), author of one of the most comprehensive and widely circulated treatises on superstition of the early modern period, laments in 1679, such acts “enter even into the most holy practices of the Church, and sometimes, which is utterly deplorable, they are publicly authorized by the

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ignorance of certain Ecclesiastics who should do everything in their power to keep them from taking root in the field of the Church, where the enemy sows them during the night over the good seed.”7 Popular beliefs and customs infused and inflected “official” religion in unique ways from region to region, and local priests regularly accommodated alternative interpretations of doctrine and ritual according to their parishioners’ own traditions and expectations.8 Faith-based remedies that made use of material elements—but whose success was attributed to the power of God or his emissaries to cure—posed a particular challenge for Catholic theologians eager to sort the good from the bad. Indeed, as this chapter’s examination of Church-sponsored therapies to combat the dreaded rabies virus reveals, some cures not only claimed their medieval origins within the Catholic Church but often enjoyed tolerance and even encouragement by Catholic authorities for centuries, despite inciting controversy. Skin-marking cures for rabies, in which priests and monks wielded hot irons and scalpels to brand or incise the skin of men, women, and domestic animals, were practiced throughout much of Europe during the early modern period.9 Officially sanctioned by certain members of the ecclesiastical elite and trusted by persons from all walks of life, these healing or protective rituals blurred the boundaries between vain and pious observance, as well as between medicine and religion. Priests’ active role in, and encouragement of, these therapies, the often ambivalent or contradictory responses they garnered from ecclesiastical authorities regarding their legitimacy, and the sheer longevity of these healing methods over the course of several centuries challenge any facile understanding we may have of an early modern campaign against popular superstition, characterized by neatly defined binaries and quickly ushering in a so-called enlightened modernity. As the long polemic over these cures for rabies suggests, the definition and management of superstition proved far messier on the ground than it was in theory. Moreover, the remarkable prevalence and persistence of faith in cures that marked the skin, even into the early twentieth century, attest to an enduring belief in the power of dermal stigma to effect change within the body and to signify healing and protection. Remedies for Rabies Classified among venoms by early modern medicine, which correctly understood the rabies virus as carried into the body by an infected animal’s saliva deposited into a bite wound, rabies inspired fear. Aptly named la rage in French for the apparent madness it inspired, or, more widely, “hydrophobia,” for the irrational fear of water displayed by its sufferers, rabies represented a constant danger in European agrarian societies. Numerous published medical responses written in the vernacular and commissioned by municipalities or their elite residents testify to the fight against rabies—“a monstrous affliction” and “a sickness arduous

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Fig. 7.1  “Canis Rabiosus,” a group of men hunt a rabid dog. Woodcut. From Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii in libros sex . . . de medica materia (Venice: Valgrisus, 1558), 753. Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (Paris), https://‌www‌ .biusante‌.parisdescartes‌.fr‌ /histmed‌/image‌?01008.

to cure”—as being of high public concern.10 Doctors published precise step-bystep prescriptions for first aid and treatment of bite victims, responses to lists of “frequently asked questions,” and horrific case studies of local attacks by rabid wolves or dogs, told in vivid detail, that highlighted therapies to ward off the virus successfully if caught early enough.11 In May 1635, rabies was chosen as a pressing topic for medical debate at weekly public conferences hosted by doctor and journalist Théophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’adresse et de rencontre.12 Given the potential hazards of traveling the countryside, pilgrimage manuals, too, included signs for identifying a rabid animal, symptoms displayed by human beings upon infection, and effective medical therapies and prescriptions alongside recommendations for faith-based cures.13 Communities organized hunts for the rabid beasts terrorizing their villages, as portrayed in a 1558 Venetian woodcut, where one unfortunate assailant finds himself attacked (fig. 7.1). As remains the case today, immediate intervention prior to the onset of rabies’ symptomatic phase was of paramount importance. Medical remedies focused on preventing the penetration of the virus from the site of the bite more deeply into the body. Physicians and surgeons recommended, as they still do, washing the wound immediately and thoroughly. They employed scraping techniques to remove harmful residue and kept the wound open for as long as possible so that any remaining “venom” could be drawn out or neutralized using compresses composed of strong substances such as salt water, vinegar, urine, alcohol, garlic, and onions. Some recommended the use of cupping glasses, leeches, or small animals to suck venom from the bite, while others employed caustics and cauterization in an attempt to kill the virus or irritate the wound and thus encourage the evacuation of nefarious fluids.14 Doctors frequently recommended ocean bathing, as much for its psychological effects as for the salt water’s antiseptic properties.15 They followed these “exterior” remedies by “interior” ones: the ingestion of medical compounds that were known antidotes to poison, such as complex preparations of mithridate or theriac and, later, mercury.16 Whatever the

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chosen treatment plan, it was well known that “you should not wait in any case to apply and to give remedies, but instead hurry, because of the vehemence of the venom.”17 Once the virus became symptomatic, having penetrated the body and reached the “noble parts,” death was, then as nowadays with rare exceptions, certain. As French royal surgeon Amboise Paré (ca. 1509–1590) solemnly asserted, “Those who fall into hydrophobia never get better.”18 Despite medical professionals’ efforts, ultimately their success at combatting rabies was, at best, mixed and the consequences of their failure highly visible. Rabies sufferers displayed agitated and aggressive behavior, repulsion for food and drink, uncontrollable muscle spasms, foaming at the mouth, seizures, confusion, frenzy, and hallucinations, all horrific precursors to an assuredly fatal outcome. Considering early modern medicine’s relative impotence against the ravages of rabies and the virus’s dramatic and terrifying neurological manifestations, individuals who had been bitten by rabid dogs, wolves, and other infected or suspect animals understandably sought all available avenues for warding off the disease’s terrible consequences, including supernatural intervention. Likewise, they sought sure means to protect the animals they lived with and upon whom their livelihoods depended. It is in this context that local priests, who regularly offered faith- and relic-based remedies and apotropaics to their parishioners to heal and protect against bodily afflictions of all kinds, provided their own treatments for rabies. These church-sponsored remedies took two forms, each of which marked the skin. First and more common, priests branded the bite wounds or the foreheads of men, women, and domestic animals with small consecrated irons, or “keys,” heated red-hot. Second, following an extensive ritual of physical and spiritual preparation undertaken by the bite victim, they made a small incision in the supplicant’s forehead to insert a thread taken from a sacred relic. Each of these healing methods, performed not by medical doctors or surgeons but by priests, followed different geographies and evoked varied responses from critics as to their permissibility. Both, however, promised a cutaneous cure, drawing their potency from the sacred, whose healing power entered the body through the penetrating and permanent marking of the skin. Keys to a Cure Medical cauterization, often quite effective in killing the rabies virus when performed immediately on an open bite wound, thus met spiritual healing practice, administered by clergy and taking place within the church’s walls. Thiers recounts that “in the County of Avignon, in Provence, in Dauphiné and elsewhere, there are Priests who heat up a piece of iron, or one of the keys of the Church, and who apply it to men and women, to dogs and livestock, to cure them of rabies, or to protect them from getting it. . . . They mark ordinarily men and women with it inside the Churches and dogs and livestock just outside the doors.”19 This

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Fig. 7.2  Remacle le Loup, monastery of Saint Hubert in the forest of Ardennes, near Liège. Engraving from Pierre Lambert de Saumery, Les délices du Païs de Liége (Liège: Everard Kints, 1743), 3: between pp. 16 and 17.

healing tradition is mentioned as early as the sixth century by Gregory of Tours (538/9–593/4), who recounts how horses suffering from a “very dangerous affliction” were miraculously cured through branding with the “key of the Chapel” of the oratory of Saint Martin near Bordeaux.20 In the early modern period, the marking rites most often invoked the power of Saints Peter and Hubert. Branding irons variously referred to as the “Key of Saint Peter,” the “Key of Saint Hubert,” or sometimes simply “the Key of the Church” got their names from the saints whose intercession they called upon for healing and protection and to whom the churches where marking took place were most often dedicated. As Thiers attests, in southern France and Italy, “This piece of iron, and this key, is called the key of Saint Peter, because it is used more often in Churches that are dedicated to St. Peter than in others.”21 Further north and east in France, Belgium, and Germany, such “keys” were more often associated with Saint Hubert because of the closer proximity of these regions to the Benedictine Abbey dedicated to him in the forest of Ardennes near Liège, a major pilgrimage center for bite victims and those fearing infection (fig. 7.2). Originally founded circa 687 in honor of Saint Peter, the abbey had a history that linked the two saints associated with healing by marking. Branding with the key was thus likely already a well-established tradition even prior to the translation of Saint Hubert’s body there in 825. While the irons used against rabies mimicked the cauterizing tools

Fig. 7.3  “Diversity of current cauterizing irons, that you can use as they suit you” and “Other cauterizing irons.” From Amboise Paré, Œuvres, 5th ed. (Paris: la Veufve Gabriel Buon, 1598), bk. 19, ch. 33, 717 and 718.

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regularly employed by surgeons, such as those displayed in Paré’s opus (fig. 7.3), as well as the irons commonly used for the judicial branding of convicts and the enslaved in the period, branding with consecrated keys promised a spiritual cure through the imposition of a material stigma upon the skin.22 It represented, as one Saint Hubert Abbey fundraising pamphlet put it, “a unique preservative and sure remedy against the perils of rabies,” one based in Catholic tradition and situated squarely within the domain of the Church.23 Saint Peter’s association with keys had biblical roots: Christ himself was said to have bestowed the powerful keys of the kingdom of heaven on Peter (Matthew 16:18–19). Numerous engravings and paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued the medieval artistic tradition of representing Peter either holding the keys of heaven or receiving them from Christ, as in a 1631 engraving by Jacques Callot (fig. 7.4). Saint Peter’s keys, which figure in the coat of arms of the Papacy as a symbol of both temporal and spiritual power, thus boasted extraordinary symbolic capital, a power extended to the actual keys of church buildings more generally. Moreover, given their association with Christ and the papacy, keys explicitly carried with them the power to heal and to save, as Antoine Furetière explains in his 1690 definition of “key”: “The Pope has the power of the keys, to open and to close Paradise, according to the power that jesus christ gave him to bind and to release, to condemn or to absolve.”24 In particular, keys granted Saint Peter and his descendants the power to drive out demons and to cure madness, which likely inspired their use against the similarly frenzied behaviors caused by the onset of rabies. Saint Hubert’s connection with keys came to him secondhand. Legend went that in 683, a wealthy and carefree young nobleman of Toulouse named Hubert (ca. 656–ca. 727/8) was out hunting on Good Friday when he saw a vision of the crucified Christ upon the head of the stag he was pursuing. This vision inspired his conversion to Christianity and entry into the priesthood, as portrayed in a 1704 frontispiece (fig. 7.5).25 Later, the story goes, during Hubert’s induction as the bishop of Liège in 709, a sacred stole descended from heaven and Saint Peter himself bestowed a golden key on Hubert, telling him that God had granted him special healing powers (fig. 7.6).26 Soon after, Hubert miraculously cured a man who had been bitten by a rabid dog, establishing his reputation and the association between Saint Hubert and a cure for the virus. Branding with a consecrated key treated both humans and domestic animals who had been bitten by rabid dogs, wolves, or other animals jusqu’au sang— with a bite piercing the skin, causing bleeding—and ensured protection for those whose skin was intact but who nonetheless feared infection. Churches often possessed two different “keys” to brand animals and humans.27 Using the same technique employed from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries by executioners and slave traders to brand convicts and enslaved Africans, the priest performed the marking ritual by inserting a small portable iron “key” into the

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Fig. 7.4  Jacques Callot, Saint Peter holding the keys of heaven, ca. 1626. Etching and engraving. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 59.569.18.

end of a longer rod made of metal or wood and heating it in hot coals.28 He then applied the mark directly to the bite wound or, in the absence of a wound, to the victim’s forehead, as Pierre Lebrun (1661–1729) testifies in his 1702 treatise: “This iron is applied to the wound, when it is apparent, or to the head, when the wound is not apparent.”29 Jesuit theologian and church historian Jean Robert (1559–1651), a native of the village of Saint-Hubert, provides an illustration of a branding rod used there for marking against rabies in his 1621 Historia Sancti Huberti (fig. 7.7). Some “keys,” as Thiers suggests, were indeed actual keys or took the shape of them, as attested by the nineteenth-century renderings published by church archaeologist Xavier Barbier de Montault (1830–1901) and confirmed by extant specimens (fig. 7.8).30 A surviving key of Saint Peter is still displayed today in the church of Saint Peter in the southwestern French town of Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, where it was used in the late seventeenth century to protect the two young sons of the Marquis of Angosse from the onset of rabies following an attack by a rabid dog (fig. 7.9). A large painting made in 1681 by François Fayet (1630–1708) for the then Benedictine abbey, offered as an ex-voto by the grateful family, explicitly links Saint Peter and the boys’

Fig. 7.5  Frontispiece portraying the future Saint Hubert’s miraculous vision while hunting a buck crowned with a crucifix, the hunter’s horn that will become his symbol draped on his back. From Abregé de la vie et miracles de Sancti Hubert, Patron des Ardennes, 2nd ed. (Liège: J. F. Broncart, 1704).

Fig. 7.6  Unknown artist of the workshop of the Master of the Life of the Virgin, Saint Hubert receiving the miraculous stole from heaven, with a dog in the foreground, signaling belief in his ability to protect against rabies, Cologne, ca. 1485–90. Oil on canvas, transferred from wood, right-hand shutter, 123.2 × 83.2 cm. The National Gallery, London, NG25.

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Fig. 7.7  Branding iron. From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 269.

miraculous cure (fig. 7.10). In the foreground, Christ gives the keys of heaven to Peter while the Apostles look on, while in the background at right, a second scene depicts the Marquis of Angosse with his wife and sons, kneeling to venerate a key held by a monk as a dog lingers (fig. 7.11).31 Other “keys” probably resembled simpler and smaller stylized flat-headed nails or long cones, like the later extant nineteenth-century artifacts still held in museum collections and portrayed among Barbier de Montault’s drawings (figs. 7.8 and 7.12).32 Like the irons used by slavers and executioners, locally designed “keys” sometimes took different shapes, creating a variety of signs with which bite victims might be marked; as Lebrun underlines, the iron “is not made everywhere in the shape of a Key, in Liège it is a ring, in Utrecht it is an iron Cross, all signs that were under the authority of the institutions of men.”33 In the case of Saint Hubert’s “keys,” irons referred to as cors (horns) or cornets de fer (iron horns) took the

Fig. 7.8  Keys of Saint Peter and Saint Hubert. From Xavier Barbier de Montault, “Le reliquaire de LacourSaint-Pierre (Tarn-et-Garonne) et les clefs de Saint-Pierre et de Saint-Hubert,” Bulletin Archéologique de la Société Archéologique de Tarn-et-Garonne 6 (1878): plate II, between pp. 56 and 57. Original legend reads: 1. Key of Saint Peter in Esparsac (Tarn-et-Garonne), for humans, half of original size. 2. Key of Esparsac, for dogs, half of original size. 3. Key of Lacour Saint-Pierre (Tarn-et-Garonne). 4. Key of Saint Hubert, in Ogré (Vienne). 5. Key of Saint Hubert, in Saint-Hubert-en-Ardennes (Belgium).

Fig. 7.9  Key of Saint Peter, Église paroissiale Saint-Pierre, Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, France. Photo © Frédéric Dupuy. Fig. 7.10  François Fayet, Saint Peter Receiving the Keys, 1681. Oil on canvas, approximately 400 cm × 300 cm. Choir of the Église paroissiale Saint-Pierre, SaintPé-de-Bigorre, France. Photo © Frédéric Dupuy.

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Fig. 7.11  François Fayet, Saint Peter Receiving the Keys, detail of the Marquis of Angosse kneeling before a Benedictine monk, accompanied by his wife and two young sons, 1681. Choir of the Église paroissiale SaintPierre, Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, France. Photo © Frédéric Dupuy.

shape of a long cone or a hunter’s horn because of the saint’s close association with the hunt (fig. 7.13 and the final examples in fig. 7.8).34 Whatever form it took, the iron permanently imprinted a new sacred mark upon the skin, effectively replacing—literally overwriting—the nefarious mark of the bite that had violated the body’s integrity and threatened its wellbeing, impressing in its place an authoritative sign invested with the power to cure. A visible, material attestation of the God-given authority of the priest who made it and of the healing power of the saint through whose intercession miraculous remedy was sought, the brand mark affirmed an individual’s divine protection from rabies, and, like a seal, closed the body off from penetration by it.35 Contemporary Controversy over Marking Far from being a local, marginal practice, combatting rabies through branding with a “key” was widespread and well-known to high-ranking Catholic

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Fig. 7.12  Simple Saint Hubert “key” produced in Belgium resembling a flat-headed nail, 1880–1920. Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, London, CC BY 4.0. Fig. 7.13  “Clavem S. Huberti.” From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 505.

authorities in early modern Europe. Period testimonials and surviving irons confirm that forms of the ritual were common in regions of what are today France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and Austria, while the Saint Hubert Abbey attracted pilgrims who traveled long distances to seek relief. As Sorbonne doctor of theology Jacques de Sainte-Beuve (1613–1677) attests, branding with the key of Saint Peter was conducted openly, even in the papal enclave of Avignon: “This is practiced in Avignon, in plain view of the Prelate. It is also practiced in France in many places, and no one prevents it, not that they believe that it has an infallible virtue, but because it is considered an act of Religion, through which they put themselves under the protection of Saint Peter, . . . whose intercession they hope for to be protected from rabies.”36 Sainte-Beuve’s complaint highlights the problem of determining just what should and should not be deemed an act of faith in a reformed Catholic Church that held close to its saints and their relics yet sought to eliminate the excesses this attachment sometimes engendered. Among several examples he provided of “vain observance,” Jean Gerson (1363–1429), prominent fifteenth-century Catholic reformer and chancellor of the University of Paris, had included cures for rabies evoking Saint Hubert, administered not far from his birthplace in the Ardennes region, a condemnation that later critics of the practice would not fail to cite.37 Sainte-Beuve and the Sorbonne doctors issued their own written opinion

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on the subject in response to a December 24, 1673 letter from a concerned bishop, soliciting their help with what he cast as a prevalent practice. The doctors’ February 26, 1674 response reveals, even in its opposition to the branding rite, a certain degree of ambivalence, a wavering that points to the difficulty of clearly delimiting superstitious behavior, especially when the difference between pious and vain observance resides in discerning the practitioner’s interior intentions. The Sorbonne doctors begin their response by excluding branding categorically, basing their argument on tests of the natural or supernatural efficacy of the iron’s touch to bring about cure. They affirm simply, “It is superstition to bring men and women into the Church, or livestock to the door of the Church, to have them touched with a hot iron for rabies by the Priest, because this touch has neither the natural nor the supernatural virtue to produce the hoped for outcome.”38 Yet despite making initially what seems to be an unequivocal condemnation of marking, the Sorbonne doctors remain sympathetic to those who undertake it out of true religious devotion: “This is practiced in many places, and while we cannot excuse the act of superfluous superstition itself, we can perhaps pardon from sin those who practice it.”39 Indeed, some persons, they reason, may receive the mark in true faith, putting their trust in God alone, while others clearly sin by placing their faith in the cure’s external or material elements—the branding iron, the mark itself, or the ceremonies surrounding the marking ritual—thus falling into superstition. Though Sainte-Beuve concludes that “all things considered, I believe that it is something that Priests and Prelates should abolish with prudence, since it has all the airs of superstition,” a question remains as to whether the ritual could be performed in good conscience under the right circumstances and with proper pious intentions, an argument that would be invoked by supporters of the marking practices performed at the Saint Hubert Monastery for centuries to come.40 Authoritative opinions such as that of the Sorbonne theologians apparently had little effect on actual practice. Sixteen years later, the 1690 Synodal Ordinances of the Diocese of Grenoble record a similar plea to clergy concerning the marking of dogs, confirming that the ritual had, in no way, abated there: “They would do well to abolish the profane and superstitious custom of Priests applying the keys of the Church, or other keys, to cure rabid dogs, or to keep them from becoming rabid, especially in the Parishes dedicated under the invocation of Saint Peter.”41 Furetière, in his dictionary of that same year, mentions the ongoing marking of animals for rabies in his definition of the verb flatrer, a devotional practice of which he is characteristically skeptical: “We still say today, Flatrer a dog, when people apply a hot iron to him after having been bitten by a rabid dog, according to the imaginary belief they have that this protects from rabies.”42 In 1697, Thiers enters the debate, discussing branding of both persons and animals in two different sections of the expanded second edition of his Treatise on Superstition.43 He quotes from Sainte-Beuve’s earlier argument

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against marking, with which he concurs, and considers examples of miraculous healing from the early Church, including the sixth-century case of the branding of horses recounted by Gregory of Tours, to examine whether Christians can seek such cutaneous cures in good faith. He nonetheless concludes: “But if God granted these extraordinary cures in recognition of the faith of those who brought like this their horses to Saint Martin, and of the confidence they had in prayers to this great Saint, Miracles of this nature do not happen every day, and events as singular as these cannot be used to excuse the Superstition of Christians who have applied to themselves, or have applied to dogs, the key of Saint Peter against rabies, without ruining the principles established by Theologians for recognizing Superstitious practices.”44 The same is also true of “Horns, or Cornets of iron (that are called Keys of Saint Hubert),” whose supposed miraculous effects Thiers has heard about and seen advertised in placards distributed by fundraisers from the Saint Hubert Confraternity, as they went door to door collecting donations to support the abbey’s work.45 In 1702, Lebrun follows Sainte-Beuve and Thiers in condemning marking for rabies, calling it a “rather common practice in the Provinces of France, that would deserve to be entirely prohibited.”46 Though he endorses other Church-sponsored cures, such as healing through relics, he advocates for careful control of marking rituals, warning that “it would be advisable . . . that we never use the hot iron, and that we no longer hear talk of the erroneous observances presented in the discussion of the case; because what is done with simplicity and innocence by some people is done with superstition by others.”47 Taking up Thiers’s earlier argument, Lebrun further problematizes branded stigma, calling them mere “arbitrary signs” that cannot reliably guarantee the same miracle every time they are used.48 Returning as well to Gregory of Tours, he emphasizes that “the Key of the Chapel, with which they marked the horses, was only a sign of the protection of the Saint whose aid they were imploring. But you cannot be assured that the miracle will happen every time you use the same sign. It is tempting God to do something that requires God to make a miracle.”49 For Lebrun, the problem with “cures with a hot iron, and similar practices, is that we demand miracles in calling on arbitrary signs that jesus-christ and the Saints sometimes imbued with divine virtue, because there is no guarantee that the same miracles will happen in the future through these signs.”50 In the same way, he writes, “It is no less problematic that people claim that a hot iron must infallibly preserve from rabies and other afflictions, because it happened once that people who had asked God, and used the intercession of a Saint, had been cured in this way.”51 In calling out as superstitious the belief that brand marks made on skin consistently bring healing and instead underlining their unstable nature, Lebrun puts into question a deeper, enduring belief in the power of cutaneous signs to provide protection and cure.

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The Saint Hubert Cut While marking with the key of Saint Peter appears to have been particularly common in southern and southwestern France for fighting rabies in both animals and humans, further north in Picardy and Flanders the marking of human skin took on an even more elaborate, ritualistic form. Though people as well as animals were routinely branded with keys at the Saint Hubert Abbey and in its surrounding regions, another long-standing dermal marking ritual, commonly referred to as “the cut” (la taille), predominated. Specifically designed for and performed only on human bite victims, the rite dated from 825, when Saint Hubert’s body was moved from Liège to the abbey in Ardennes, and his sacred stole was presumably discovered. In this case, a person wishing to receive the intercession of Saint Hubert most often made the pilgrimage to the abbey.52 There they followed a detailed set of strict dietary, behavioral, and spiritual prescriptions, completing a novena that included daily prayer, confession, and communion; sleeping alone in clean white sheets or fully clothed; drinking pure water or water mixed with wine from their own glass and never from fountains; eating white bread, the flesh of male pigs, capons, or chickens that were at least one year old, fish with scales, or hard-boiled eggs, all to be consumed cold; and not combing their hair during forty days.53 At the close of the initial nine-day period, the priest brought the penitent into the treasury of the church to perform surgery, as Lebrun describes: “They make a small incision in their forehead, to enclose under the skin and in the flesh a thread of the Stole of that Saint.”54 The priest then wrapped the supplicant’s forehead with a black band to secure the implant as the skin healed over it, later removing the cloth bandage, burning it, and scattering its ashes into the piscina. After the marking rite, the newly implanted individual then followed further prescriptions and pledged to honor Saint Hubert annually on his feast day.55 By inserting a sacred parcel under the skin, the ritual of the taille thus effectively made a living reliquary of the individual receiving it. The thread of the stole, which Robert displays ostensibly to scale in his history of the abbey, once inserted under the skin, left a visible stigma upon its bearer’s forehead, signaling the cure (fig. 7.14). This literal incorporation of a relic, while remarkable, was consistent with a larger Catholic tradition in which the sacred was routinely touched to, or taken into, the body to impart grace, protection, or healing. Indeed, the regular consumption of the body and blood of Christ through the transubstantiated elements of the Eucharist, whose legitimacy had been reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century, offered the preeminent model for a materialist conception of the communication of sacred power through ingurgitation. With more or less approbation by ecclesiastical authorities, relics and other consecrated objects, elements, and substances as

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well as sacred texts and prayers were commonly touched to the skin or to intimate possessions—crosses, rosaries, agnus dei, handkerchiefs, jewelry, belts, cloths—and worn against the body for healing and protection. Relics and their remnants were frequently kissed, licked, rubbed, scraped, eaten, and steeped in liquid to be drunk in order to absorb their therapeutic or protective powers.56 Like the compounds and compresses offered by early modern medicine, whose natural healing properties were ingested or infused through the skin’s surface, sacred elements, too, could impart their power through consumption or absorption. These more mainstream practices found their echo in other widely used remedies and protective prescriptions in which people harnessed the power of holy words and signs by writing them on the skin or on paper, parchment, fruit, or bread and then eating them.57 Such methods of incorporating the sacred, all testaments to the endurance of a highly materialist faith and tinged with the magical, underline the importance early modern Catholics attributed to physical contact between sacred objects and the flesh as essential to the transmission of the objects’ power. Even Lebrun, who rails against superstition in all its forms in his voluminous treatise, readily acknowledges the power of relics to bring about healing through touch: “We know that God glorifies his Saints by the miracles that their Relics produce. Handkerchiefs and belts, or other pieces of cloth that had touched the body of Saint Paul cured the sick, and made evil spirits leave the bodies of the possessed. . . . We have seen all across the centuries similar effects of Saints’ Relics; and we still see today in Riom in Auvergne that those who are bitten by vipers . . . are undeniably cured, as soon as they touch Saint Amable’s tooth.”58 Similarly, at the Saint Hubert Abbey, rings, crosses, medallions, rosaries, and other devotional objects, often purchased on site, were touched to the saint’s holy stole to harness a degree of its sacred power and then worn reverently or sewn into the clothing for protection from attacks by rabid dogs.59 The power of the relic’s touch was likewise at work in the act of therapeutic branding with keys: Saint Hubert irons received their healing power from having been touched to his sacred stole; Saint Peter keys were thought to contain or be forged from links of the chains that had bound his body. Both keys not only touched but more often permanently seared their sacred power into a bite victim’s flesh. In the Saint Hubert cutting-and-insertion ritual, the relic’s touch went one step further; by placing a thread of the stole permanently under the supplicant’s skin, the ritual allowed the believer to maintain constant intimate contact with the sacred vestige and thus harness its power long term. Moreover, once physically inscribed with recognizable scars upon their foreheads and bearing threads of the sacred stole beneath their skin, those “taillés à la Saint Hubert”—cut in the Saint Hubert way—gained the power to assist others in their communities, their own touch warding off the onset of rabies for forty days at a time, until bite victims could make their own pilgrimage to

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Fig. 7.14  Print representation of a thread of the Saint Hubert stole inserted under the skin, ostensibly reproduced to scale. From Johanne Roberti, Historia Sancti Huberti (Luxembourg: Hubertus Revlandt, 1621), 377.

the Saint Hubert Monastery, a gift of “respite” indefinitely renewable for those too old or infirm to make the journey.60 Parsing the Cut In contrast to the theological debate over marking with the key, for Catholic reformers, discussion of la taille did not center on the problem of the dermal mark’s natural or supernatural efficacy to bring about cure. Only Thiers, to whose examination of empirical proof I will return, seems to question the supernatural power of the relic inserted under the skin. Instead, most theologians, Thiers included, focused their attention on what they saw as the excessive nature of the ceremonies surrounding the marking rite itself. When Alixis Colart, a priest from the diocese of Noyon who had performed the cut on a parishioner from Fresne by the name of Jacques Lypos on January 23, 1671, wrote afterward to the Sorbonne doctors to seek clarification regarding the rite’s legitimacy, the theologians condemned not the practice itself of inserting a relic under the skin but instead the regimented diet, extensive preparatory rituals, and postincision obligations surrounding the ceremony. More significant, while they did

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not openly contest the power of the sacred relic to bring about cure, in crafting their response, they turned to science for answers regarding the medical soundness of the pre- and postoperative requirements of the taille. Having consulted reputed Paris physicians Nicolas Brayer (1604–1676) and Denis Dodart (1634– 1707) on the bodily regimen prescribed during and following the novena, the Sorbonne theologians repeat an apparently already often-reiterated condemnation in their June 10, 1671, response: The undersigned Doctors of Theology, declare having responded many times: That this practice is blameworthy and superstitious, that it cannot be tolerated, but must be stopped, this response having been made after having seen the opinion of M. Brayer and Dodart, Doctors of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, who condemned it concerning the sleep, food and other things that belong to their professional purview; just as the undersigned [doctors of theology] condemned it concerning the nine confessions and communions during nine consecutive days, the removal of the headband by a Priest, the obligation to honor the feast day of saint Hubert, the power to grant a respite of forty days, the whole being superstitious.61 Rather than condemning the implantation of the relic outright, the Sorbonne doctors focus blame on the unnecessary “externals” surrounding it that, the medical experts concur, have no place in spiritual practice. These, they argue, not only distract the penitent from seeking a cure from God alone but also dangerously resemble countless rites prescribed by natural magical practice, whose characteristic attention to spiritual and physical preparation as well as to the use of particular materials, clothing, and diet were recorded in period demonologies and treatises on superstition and formally condemned by the Catholic Church. A generation later, while Lebrun continues to affirm the power of Saint Hubert’s relics and peoples’ belief in them to cure—“We will always approve that people call on Saint Hubert’s relics devoutly”—he, too, criticizes the excesses their veneration engenders: “We must limit ourselves to imploring the intercession of St. Hubert, in submission to God’s will.”62 Though Lebrun goes so far as to condone “even that people receive a small thread of the Saint’s Stole in the hope of being protected from rabies” as an act of faith, arguing that God glorifies his saints through the miracles their relics perform, he follows his predecessors in critiquing the “many ceremonies” surrounding Saint Hubert marking, namely the elaborate prescriptions of the novena and the common belief in the ability of those who received a thread of the relic to communicate its miraculous power to others: “We must disabuse the People of these customs, and do what is necessary so that, if it is possible, we no longer see people running through Cities and Villages to touch those who have been bitten, and to give them Respite, as is so commonly done in all of Picardy.”63

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Belief in the Saint Hubert healers was not limited to the lower echelons of early modern society but traversed class lines, even reaching the highest ranks of the French state.64 Queen Anne of Austria herself (1601–1666) was an enthusiast of the miraculous abilities of a certain George Hubert—known as the “Knight of Saint Hubert”—who operated with royal and ecclesiastical approval.65 Both Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV consulted him, as did several other members of the royal family and aristocracy.66 Hubert received royal letters of patent in 1649 approving his right to heal and, in 1652, the Archbishop of Paris himself provided him with a chapel in which to practice in the parish of Saint-Eustache. Saint Hubert healers thus held a recognized, if contested, place in seventeenth-century French society. Further northeast at the Saint Hubert Abbey, clergy actively promoted the newfound ability of those cut to grant others respite from the onset of infection. The official instruction sheet given to pilgrims implanted there affirms their right to heal others: “Finally, they can give respite or delay by increments of forty days to all people who are wounded or bitten with bleeding or otherwise infected by rabid animals.”67 Saint Hubert clergy provided each taillé with a license of sorts, a written certificate prepared and signed by the priest who had done the surgery that served as authoritative proof of their marking, a paper-and-ink double for the distinctive scar on their forehead.68 Many theologians, however, harbored deep concerns about these healers and their activities. While, like the Sorbonne doctors before him and Lebrun after him, Thiers was willing to accept that certain people seeking the help of Saint Hubert through the cutting ritual have long “receiv[ed] relief in their suffering through the aid of his intercession before God,” he warns against extending the saint’s power to heal to his implanted emissaries. Given the differences in opinion regarding the healers among ecclesiastics of his own time, he advocates for prudence: The Church has not yet explained itself in its Councils regarding this matter. When she will have made a pronouncement on this practice, and will have approved authentically these persons and all their practices for procuring for the sick a cure to their ills, then we will be able to put our confidence in them, and believe in their benedictions, in their prayers, and in all that they prescribe. But as long as she has not declared herself in their favor, I think that we would do well to look instead to the remedies that the Church and Medicine offer us, rather than to use their ministry.69 Healers Marked with a Sign Reticence regarding the Saint Hubert healers, whose surgical implantation and therapeutic activities clearly pushed at the boundaries of the acceptable, must

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also be understood in light of this group’s resemblance to other so-called popular healers of the period. Gifted as they were with the ability to delay infection by rabies, Saint Hubert healers had their place among a range of practitioners believed to possess special therapeutic powers, all of whom—with the notable exception of the French king himself, whose divinely endowed touch was widely confirmed to cure scrofula—were consistently condemned by both Church and medical authorities.70 While Saint Hubert healers had something these others did not—the threads of a relic sealed beneath their scars—their therapies and the credence they were accorded ran dangerously close to those of other healers who were, for their critics, at best hoaxes and at worst in league with the devil.71 Moreover, the characteristic recognizable mark Saint Hubert healers bore visibly on their foreheads resembled the equally apparent cutaneous signs of distinction worn by these other practitioners, all part of an early modern imaginary that linked healing power and signs on skin. Just as Saint Roch was believed to have cured plague and cholera thanks to a cross-shaped birthmark engraved by God on his thigh—“the seal and mark of [his] Captain”—would-be contemporary healers commonly legitimized their own therapeutic touch through material signs made upon the skin.72 The Pauliani of Italy—believed to cure snakebites— and the Saludadores of Spain—who healed numerous afflictions with breath or saliva—all displayed ostensibly innate birthmarks that served as a “badge or a certain sign,” conveying their identity and validating their assertion of belonging to illustrious families endowed with special healing powers.73 The Pauliani, who, like Saint Paul with whom they claimed lineage, were themselves supposedly immune to snake bites, wore a birthmark in the shape of a snake, while the Saludadores wore the wheel of Saint Catherine’s martyrdom embossed on their skin.74 Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre (1553–1631) recounts that he met one such healer who came to the Labourd region from Spain in September 1610 and “told everyone that he had three naturally-made marks on his body, one under the tongue, the other on the shoulder, and the other in some other part that [de Lancre] could not ascertain,” as proof of his ability to cure.75 In France, so-called seventh sons—sons born seventh in line without a daughter in between—were believed to heal fevers and scrofula. They, too, bore a cutaneous sign signifying their particular abilities: a fleur-de-lis, often on their thigh.76 Unlike the Saint Hubert healers, all of these dermally marked practitioners found themselves routinely critiqued as charlatans or magicians by members of the ecclesiastical and medical ranks, who consistently debunked their apparent “birthmarks” as human-made: “They claim that they carried this figure out of their mother’s womb, even though they made it themselves.”77 Yet the recourse these healers had to signs on skin to reinforce their authority and to give credence to the cures they offered only highlights the importance of early modern belief in cutaneous marks as signifying healing power, a belief that clearly informed both the Saint Hubert taille and the practice of branding with consecrated keys

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of Saint Hubert and Saint Peter to combat rabies. It was in this stigmatic imaginary, where signs on skin communicated and conveyed cure, that these healers operated and that marks cut or burned into the skin were believed to impart healing or protection. Questioning the Reliability of Relics I return now briefly to the larger polemic over the Saint Hubert taille and to Thiers’s uniquely incisive critique of the practice, which prompted fervent responses in his own time and continued to be cited and angrily rebuked by nineteenth-century defenders of the cut. Though Sainte-Beuve and Lebrun both carefully refrained from attacking outright the subcutaneous implantation of the relic itself, focusing their attention instead exclusively on the many ceremonies surrounding it, Thiers boldly questioned efficacy of the taille to bring about cure or to protect its bearer. In an anecdote he added to the 1697 edition of his Treatise on Superstition, Thiers tells the story of a bite victim from his parish. According to Thiers, having been bitten by a rabid dog, Damien Montandoüin had made the pilgrimage to Saint Hubert, received the cut on February 10, 1687, and followed all the accompanying prescriptions to the letter. After returning home, he nonetheless became symptomatic and succumbed to rabies a month later. The characteristic stigma that Thiers can make out clearly on the forehead of his parishioner thus becomes, in this case, a sign not of healing but of its failure: In 1687, in the month of March, I witnessed the death of one of my parishioners of Champrond, named Damien Montandoüin, who, having been bitten by a rabid dog, died of rabies, or, as the Doctors say, of hydrophobia. However, he had made the voyage to Saint Hubert, he had exactly observed all that is prescribed for the Saint Hubert novena. Finally, he had been cut with the Stole of this saintly Bishop, as he assured me himself, and as I recognized as much by the still quite fresh scar that he had on his forehead as by the authentic certificate from D. Luc Crahea, Treasurer of the Abbey of Saint Hubert, who had cut him. This certificate has remained in my possession, and I will transcribe it in full now.78 Thiers goes on to provide, as promised, a full transcription of the certificate, which includes the instructions given to pilgrims followed by the signed attestation to Montandoüin’s implantation, presumably originally written in the officiating priest’s hand: “I, the undersigned, Monk of Saint Hubert, certify having cut Damien Montandoüin, residing in Champrond, Diocese of Chartres. Done at Saint Hubert this February 10, 1687. D. Luc Crahea, Treasurer of Saint Hubert.”79 With this display of empirical evidence, Thiers argues that, despite

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what its supporters may say, “it is not a very reliable remedy for rabies to be cut with the stole of saint Hubert.”80 Thiers’s ardent attack on Saint Hubert cutting practices inspired an equally fervent reply from the monks of the abbey, who actively defended and promoted the validity of the branding and cutting cures they offered, which not only supported their monastery’s reputation but also its treasury, as well as the economic health of the nearby town. The same year Thiers published his critique, an anonymous monk of Saint Hubert produced an Abregé de la vie et miracles de S. Hubert (Summary of the life and miracles of St. Hubert) to respond to what its author qualified as “the dreamed-up musings that are spreading about this matter, worrying many people.”81 He seeks “to disillusion some, and to give satisfaction to others” through a defense of the pious nature of Saint Hubert marking therapies.82 Contrary to what detractors say, he argues, the countless miracles performed by the saint’s God-given stole “must not at all be attributed to superstition or to the enemy of men’s salvation, but instead to the power of God who is pleased to glorify the merits of the great saint Hubert.”83 Just as Thiers and Lebrun had cited the Sorbonne theologians, who themselves also called on medical doctors from the Paris Faculty of Medicine to substantiate their position, the Saint Hubert monks produced their own, more local experts, reprinting the 1690 Bishop of Liège Jean Louis’s endorsement of their practices and the favorable opinion of the doctors of theology and of medicine from the University of Louvain.84 In 1704, two years after Lebrun published his critique, a new expanded edition of the Abregé included the instructions given to those cut, followed by a methodical “Explanation or Reflection on Each Article,” justifying the spiritual or medical purpose behind each of the novena’s prescriptions.85 Like their critics, the Saint Hubert monks, too, used empirical arguments in defense of the taille and the relic on which it relied. Among other claims, they found proof of the miraculous nature of the Saint Hubert stole in its remarkable endurance, despite centuries of having pieces cut from it: “Each year since the year 825 a sizable parcel has been cut from this Relic, from which were pulled small parcels that were inserted into the foreheads of an incredible number of people up until the present day; reunited these would without difficulty suffice to make several large stoles.”86 Further, they argued that the stole also demonstrated its incorruptible and therefore sacred nature by its ability to defy accepted medical principles. The author of the Summary calls the skin itself as a witness to the relic’s supernatural status, citing the extraordinary nature of its retention of a foreign object it should normally reject: “This incorruption is seen once again by another experiment, because the parcels that are inserted in the foreheads of persons infected with rabies stay whole, and nature does not push them out like she does with other substances, even the smallest splinter.”87 Medical empiricism thus joined theological reasoning to come to the aide of parties on both sides of the debate

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over the taille throughout the early modern period, as expert opinions about age-old dermal rituals collided in this new era. Enduring Ambivalence At the close of the seventeenth century, Catholic authorities had not yet agreed on a definitive statement regarding the practices surrounding the Saint Hubert healers—nor would they ever definitively approve or condemn their practices.88 A half century later, the case was presented again, this time to Paris professor of theology Pierre Collet (1693–1770). Collet was asked by a fellow priest whether or not a villager of his parish whose son had been bitten could, in good conscience, make pilgrimage with him to Saint Hubert and undertake all the ceremonies practiced there.89 Responding in a letter published in 1753, Collet characterizes the enduring polemic surrounding Saint Hubert marking as still quite heated: “The famous Novena that is in use there has long been a problem. Learned people call it superstitious. Others justify it. Would I have the good grace to throw myself into the skirmish?”90 Summarizing the pros and cons of these dermal rituals by presenting the arguments of his predecessors as well as his own, Collet at first seems to lean toward condemnation of the Saint Hubert cures, surprised that “despite these reasons and these authorities, there always have been, and there still are, people who, though they are not want for intelligence or piety, do not dare condemn a practice that Heaven seems to authorize by such a constant suite of miracles that even the most critical eye has trouble finding one or two exceptions to the rule.”91 Collet’s own critical eye worries over what he sees as a lax stance on the part of many Church officials: “All things considered, they believe that we can without peril leave things as they are.”92 But while Collet preaches caution, he is no less troubled in drawing his own conclusions. In the end, he believes God will see no real crime in the cutting ritual as a simple act of faith. He is willing to bet on the good intentions of those who undertake the novena, ending his letter on a personal note: “As for myself, I wouldn’t have any trouble doing it.”93 Collet was apparently not alone. The ambivalence that characterized Collet’s mid-eighteenth-century response and the back-and-forth between defenders and opponents of the marking practices that he documented continued with intensity well into the nineteenth century.94 Despite generating significant theological debate throughout the early modern period as to their status and allowability, dermal marking for rabies persisted, serving the needs and quelling the fears of countless bite victims over the course of several centuries. Even after Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) developed his rabies serum in the late nineteenth century—using a method of similarly piercing the patient’s skin but now to insert small doses of the virus—belief in the effectiveness of the Saint Hubert cut and of branding with consecrated keys continued. In fact, Pasteur’s patients regularly combined his experimental treatment with

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pilgrimages to the Saint Hubert monastery and even with the taille, which was referred to by nineteenth-century clerics, in the language of their time, as an “inoculation” of the sacred beneath the skin.95 This remarkable endurance of Church-sponsored branding and cutting treatments to prevent the onset of rabies testifies, to be sure, to the persistence of a materialist religious belief in the potential of sacred objects—here the consecrated key or the holy relic itself—to cure and to protect the humans and animals they touched. Yet, even more important for the questions asked in this volume, the survival of such hotly contested marking practices also confirms the prominence of a long lingering understanding of the power of marks on skin to impart healing and to ensure protection. Part of a larger marking culture where stigma made on skin were believed not only to communicate identity but also to effect real change within the bodies that bore them, these brands and cuts permanently marked bite victims with a sign of their deliverance, wounding the body while simultaneously embossing it with a positive, restorative sign of health and imminent cure. Notes Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 1. Prominent treatises published by French Catholic theologians include Jean-Baptiste Thiers, Traité des superstitions selon l’écriture sainte, les decrets des conciles, et les sentimens des saints peres, et des theologiens (Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1679)—with a second edition appearing in 1697—and Pierre Lebrun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses, Qui ont séduit les Peuples, & embarassé les Sçavans: Avec La Methode et les principes pour discerner les effets naturels d’avec ceux qui ne le sont pas (Rouen: Guillaume Behourt, 1702). Many demonologies include lengthy discussions, including Martin Delrio, Disquisitionum magicarum (Louvain: Gerard Rivius, 1599– 1600), translated and published in French as Les controverses et recherches magiques, ed. and trans. André Du Chesne (Paris: Chez Jean Petit-Pas 1611); and Pierre de Lancre, L’incrédulité et mescréance du sortilège plainement convaincue (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1622). On the importance of the debate over superstition in this period, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 472–88. French medical works include Laurent Joubert, Erreurs populaires au fait de la medecine et regime de santé (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1578); André du Breil, La police de

l’art et science de medecine, contenant la refutation des erreurs, & insignes abus, qui s’y commettent pour le jourdhuy (Paris: Leon Cavellat, 1580); Thomas Sonnet de Courval, Les tromperies des charlatans descouvertes (Paris: Nicolas Rousset, 1619); and Jean Duret, Discours sur l’origine des mœurs fraudes et impostures des ciarlatans, avec leur descouverte (Paris: D. Langlois, 1622). The latter is an unacknowledged translation of material from Scipione Mercurio’s De Gli Errori Popolari d’ltalia (Venice, 1603). On the professionalization of medicine and medical reform, see François Lebrun, “Médecins et empiriques à la cour de Louis XIV,” Histoire, Économie et Société 3 (1984): 557–66; Alison Klairmont Lingo, “Empirics and Charlatans in Early Modern France: The Genesis of the Classification of the ‘Other’ in Medical Practice,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 583–603; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), esp. 230–37; and William Eamon, “Physicians and the Reform of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Acta Histriae 17, no. 3 (2009): 615–26. 2. See Jennifer Rosecrans, “Wearing the Universe: Symbolic Markings in Early Modern England,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

Rabies and Relics 2000), 46–60. On natural magic, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 214–50. On the ways learned and popular healing practices informed each other, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 276–83. 3. Pedro Manuel, Report of Visitation 1526, in Synodicon Hispanum, vol. 3, ed. A. Garcia y Garcia (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984), no. 37, 361; repr. and trans. in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 64. 4. On Cain, see Genesis 4:15. On the seal of God, see Revelation 7:2–8, 9:4. On the mark of the beast, see Revelation 13:16–17, 14:11, 16:2, 19:20, 20:4. 5. See, for example, the Tres-ardente oraison pour conjurer pestes & charbons, trans. P. C. (Paris: Joan. Vvandilck, 1623), 7. On Saint Roch, see the Dévote oraison pour dire en temps de peste: Laissee par divine inspiration au Monastere de Sainte Claire en la ville de Conimbre (Paris: Mathurin Hénault, 1619), 11. 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ia iiae, qq. 92–96. Period authors also drew from Augustine (354–430 CE) and John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407 CE). On the categories through which superstition was judged in the early modern period, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 474–78. 7. Thiers, preface to Traité des superstitions (1679), n.p. 8. Robert Munchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 9. Earlier studies include Henri Gaidoz, La rage et Saint Hubert (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1887), recently reedited by Jean–Michel Leniaud (Paris: Éditions de Montbel, 2018)—all references here are to the 1887 edition—and Hervé Bazin, “Saint Hubert, guérisseur de la rage de l’homme et des animaux, ou: Comment Pasteur mit fin, sans le vouloir, à une pratique vieille de dix siècles,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Médecine et des Sciences Véterinaires 7 (2007): 104–26. 10. Prefatory poem titled “Pour Monsieur Le Docteur Jean Bauhin,” n.p., in Jean Bauhin, Histoire notable de la rage des loups, advenue l’an M.D.XC: Avec les remedes pour empescher la rage, qui survient apres la morsure des Loups, Chiens, & autres bestes enragees (Montbeliart, 1591), 49–50. The first text entirely devoted to rabies, Bauhin’s treatise was recently reedited

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by Hélène Camille Martin and Colette H. Winn (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020). 11. For sixteenth-century examples, see Bauhin’s Histoire notable, and Amboise Paré, “Venins & morsures & picqueures de bestes veneneuses,” in Œuvres, 5th ed., bk. 21, esp. 748–66. For the seventeenth century, see Aix doctor Jacques Caissan, Discours Veritable des Remedes, Medicamens, et Regime de vivre, pour la guerison des morsures du Rage (Aix: Jean Tholosan, 1609); Metz doctor Jean Ravelly, Traité de la Maladie de la Rage ([Metz]: Jean Collignon, 1694); and Huict questions proposees, et huict responses, sur la maladie, causes, effects & garison de Rage (Sens: George Niver, 1603). For the eighteenth century, see Cluny doctor Blais in Joseph-Marie-François de Lassone, Méthode éprouvée pour le traitement de la rage ([Paris]: L’imprimerie royale, 1776) and Charles-Louis-François Andry, Recherches sur La Rage, Lues à la Société Royale de Médecine (Paris: Philippe-Denys Pierres, 1778). “Home remedies” also circulated, such as Guillaume Barbier’s Remede infaillible et tres-avere, par l’experience continuelle de plusieurs siecles: Pour preserver de la rage; Tant les hommes, que toutes sortes d’animaux, qui auront esté mordus de quelque beste enragée, dont les ingrediens sont tres-communs (Lyon: Barbier, 1657). 12. “De la Rage,” May 7, 1635, 76th conference, published in Recueil General Des Questions Traittées és Conferences du Bureau d’Adresse és années 1633·34·35· jusques à present, sur toutes sortes de matieres, par les plus beaux esprits de ce temps (Paris: Au Bureau d’Adresse, 1655), 2:417–26. 13. On signs of rabies in animals, see, for example, Abregé de la vie et miracles de S. Hubert Patron des Ardennes: Par un Religieux de l’Abbaye dudit S. Hubert (Liège: Jean François Broncart, 1697), 22–24. The 2nd edition of 1704 includes a new section on how to identify the virus in humans (44–47). 14. Many of these remedies may well have been medically effective if performed on fresh wounds, preventing the virus’s spread to the central nervous system. On cauterization, see Louys Guyon, Le Miroir de la beauté et santé corporelle, contenant toutes les difformités, maladies, tant internes qu’externes, qui peuvent survenir au corps humain (Lyon: Claude Prost, 1643), 2:245. Cauterization remained the most effective treatment in the 1870s. François Hallet, L’Œuvre de Saint Hubert ou Manuel du

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pèlerin de Saint-Hubert en Ardenne: Instructions et prières propres à éclairer et à nourrir la piété des fidèles et la dévotion envers saint Hubert (Brussels: Goemaere, 1871), 98–103. 15. Recueil General, 2:425. 16. Bauhin, Histoire notable, 59–64. 17. Ibid., 57. 18. Paré, “Venins & morsures,” in Œuvres, 5th ed., bk. 21, ch. 19, 763. 19. Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:370. 20. Lebrun discusses Saint Martin’s marking cure for horses as the practice’s “pious origins,” citing Gregory of Tour’s Miracles of Saint Martin, bk. 3, ch. 33, col. 1097, in his Histoire critique, 354–56. 21. Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:370. Emphasis original. 22. On the branding of African captives and European convicts, see Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper’s as well as Craig Koslofsky’s contributions to this volume, and Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 217–56. For extant keys from later periods, see fig. 7.13 and a portable key with canister reproduced by Bazin, “Saint Hubert,” fig. 3, 111. 23. Sommaire des miracles continuels qui se font en l’Eglise & Monastere de M. S. Hubert en Ardennes de l’Ordre de S. Benoît, au diocese de Liege, & des graces & Indulgences concedées à perpetuité par les souverains Pontifes de Rome, à la Confrerie dudit glorieux S. Hubert, quoted in Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:372. 24. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts (Paris: La Haye, 1690), s.v. “Clef.” 25. Gaidoz examines the legend and its sources extensively (La rage, 25–48). Saint Hubert’s conversion story is a retelling of that of the earlier Christian martyr Saint Placide or Eustache (d. 118 CE), discussed by Ana Fonseca Conboy in her contribution to this volume. 26. A golden key is still kept in the treasury of the Collégiale Sainte-Croix in Liège. It is, however, neither Saint Peter’s key nor the key given to Hubert during a visit to Rome by Pope Gregory II. See L. Martinot, G. Weber, and Ph. George, “La clef de Saint-Hubert,” Feuillets de la cathédrale de Liège 21–23 (1996): 3–22, and

Philippe George, La clé-reliquaire de Saint Hubert (Leuven: Peeters, 2019). 27. A 1710 register of the relics held by the church of Sainte-Madeleine in Gavarnie lists two different keys: “Two little iron rods that cured miraculously when applied, one for rabies in women, men, and children and the other, for that in animals.” François Marsan, “Reliques de l’église Sainte-Madeleine de Gavarnie, en 1710,” Revue des Hautes-Pyrénées 5 (1910): 156. While the Abregé warns that consecrated irons “have no effect on people and would be desecrated if they were used any other way but for marking animals,” the very warning, in addition to numerous other sources, testify to their use on humans (17–18). 28. Johanne Roberti, Historia S. Huberti principis Aquitani, ultimi Tungrensis et primi Leodiensis episcopi, ejusdemque urbis conditoris, Arduennae apostoli magni thaumaturgi (Luxembourg: Revlandt, 1621), 269. The close resemblance between irons used to mark for rabies and other types of irons is confirmed by ecclesiastics’ worry over the consecrated objects being kept “without respect or distinction from other keys or profane instruments, which happens all too often” (Abregé, 17–18). For an example of a fleur-de-lis shaped iron used to brand convicts and the enslaved, see DaugeRoth, Signing the Body, fig. 5.3, 223. 29. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 358–59. Forehead marking may, however, sometimes have been symbolic—the iron being touched to the head to communicate its sacred healing power rather than heated and impressed upon it—so as not to mark the face permanently. Thiers mentions applying either a cold or a hot key (Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. [1697], 2:500). 30. Xavier Barbier de Montault, “Le reliquaire de Lacour-Saint-Pierre (Tarn-etGaronne) et les clefs de Saint-Pierre et de Saint-Hubert,” Bulletin Archéologique de la Société Archéologique de Tarn-et-Garonne 6 (1878): 39–80, at plate II, between 56–57. 31. See Thibaut de Rouvray’s full presentation at “Patrimoines en Occitanie,” ref. IM65002299, Conseil général des Hautes Pyrénées and Inventaire général Région Midi-Pyrénées, 1992, last updated December 30, 2018, https://‌ressourcespatrimoines‌.laregion ‌.fr‌/ark:‌/46855‌/inventaire‌_IM65002299. I extend my deep gratitude to Thibaut de Rouvray, Conseiller municipal délégué à la Culture et au Patrimoine, Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre,

Rabies and Relics for taking such interest in this project and so generously sharing his research and insights with me. Many thanks go to him, as well as to Pauline Igau, Frédéric Dupuy, and their colleagues in Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre for their help in obtaining photographs of the Fayet painting and the Saint Peter key. 32. Sommaire des miracles continuels, quoted in Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:372. The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford holds in their collection extant “keys” in the form of actual keys or flat-headed nails. They also possess a bugle horn–shaped amulet that would have been worn around the neck with the image of Saint Hubert kneeling before the miraculous stag on one side and an image of the key on the other. For photographs of these objects, see the Small Blessings project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, http://‌web‌ .prm‌.ox‌.ac‌.uk‌/amulets, object numbers 1985.52.615 and 1985.52.2305 at http://‌web‌ .prm‌.ox‌.ac‌.uk‌/amulets‌/index‌.php‌/keys‌-amu let3‌/index‌.html, and object number 1985.52.599 at http://‌web‌.prm‌.ox‌.ac‌.uk‌/amulets‌/index‌.php /saints‌-amulet3‌/index‌.html. 33. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 358. 34. Sommaire des miracles continuels, quoted in Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:371. For further information on known irons as of 1887, see Gaidoz, La rage, 132–35. See also the horn-shaped amulet held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, noted above. 35. Similarly, in Catholic tradition the mark of baptism was cast as God’s protective seal upon the body, impeding the devil from entering. Nicolas Fontaine, “Cachet,” Dictionnaire chrétien (Paris: Chez Elie Josset, 1691), 89–90. On the mark of baptism, see Conboy’s contribution to this volume and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, esp. 33–36 and 42–43. 36. Jacques de Sainte-Beuve, Resolutions de plusieurs cas de conscience touchant la morale et la discipline de l’eglise, 3 vols (Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1689), 2:39. Avignon remained under Vatican control until 1791, when it became part of France. Saint Hubert marking practices had won the approval of Pope Leon X (1475–1521), as attested by a letter of September 4, 1515, quoted in Hallet, Œuvre de Saint Hubert, 59. 37. “Quod ad sanctum Hubertum pro morsu canis rabidi fiant innumeræ particulares observantiæ, quæ nulam videntur habere

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rationem institutionis” (When at Saint Hubert for the bite of rabid dogs people perform innumerable particular practices, that seem to have no reason for being). Jean Gerson, Opera Omnia, ed. Lud. Ellies du Pin (Antwerp: Sumptibus Societatis, 1706), 3: cols. 471–72. 38. Sainte-Beuve, Résolution, 2:38–39. 39. Ibid., 2:40. Sainte-Beuve cites cardinal Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534) extensively (2:39–40). 40. Ibid. 41. Étienne Le Camus, Ordonnances synodales du diocese de Grenoble (Paris: Pralard, 1690), title 1, art. 3, no. 9, 16. 42. Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “Flatrir.” Emphasis original. 43. Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:370–72 and 2:500–503. 44. Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 2:501–2. 45. Questeurs de la Confrerie de Saint Hubert, Sommaire des miracles, quoted in Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:372. 46. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 353. 47. Ibid., 363. 48. Ibid., 357. 49. Ibid., 356. 50. Ibid., 357. 51. Ibid., 358. 52. Other churches that possessed Saint Hubert relics, such as Lattrey and Nonweilles, also practiced the taille. Andry, Recherches sur La Rage, 325 n. (a). The priest who requested Saint-Beuve’s opinion certified having performed it in the diocese of Noyon. SainteBeuve, Resolutions, 2:628. The special cutting ritual may have been a way of encouraging pilgrimage to Saint Hubert, since it was not widely available. Barbier de Montault, “Le reliquaire,” 74–75, and Gaidoz, La rage, 130–31. 53. “La forme et maniere de faire la Neuvaine de S. Hubert” is reprinted in Abregé, 2nd ed. (1704), 20 and 30 (mispaginated in edition) and quoted in Sainte-Beuve, Resolutions, 2:627–28, and Thiers, Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:514–15. Not combing the hair was likely prescribed so as not to disturb the wound made by the ritual as it healed. 54. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 359. See also theologian Pierre Collet (1693–1770), Traité des dispenses en général et en particulier, dans lequel on résout les principales difficultés, qui regardent cette matiere: Ouvrage, qui peut

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servir de supplément aux Conférences de Paris & d’Angers (Paris: Garnier, 1753), 3: 210 n. 3 (letter 22). 55. “La forme et maniere,” in Abregé, 2nd ed., 20 and 30. 56. De Lancre’s third treatise,“De l’attouchement,” highlights belief in the power of touch to communicate healing virtues (L’incrédulité et mescréance du sortilège, 114–77). See also Gaidoz’s appendix, “De l’emploi thérapeutique des reliques, à l’intérieur,” in La rage, 203–18. On touch and the cult of relics, see Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 35–45. 57. See Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 355 and 368, as well as Protestant physician Johann Weyer (1515–1588), who mocked the Catholic veneration of the consecrated host in relating remedies for rabies. See Weyer, De Præstigiis dæmonum et incantationibus ac venificiis (Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1563; 6th ed., 1583); for the English translation, ed. George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 388–89. 58. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 362. 59. Abregé, 17, and Hallet, Œuvre de Saint Hubert, 119–23. 60. On the power and process of granting respite, see Abregé, 16–17. Nineteenth-century sources include the possibility of “lifetime relief,” good for ninety-nine years. See Hallet, Œuvre de Saint Hubert, 63–64, who offers a forty-point list of FAQs, 63–81. 61. Sainte-Beuve, Resolutions, 2:627–28. 62. Lebrun, Histoire critique, 362. 63. Ibid., 362 and 361–62. Emphasis original. 64. Marking practices for rabies likely crossed confessional lines as well, as some German regions possessing marking irons were Protestant. Though clearly with propagandistic intentions, the Annales de l’abbaye de Saint Hubert report that in 1561, Jean Calvin himself sent his son who had been bitten by a rabid dog to the abbey to be healed. After having renounced the Protestant faith, he was supposedly taillé and successfully saved from rabies. Collet recounts the incident with amusement: “I would like to add that Calvin himself sent his son to saint Hubert, and . . . he was cured there of this double ‘rage,’ that of the dog who had bitten him, and that of his father”

(Collet, Traité des dispenses, 3:217 (letter 22). Many nineteenth-century authors reproduce this claim. See, for example, Eugène Grisard, Saint Hubert et M. Pasteur: La Rage; Peut–elle être spontanée chez l’homme? L’épilepsie a-t-elle quelque affinité avec la rage? (Paris: Téqui, 1886), 30, and F. A. Mouzon, Précis de l’Histoire chronique de l’Abbaye des Saint-Hubert, en Ardenne: Suivi de détails sur l’Église Abbatiale (Liège: Dessain, 1848), 71. 65. Saint Hubert healers were not all necessarily taillé but instead inherited their healing powers through lineage, as was the case for other groups of healers. Royal doctor and surgeon Pierre-Martin de la Martinière writes of a certain noble descendent of Saint Hubert, Monsieur de Canroses, who heals not by touch but through a certain remedy passed down through the Saint Hubert line (L’Operateur ingenu: Enseignant les veritez & abus des Operateurs [Paris: Chez l’Autheur, 1660–69?], 49–56). 66. Gaidoz, La rage, 112–17; Lebrun, “Médecins et empiriques,” 564; Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 77. 67. Quoted in Abregé, 2nd ed., 30 (mispaginated in edition). 68. Sainte-Beuve (Resolutions, 2:628) and Thiers (Traité des superstitions, 2nd ed. [1697], 1:515) both transcribe such certificates, which appear to have been written on the instruction sheet itself. 69. Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 438–39; and 2nd ed. (1697), 1:511–12. 70. On the king’s touch, see Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924; Paris: Colin, 1961). For seventeenth-century commentary, see Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 440–41. 71. On these healers, see Théophile Raynaud, De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco (Grenoble, 1647; 2nd ed., Lyon: Cellier, 1654), sect. 2, ch. 4, “On the artificial marks of con-men, falsely said to be innate,” 311–26; Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 432–35; 2nd ed. (1697), 1:505–8; Leonard Vair, Trois livres des charmes, sorcelages, ou enchantemens, trans. Julian Baudon (Paris: Chesneau, 1583), bk. 2, ch. 11, 275–76; Delrio, Controverses, bk. 1, qu. 4, 49–52; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Paris: Berjon, 1612), 190–91;

Rabies and Relics and Pierre de Lancre, L’incrédulité et mescréance du sortilège, 156. 72. Dévote oraison, 10. 73. Raynaud, De stigmatismo, 317. Birthmarks identified healers much like the badges, coats of arms, and honorary insignia sewn and embossed on garments and possessions that were ubiquitous in the early modern period. See Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body. 74. Saint Paul’s immunity to snake bites was based on a biblical story where the bite of a normally deadly viper did not kill him (Acts 28:1–6). On the Pauliani, see Katharine Park, “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace: Snakehandlers as Itinerant Healers,” Renaissance Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 104–20, and David Gentilcore, “Charlatans and Medical Secrets,” in Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 96–124. On the Saludadores and other itinerant healers and their marks, see François Delpech, “Les marques de naissance: Physiognomonie, signature magique et charisme souverain,” in Le Corps dans la société espagnole des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Augustin Redondo (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1990), 35–37, and María Tausiet, “Saludadores and Witchfinders,” in Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens, trans. Susan Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 99–123. 75. De Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, 191. Vair also confirms the presence of such healers in France and Burgundy (Trois livres des charmes, bk. 1, ch. 11, 101). On signs worn on the arm and the palate, see also Delpech, “Marques de naissance,” 35. 76. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges, 300–301. Hippolyte Raulin, Panégyre orthodoxe mystérieux et prophétique sur l’antiquité, dignité, noblesse, splendeur des fleurs de lys (Paris: F. Jacquin, 1626) is the earliest reference, according to Bloch, 300 n. 1. 77. Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 432; 2nd ed. (1697), 1:505. 78. Thiers, Traité des supersitions, 2nd ed. (1697), 1:513–14. 79. Ibid., 1:515. 80. Ibid., 1:512. 81. Abregé, Avant-propos, n.p. 82. Ibid.

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83. Ibid., 20. 84. Ibid., 20–21. The university theologians’ approbation dates from September 6, 1690, that of a team of synodal experts from Liège from September 22, 1690, that of the Bishop of Liège from October 4, 1690, and that of university doctors from June 17, 1691. These are all reproduced in Hallet, L’Œuvre de Saint Hubert, 53–56. The timing of these pronouncements suggest they were responding to the larger diffusion of Sainte-Beuve’s opinions, published as three collected volumes in 1689. 85. “Maniere de faire la Neuvaine de S. Hubert. La personne à qui on a inseré dans le front une parcelle de la sainte Etole, doit observer les articles suivans,” in Abregé, 2nd ed. (1704), 20 and 30 [mispaginated in edition] and “Explication ou Reflexion sur chaque Article,” ibid., 31–35. Emphasis original. 86. Ibid., 15. 87. Ibid., 15–16. 88. Thiers, Traité des superstitions (1679), 439; and 2nd ed. (1697), 1:511–12. 89. Collet, Traité des dispenses, 3:209–18, at 209 (letter 22). 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 3:212–13. 92. Ibid., 3:213. 93. Ibid., 3:216–17, at 216. 94. See Gaidoz, La rage, who assembles and provides commentary on numerous texts of the nineteenth-century debate. According to J. Schmidt, then dean of the Saint Hubert Abbey, more than 4,800 people underwent cutting and implantation there during the nearly thirty-year period from October 12, 1806, to January 1, 1835, alone (Annales de l’abbaye, 187, quoted by Grisard, Saint Hubert et M. Pasteur, 30). Numerous warnings against the therapeutic branding of humans testify to the persistence of that practice as well. See, for example, Hallet, who documents cases of human marking in Belgium even as he quotes instructions that prohibit it (Œuvre de Saint Hubert, 125–26). 95. Chronique de l’Abbaye de St-Hubert, dite cantatorium, trans. A. L. P. de Robaulx de Soumoy (Brussels: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1847), 351.

pa r t i i i

S ta n ding Out Marks of Honor, Shame, and Beauty

Chapter 8

Skin Narratives Speaking About Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Nicole Nyffenegger

Marks on skin, and most prominently wounds and scars, are meaningful entities in early modern plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Nowhere are they quite as central, however, as in Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus, in which the protagonist’s refusal to publicly display his wounds ultimately leads to his downfall. Set in fifth-century bce Rome, the play revolves around the decorated war hero Caius Martius, who single-handedly defeats the enemy town of Corioles, hence gaining his honorary byname Coriolanus.1 When he returns from the war, his mother and a fatherly friend rejoice in his fresh wounds and proudly add up the new total number of battle marks on his skin. They expect these wounds not only to commend his bravery in the service of Rome but to gain him the office of consul, which is historically attested to be connected to a rite of public wound-showing.2 In Coriolanus, this rite is presented as the plebeians’ newly attained prerogative by which they seek to humble the aristocrats and partake in their power. Therefore, and in contrast to the Coriolanus presented by the Latin sources and their translations, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus refuses to comply, bringing about his exile from Rome, his alliance with his former enemies, and eventually his death. Thus, the marks on his skin are a momentous element in

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the play, which, significantly, has by far the most mentions of the word “wound” among all of Shakespeare’s plays.3 But here as elsewhere, wounds and scars do not signify in isolation. Instead, they are invested with meaning and shaped by what Coriolanus and other characters say about them. I argue here that these “wound narratives” and “scar narratives,” as I propose to call them, are central to our understanding of the protagonist’s identity as formed by himself and his social surroundings. Marks on the skins of fictional characters such as Coriolanus are more multifaceted than those on the skins of their actual fleshly counterparts because they exist on several levels. As a paper creature, Coriolanus has no body and no skin when we encounter him in the words of the play. In the reality of his world as seen on stage, however, body, skin, and marks come alive by virtue of, on yet another level, the makeup and the performative choices of the actors. Literary studies offers methods of approaching this volume’s topic through these different levels and hence has a valuable contribution to make to historical and cultural discussions of early modern marks on skin. Theory-oriented criticism of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus has expanded our understanding of the play by reading the characters and their bodies through paradigms offered by Mikhail Bakhtin, Ernst Kantorowicz, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, to name but a few. Such readings highlight, for example, the parallels between cities and female bodies that are penetrated, raped, give birth, and nourish;4 the emotional and physical struggle of the protagonist to free himself from his overbearing mother;5 or the (often grotesque) state of the characters’ bodies as a representation of the body politic.6 In these contexts, Coriolanus’s wounds have been interpreted as designating female permeability, standing in for vaginas or mouths, or functioning as fetishes.7 In line with the materiality studies–oriented work being done in the emerging field of skin studies, I here propose, instead, to read the wounds literally rather than figuratively. Wounds are ruptures in the skin that signal, first and foremost, that someone has been injured. From there, both the characters in the play and the audience in the theater may infer vulnerability and weakness. As long as the protagonist’s wounds remain fresh and open, they may suggest accessibility of “what is inside,” but they also have the potential to heal, become scars, and consequently signify differently. The material turn has brought about a new attention to surfaces, such as skin, in Shakespeare scholarship as well.8 Philosopher Karmen McKendrick claims that her field (to which I would add many fields, including literary studies) has “long been in love with depth,” and she hence invites us instead “to think, not in the depths, but at the edges, on the skin, at the surface of the page on which we write.”9 For my purposes, this means not only to insist that wounds be understood literally but also to focus on what the characters actually say about the wounds rather than to speculate about what they may think, feel, or “would

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like to suggest” the wounds mean.10 The protagonist Coriolanus is himself very much a man of surface rather than depth; unlike many of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, he does not repeatedly share his thoughts with the audience in soliloquies.11 Cynthia Marshall suggests that this is a lead we should follow to think about “how, and why, the wounds are read, not merely what such reading might render.”12 Another lead is the fact that Shakespeare never uses wounds or wounding in this particular play in a figurative sense, while he does so in other plays, to designate, for example, emotional hurt or material damage.13 Shifting focus from Marshall’s idea that the characters read the wounds to the idea that they speak about them, I propose to investigate the wounds and scars in Coriolanus as sites of narrative negotiations of identity. The marks, I contend, do not consist solely of their physical presence on the hero’s skin, and in most cases, they do not signify by themselves. Instead, the physical marks trigger skin narratives. Coriolanus; his mother, Volumnia; his fatherly friend Menenius; the Roman patricians; the tribunes; and the plebeians all speak about the wounds. In so doing, they provide them with stories that, in turn, shape the way in which the physical marks signify. Without the characters’ narratives, the marks would not convey the same meaning. In the text, they would barely be present except for Shakespeare’s sparse stage directions; while on stage, their meaning would have to be inferred by the audience, guided solely by nonverbal action. Thus, what the characters say about the wounds and scars matters.14 I propose to think of wound narratives and scar narratives in analogy to Margo DeMello’s concept of the “tattoo narrative,” which I here continue to explore and expand.15 Tattoos, DeMello claims, are “a site of discourse. People talk about tattoos. They talk about their own tattoos, about each other’s tattoos, about tattoos in general, and this talk . . . has a practical effect: it actually shapes the tattoos. . . .[Tattoo narratives] serve in an important way to create meaning, by providing an intellectual and emotional context for the tattoo.”16 The same can be said, more generally, about marks on skin, as long as one takes into account the difference between self-chosen marks, which most modern tattoos are, and those received unwillingly, for example in battle. Physical marks, then, are but parts of a whole, and they are unstable signifiers susceptible to narrative appropriation.17 The sharp differences between the respective skin narratives of Coriolanus and the Roman community illustrate this impressively: throughout the play, the Romans constantly refer to all of Coriolanus’s marks as “wounds,” including those from previous battles that conventional logic would suggest have by now healed and become scars. In contrast, Coriolanus himself, while also referring to his marks as “wounds,” calls them “scars” twice. He is the only one to ever do so. In addition, he employs further imagery of unruptured or resealed surfaces when referring to his skin. Hence, I do not agree with Gail Kern Paster’s claim that “the play’s language . . . allow[s] for no saving categorical distinctions

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between new and old wounds, between flowing blood and healed-over scars.”18 The respective Oxford English Dictionary entries suggest that “wound” (“hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument”) and “scar” (“trace of a healed wound, sore, or burn”) were semantically as differentiated in Shakespeare’s time as they are today.19 While a reference to a wound received in the past, such as the Fourth Citizen’s statement, “You have received many wounds for your country” (2.3.104–5), may in fact imply a scar, it remains ambivalent and, I argue here, deliberately so.20 Most scholars, however, have, in their discussions of Coriolanus’s battle marks, used the words “wound” and “scar” interchangeably, at times ignoring the exact wording of a particular passage.21 In addition, there has been a lack of attention to who uses which word (only Coriolanus speaks of scars!) to the point of producing misinterpretations.22 If we pay close attention to who says what about these battle marks, as I intend to do here, we can discover yet another aspect of the play. There is already a critical consensus on a struggle between individual and community, which is both literally and figuratively fought out on the protagonist’s body, often via a discourse of wholeness versus fragmentation.23 I suggest that we add to this a struggle over the authoritative story of Coriolanus’s marked skin, fought out via the Romans’ narrative appropriations of the marks and Coriolanus’s defensive counternarratives. In what follows, I first turn to the second and third scenes of act 2, where Coriolanus refuses to show his wounds to the plebeians in the marketplace. These scenes have received the most scholarly attention in connection with the wounds in the play. Many feminist and psychoanalytic readings have focused on what the wounds in these scenes could mean and have in the process often read a psychological depth into the character of Coriolanus that Shakespeare did not provide.24 In contrast, I analyze the disputes that take place between the characters concerning the significance of Coriolanus’s wounds, responding to Marshall’s claim that “the very condition of textuality guarantees the instability of Martius’s wounds as signifiers; their meaning is disputed, veiled, and contested.”25 In particular, I explore in the second part of this chapter the effect of the conflicting narratives: the scar narratives told by Coriolanus himself and the wound narratives told about him by others. Approaching Coriolanus’s Wounds in Act 2 Act 2 sees Coriolanus returning to Rome in triumph and reluctantly preparing to stand for the office of consul.26 The praise of his general Cominius gains him the approval of the senators, but he also needs the approval of the plebeians. According to custom, their “voices” are to be given after a public appearance of the candidate in the marketplace, where he is to wear the “gown of humility”

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(2.3.39) and show his wounds. These consequently become “tokens of war heroism in the political marketplace,” to be traded for “voices.”27 Having requested in vain to be given leave from this tradition and contrary to his own previous conviction (the tribune Junius Brutus reports that he has heard Coriolanus swear he would never agree to such a display [2.1.225–29]), Coriolanus reluctantly complies. But, upon meeting the plebeians and being asked to show his wounds, he refuses. In Shakespeare’s play, this refusal develops naturally from Coriolanus’s intriguing combination of unpretentiousness when in the company of fellow generals and utter disdain when faced with the plebeians. However, this is Shakespeare’s alteration of the story as presented in the Latin sources and in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans that Shakespeare used. North explicitly states that Coriolanus (Martius) did show his wounds: “Now Martius following this custome, shewed many woundes and cuttes apon his bodie, which he had receyued in seuenteene yeres seruice at the warres, and in many sundrie battells, being euer the formest man that dyd set out feete to fight. So that there was not a man emong the people, but was ashamed of him selfe, to refuse so valliant a man.”28 Shakespeare’s alteration of his source is fascinating and has been widely commented on; in the Christian context of early modern England, the showing of wounds would have acquired an additional layer of signification because of the Doubting Thomas motif or that of Christ as the “wound-man.”29 Theatergoers may therefore not have found the display of wounds a convincing gesture for a Roman hero, leading Shakespeare to change the events accordingly in his play.30 Other critics have claimed, more straightforwardly, that Coriolanus’s refusal to show his wounds “focuses further action and spectacle upon the hero’s body.”31 While the body as spectacle is present already in Plutarch’s Lives and in North’s translation thereof, I agree that the alteration focuses further action and, in particular, also characterization upon the surface of the hero’s body. In Shakespeare’s version, Coriolanus’s arrogance and class consciousness are established exactly through the fact that he refuses to show his wounds to the plebeians after he himself casually brought them up in conversation with his fellow generals in the aftermath of the battle of Corioles (1.9.28–29).32 Characterization happens through the body in these scenes and throughout the play, and generally great attention is paid to bodies to explain the workings of human beings (prominent also in Menenius’s fable of Rome’s senators as a belly, the plebeians as “the mutinous members,” and the second citizen as the great toe [1.1.122–58]).33 This emphasis, however, should not mislead us to reading a psychological depth into the protagonist, as Marshall rightly points out. She suggests that, instead, we should follow Shakespeare’s lead to focus on “how, and why, the wounds are read,” both in the play and in the theater, and to investigate the “troubled surface of the hero’s body.”34

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An example of a passage that has often been taken to contain “deep meaning” is the following statement by the Third Citizen, which is part of a dialogue among several plebeians set to meet Coriolanus in the marketplace: 3 citizen: . . . if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them. So, if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them. Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude, of the which we, being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members. (2.3.5–12) The image of tongues put into wounds here is, of course, highly suggestive. It has often been read as the plebeians’ desire to physically penetrate the body of the hypermasculine war hero, in the process emasculating, feminizing, or objectifying him.35 Critics have, however, sought to complicate the straightforward equation of female bodies as open versus male bodies as closed, pinpointing shifting ideals regarding gendered bodies in the Renaissance, influenced by religious practices, medical models, and anatomical study. Drawing parallels to Christ’s side wound as “often highly sexualized, resembling bodily orifices,” Lisa S. Starks-Estes, for example, comes to the conclusion that “Coriolanus’s wounds may also suggest the anus, the secret place of the male’s passivity, the hidden site where he as the closed male body can be penetrated.”36 While such a reading is possible especially if one understands the “monstrous members” in the passage as the penises of a dirty joke, as Peter Holland suggests, we might as well decide to start by reading the wounds simply as injuries and focus on how the text presents them.37 For, in their enthusiasm of exploring the wounds in Freudian terms as displaced vaginas, scholars have sometimes overlooked the close connection that is made between wounds and words in this passage: this is not just about wound-showing but also about tale-telling (“if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds”). In contrast to the version presented by North, which has Coriolanus show his wounds but does not mention him also speaking about his deeds, what the citizens expect in Shakespeare’s version is a spectacle in which the wounds are the visible proof of heroic deeds but in which the hero’s narratives, in turn, invest the wounds with meaning. In the spirit of the recent empowerment of the plebeians, however, the Third Citizen imagines this not as a one-way spectacle in which the aristocratic war hero is the sole agent, relating his “noble deeds.” Instead, denying him his prerogative of nobility, the citizens intend to tell him of their “noble acceptance” of those deeds in return.38 They will do so by putting their tongues into the wounds and speaking for them. The image, then, takes the appropriation of agency

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another step further: if wounds need narratives to fully develop their meaning, then these narratives might as well be those the plebeians choose to tell. The imagined penetration of the hero’s wounds is aimed at enabling them to incorporate the wound narratives among the talk that has already started before, as the tribune Junius Brutus says with disdain at the hubbub caused by the hero’s return: “All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights / Are spectacled to see him” (2.1.199–200). Tongues are connected with wounds in other Shakespeare plays as well but never quite so graphically as to picture one person’s tongue inside the wound of another.39 This, as Holland comments, “seems more deliberately grotesque” and certainly invites a Bakhtinian reading in which Coriolanus becomes an everopen monstrosity of self, wound, word, and boundary-transgressing other.40 The image is, in fact, accompanied by the term “monstrous” three times, but not in the way one might expect: in a reversal of norms, the Third Citizen claims that not to show gratitude in this way would be monstrous. The plebeians are eager to overcome class boundaries by making the tales of the hero’s wounds their tales and thus ultimately representing him as a hero of their making. To them, normal boundaries have become monstrous, while they see in the image of tongues in wounds (that will appear monstrous to theater audiences and readers alike) a fitting illustration of their newly gained power. The plebeians’ desire to put their “tongues into those wounds and speak for them” is thrown into sharp relief by the words of a reluctant Coriolanus, both before and after this scene, who is shown pleading with his friends and political allies to be allowed to “o’erleap that custom” (2.2.135). In the scene preceding the Third Citizen’s speech, Coriolanus claims that he cannot “put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them / for [his] wounds’ sake to give their suffrage,” that this “is a part [he] shall blush in acting” (2.2.135–44): coriolanus: To brag onto them “Thus I did, and thus,” Show them th’unaching scars which I should hide, As if I had received them for the hire Of their breath only. (2.2.146–49) When he enters the marketplace with Menenius, right after the citizens’ dialogue, Coriolanus is still reluctant and even more disdainful in view of the impending meeting with the plebeians: coriolanus: What must I say? “I pray, sir”? Plague upon’t! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace. “Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country’s service, when

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Some certain of your brethren roared and ran From th’ noise of our own drums.” (2.3.48–53) In both passages, Coriolanus is more concerned about what he will have to say than what he will have to show. He knows that he is expected to provide the gathered Romans not just with a physical performance but also with a wound narrative. What is more, it will have to be a narrative that pleases them, in which he will have to claim that he received the wounds in his country’s service and “for the hire of their breath.” As mentioned above, it is notable that Coriolanus does not mind speaking about his wounds in different circumstances. After the battle of Corioles, he refers to his wounds to bring the celebrations of his victory to an end and to be left alone: “I have some wounds upon me, and they smart / To hear themselves remembered” (1.9.28–29). Here, the agency is distributed between Martius (yet to become Coriolanus), who starts speaking about his wounds, and his wounds, which speak in their language of hurting. Cominius adopts the idea of the wounds’ agency and, in his comment that they should not be ignored lest they lead to death, also anticipates the gratitude they will ideally elicit from the Romans: “Should they not / Well might they fester ’gainst ingratitude / And tent themselves with death” (1.9.29–31). In the marketplace, in contrast, the plebeians will claim agency when they ask Coriolanus to speak about his wounds in a way he would not himself have chosen. He did not receive them to earn the Romans’ gratitude and does not want to bring his tongue to say he did. The sarcastic remark Coriolanus imagines making to the plebeians while he is still talking to Menenius before their arrival in the marketplace (“when some certain of your brethren . . . ran”) is significant in this context: anyone running from a battle would only be able to show marks on his back. These marks, in contrast to those received when facing battle (in the literal sense), would, of course, be marks of dishonor.41 When cursing his reluctant soldiers during the siege of Corioles, Martius also makes a comment to that effect: “How have you run. . . . All hurt behind, backs red, and faces pale / With flight and agued fear” (1.4.36–39). In both these instances, the protagonist is presented as an aristocratic war hero who thinks of simple soldiers and plebeians alike as cowards not worthy of sharing in the tales of his prowess. The connection that Coriolanus makes between the two groups and his condescension are also underlined by the fact that he associates both with skin diseases.42 That he will now have to show his own skin, appear almost naked in front of exactly these people, terrifies Coriolanus. Hence, while the plebeians perceive the gown of humility as a way to strip the aristocrat of his regalia and see the true valor of the hero, Coriolanus sees it as a costume and his appearance in the marketplace as a part he must play, a part that he “shall blush in acting” (2.2.144).43 He will only

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“know [him]self again” once he has had a chance to “change these garments” (2.3.144–45). When the meeting between the citizens and Coriolanus finally takes place, the first curt remarks show just how difficult it is for either party to approach the other on eye level. The First Citizen establishes that the price for their “voices” “is to ask it kindly,” to which Coriolanus reacts as follows: coriolanus: Kindly, sir, I pray, let me ha’t. I have wounds to show you which shall be yours in private. [to 2 Citizen] Your good voice, sir. What say you? (2.3.74–77) Coriolanus knows he is expected to show his wounds but refuses to do so when the moment comes.44 The promise that they “shall be yours in private” is one he obviously does not intend to keep, as he immediately turns to the next approaching citizen. However, the privacy evoked here is key: the public wound-showing and the public speaking about his wounds are not to Coriolanus’s liking, and he relegates a possible showing to the intimacy of a private moment that never happens. A moment later, the Fourth Citizen brings the conversation back to the wounds, insisting that there is a direct connection between the wounds and the hero’s merits: “You have received many wounds for your country.” By now, however, Coriolanus is determined not to show them to the Romans: “I will not seal your knowledge with showing them. I will make much of your voices, and so trouble you no farther” (2.3.104–8). Coriolanus purposefully disconnects the plebeians’ “voices” from the showing of his wounds here, and he reinforces this separation in the lines that follow. He will not show his wounds and risk that the plebeians tell their own stories about them. Instead, he keeps the wounds hidden and tells the story he knows they want to hear—against his previous conviction that he cannot bring his tongue to do so. In the hasty and sarcastic speech that follows his decision, he says, “For your voices I have fought; / Watched for your voices; for your voices bear / Of wounds two dozen odd” (2.3.124–26).45 Coriolanus thus breaks up the close connection between wound-showing, tales of merit, and the consent of the plebeians that is emphasized throughout act 2. This is exactly the context of Coriolanus’s only soliloquy: “Better it is to die, better to starve / Than crave the hire which we first do deserve” (2.3.110–22), which provides the audience with some insight of his inner resistance against the rite he outwardly performs. The plebeians link their consent to their desire to see and narratively appropriate the marks on the hero’s skin.46 Refusing to show his wounds and thereby, as indicated in these two statements, severing “voices” from wound-showing is one of the ways in which Coriolanus resists that desire.

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The other way in which Coriolanus resists, which I explore next, is to negate that there even are wounds to appropriate. Scars, healing wounds, and images of resealed and unruptured surfaces are the central elements of what I propose to call Coriolanus’s scar narratives. Marshall thinks of his refusal to show his wounds as an attempt “to retain control as ‘author of himself’” (5.3.36).47 I believe this becomes even clearer when one considers the scar narratives with which he counters the Romans’ insistence that all his battle marks, even the old ones, are always wounds. Wound Narratives and Scar Narratives The absurdity of the Romans’ appetite for wounded heroes is most poignant in the dialogue between Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, and Menenius when they have just heard of Coriolanus’s victory in Corioles and are expecting his triumphant return: menenius:  .  .  . Is he not wounded? He was wont to come home wounded. virgilia: O, no, no, no! volumnia: O, he is wounded, I thank the gods for’t! menenius: So do I too, if it be not too much. Brings ’a victory in his pocket, the wounds become him. . . . menenius: . . . Where is he wounded? [to the Tribunes] God save your good worships. Martius is coming home. He has more cause to be proud. [to Volumnia] Where is he wounded? volumnia: I’th’ shoulder and i’th’ left arm. There will be large cicatrices to show the people when he shall stand for his place. He received in the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i’th’ body. menenius: One i’th’ neck and two i’th’ thigh—there’s nine that I know. volumnia: He had, before this last expedition, twenty-five wounds upon him. menenius: Now it’s twenty-seven; every gash was an enemy’s grave. (2.1.151) Virgilia’s reaction to Menenius first asking whether Coriolanus is wounded (“O, no, no, no!”) only highlights the unnatural reaction of this mother and the man that comes closest to a father figure for Coriolanus to the news of his fresh wounds, whichever way it is acted out.48 While Menenius at first tones his statement down by saying “if it be not too much,” he and Volumnia then show an intense pleasure at thinking of previous wounds and adding up the new total of battle marks on Coriolanus’s skin together. The short interruption to greet the

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tribunes further heightens the impression of their almost unstoppable eagerness to savor these remembered and imagined wounds. Readers and theater audiences realize that the characters’ enthusiasm is caused by their idea of wounds as marks of merit that will get Coriolanus the office they envisage. The scene thus characterizes the two as being less interested in the son and person than in the hero and future consul, “a physical artefact . . . a warrior of wounds and oaken garlands.”49 They go so far as to claim that “wounds become him” and that the “large cicatrices” were got only to suit his political interests. This is the only instance in which someone aside from Coriolanus himself refers to scars, although here by the Latin term. Volumnia’s mention of “cicatrices” references the Roman custom of wound-showing more directly than the term “scar” would and thus highlights her “political commodification” of his wounds.50 Except for this one word, the two characters speak of wounds even when they speak of marks that Martius got in the battle against Tarquin in his youth, the two in neck and thigh, and the twenty-five marks he had “before this last expedition.” Just like the plebeians, they suggest in their narratives that all these wounds he received in the past (North refers to battles across seventeen years; Shakespeare, instead, to a total of eighteen battles) have still not healed, have still not become scars. In his article on twentieth-century war poetry, Jeffery Sychterz proposes to think of the connection between narrative, wound, and scar as follows: “The wound evacuates the body of authority and opens it to semantic appropriation, the scar closes the body’s narrative and reinvests it with authority.”51 This, I believe, explains why the Romans so vehemently insist on referring to Coriolanus’s marks as wounds rather than scars: they do this in order to keep his skin open to their “semantic appropriation.” The image of putting tongues into wounds, of course, only works with wounds and not with scars.52 Wounds allow a narrative appropriation and enable a claim to their authoritative story. It is through the wounds that Volumnia and Menenius tell a story of endless successes, while the plebeians, shocked by the fact that Coriolanus refuses to show them, tell one of a man who treats the citizens with disdain and denies them access to his person: 2 citizen: . . . He used us scornfully. He should have showed us His marks of merit, wounds received for’s country. sicinius: Why, so he did, I am sure. all the citizens: No, no; no man saw ’em. (2.3.160–62) The opposite, then, a healed skin, a surface sealed by scars, allows the person to regain the authority to tell his own story. As Zvi Jagendorf puts it, “[Coriolanus’s]

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is the single, isolated, discrete body of the man who stands alone, the man who would claim to be all of one piece and even author of himself.”53 Consequently, the Romans will tell a wound narrative while Coriolanus will tell a scar narrative. A particular aspect of DeMello’s concept of the tattoo narrative is helpful here, namely her claim that tattoo narratives “are dialectical in that they presuppose a questioner or listener who objects to, or cannot understand, the tattoo.”54 In the narratives of others, Coriolanus’s marks are constantly constructed as open wounds. Twenty-one times they are called “wounds” (with the dialogue between Volumnia and Menenius above containing seven instances alone) but also, as above, “gash,” “hurt,” or “mark.” The only one to ever call them “scars,” however, is Coriolanus himself. The two instances where Coriolanus refers to his battle marks as scars underline the close connection between marks on skin and words in this play. The first time he mentions his scars is when he prepares to meet the plebeians in the marketplace, quoted above. The wound-showing in that passage is accompanied by tale-telling, as I have argued above, a situation in which the marks are proof for heroic deeds but in which the tales of the heroic deeds, in turn, invest the marks with meaning. Everything hinges on whose tales these will be. As Marshall aptly points out, “[Coriolanus] depends upon them to validate his identity as warrior, but the wounds prove unstable and appropriable as signifiers. Rather than guaranteeing his identity, the wounds disfranchise it.”55 As if to prevent that from happening, Coriolanus speaks not of wounds but of “unaching scars which [he] should hide” (2.2.147). He thus conceptualizes his skin as a resealed surface on which the remainders of previous wounds have become “unaching”—that is, no longer speak in their language of hurting, as they did after the battle at Corioles—“to hear themselves remembered” (1.9.28–29).56 While there are few references to pain in the play, one may assume with Elaine Scarry that wounds imply pain while scars do not. She claims that there are “two and only two metaphors” to express pain, of which the “first specifies an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is pictured as producing the pain; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured as accompanying the pain.”57 Wound narratives and scar narratives, then, are also stories of pain and painlessness, respectively. When Coriolanus says that he should hide these “unaching scars,” he signals not only that he has (heroically, perhaps) overcome the pain but also presents a skin that is resealed and even covered by an extra layer of clothes—the exact opposite of the skin bearing open wounds and exposed in public that the Romans desire. In this context, it is interesting to analyze how productions of the play approach both the visibility of the wounds and the visibility of the protagonist’s pain. The 2012 Donmar production directed by Josie Rourke famously featured a shower scene that put the gaping wounds modeled onto Tom Hiddleston’s body center stage. The scene functioned across the communicative levels in much the

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same way as a soliloquy, letting the theater audiences in on the vulnerability and pain of the protagonist, which he has no intention to reveal to the Romans. It was certainly effective in enabling the audience to empathize more with this Coriolanus than with that of other productions, but it also showed the protagonist with more “depth” than Shakespeare arguably gave him. Sope Dirisu’s portrayal of Coriolanus in the 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Angus Jackson, for example, provided a stark contrast by never showing the protagonist’s wounds nor any signs of pain throughout the play.58 The second time Coriolanus refers to his marks as scars makes clear that he attempts to reappropriate their story from the wound narratives the Romans have been telling. In the meantime, he has met with the plebeians and has refused to show them his wounds. The plebeians, goaded on by the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, have consequently revoked their “voices” and a fight between Coriolanus’s political allies and his enemies ensues. In the heated debate, Menenius appeals to those present to recover their respect for Coriolanus by remembering his wounds: menenius: Lo, citizens, he says he is content. The warlike service he has done, consider. Think Upon the wounds his body bears, which show Like graves i’th’ holy churchyard. coriolanus: Scratches with briars, Scars to move laughter only. menenius: Consider further That when he speaks not like a citizen, You find him like a soldier. (3.3.47–53) When comparing Coriolanus’s wounds to “graves i’th’ holy churchyard,” Menenius echoes a comment he made much earlier, in his dialogue with Volumnia, according to which “every gash was an enemy’s grave” (2.1.151–52). The reference to graves, in both cases, underscores the bravery and resilience of Coriolanus, who was only wounded in the duels that were the death of his enemies. The image here also stylizes the skin of the hero as sacred ground that, notably, is public rather than private space. Again, Menenius tells a story of wounds that are continuously open and are also public property, which Coriolanus interrupts with a radical counternarrative: “Scratches with briars, scars to move laughter only.” This scar narrative of his does not undermine his heroism but constructs it differently: it takes a hero to think of mortal enemies as no more than briars scratching the skin and of wounds as no more than a laughing matter. His scar narrative does, however, undermine the construction of heroism via continuously open skin.59 It presents his skin as whole and unbroken instead. The

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clipping of each other’s lines here and elsewhere underlines the back-and-forth struggle between the characters for the authoritative story of the marks on Coriolanus’s skin. Hence, I only partly agree with Constance Relihan’s claim that Coriolanus “only derives self-definition from the speech and actions of the people around him.”60 While Coriolanus has a difficult relationship with speech in general (he can bring himself neither to speak diplomatically nor to accept others speaking about him) he does speak about his battle marks, and he does derive self-definition from the particular ways in which he speaks about them—that is, from his scar narratives. However, I agree with Relihan that this self-definition happens mainly in reaction to the contrary narratives of others, such as is the case in the passage above, where Coriolanus seeks to correct Menenius’s “deep” wound narrative by presenting the narrative of a surface that has merely been superficially scratched. There are several passages throughout the play that do not juxtapose wounds and scars so explicitly or that do not use the terms at all but that can still be read as Coriolanus’s attempts to narratively frame his marks in a way that counters the wound narratives of others. In these passages, Coriolanus conceptualizes his skin as a surface, either one that is unruptured and superficial, such as a canvas or a mask, or one that is resealed by the healing wounds having turned into scars. For example, when he says goodbye to Cominius in the aftermath of his banishment from Rome, he compares their respective age and calls himself “one that is yet unbruised” while he refers to the general as “too full of the wars’ surfeits” (4.1.45–47). Another example takes place before that, when Cominius sets out to praise Coriolanus’s bravery in front of the senate. The stage directions have Coriolanus “offer to go away,” but the First Senator invites him to sit down and listen to the accounts of his noble deeds, to which Coriolanus reacts dismissively: coriolanus: Your honours’ pardon, I had rather have my wounds to heal again Than hear say how I got them. brutus: Sir, I hope My words disbenched you not? coriolanus: No, sir, yet oft When blows have made me stay I fled from words. You soothed not, therefore hurt not; but your people, I love them as they weigh— menenius: Pray now, sit down. coriolanus: I had rather have one scratch my head i’th’ sun When the alarum were struck than idly sit To hear my nothings monstered. Exit Coriolanus. (2.2.66–75)

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Wounds and words are once more connected in this passage. First, Coriolanus refuses to hear how he got his wounds—that is, to listen to someone else appropriate his wounds narratively. Second, the wounds are counterbalanced by Brutus’s potentially hurtful words. But Coriolanus retorts that Brutus’s words have not hurt him, all the while making clear that he is better at bearing wounds than words. For Coriolanus, wounds and words do not belong together, he can support the one but flees the other.61 Along similar lines, Coppélia Kahn suggests that “in battle he could avoid confronting language as a symbolic order, a system of sounds that are signs; he could speak with his body, in a pre-linguistic code of representation.”62 For everyone else in Rome however, allies and enemies alike, wounds and words are inherently connected. They all attempt to tell the story of his bravery or of his arrogance, respectively, through his wounds.63 Coriolanus himself would much rather wait for a battle to commence than sit still and hear his “nothings monstered.” Holland points out that the word “monster” here may carry the meaning of “showing” derived from the French montrer.64 If we accept this, then the sentence “hear my nothings monstered” expresses everything that Coriolanus finds to be wrong with the Romans’ appropriation of his wounds. He wants to neither show his wounds nor hear his deeds told through his wounds. Again, then, he wishes for a closed surface that impedes the semantic appropriation of his wounds by others. The sharp differences between the wound narratives told by others and the scar narratives told by Martius also become apparent in the scenes during and after the battle of Corioles. These involve many references to a bleeding or blood-covered Martius, in which he emphasizes superficial causes of bleeding against the contrary interpretation by others. After he has just been shut inside the walls of Corioles and while his soldiers think him dead, he reenters, bleeding, as the stage directions have it: “Enter Martius bleeding, assaulted by the enemy” (at 1.4.65). But both this instance of him bleeding as well as the next, to which he is alerted by Titus Lartius (“thou bleed’st” [1.5.14]), are not acknowledged by Martius. To Lartius’s remark that suggests the blood may be a sign of a weakened body, Martius retorts that a few drops of blood are, on the contrary, invigorating: “The blood I drop is rather physical / Than dangerous to me” (1.5.18–19).65 Later, he will refer to a mere nosebleed as the source of his bleeding, for which he consequently wants no more of his troops’ acclaim (1.9.46–52). He thus clearly tends to ignore and narratively belittle his wounds. When Martius enters next to rejoin his troops after a renewed assault, however, he seems to be so covered in blood as to appear a skinless heap of flesh. Cominius asks the other soldiers: “Who’s yonder / That does appear as he were flayed? O gods, / He has the stamp of Martius, and I have / Beforetime seen him thus” (1.6.21–24). Martius here appears as the “thing of blood” that Cominius calls him later, in his speech to the senate (2.2.107), as the “one whole wound” that Starks-Estes calls him, with Jonathan Sawday, in the title of her article in

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reference to the mythological Marsyas.66 According to Cominius’s narrative, this is also not the first time that Martius has appeared like this. These, however, are not the narratives that Martius chooses to tell about himself. In stark contrast to the suggestion of a complete absence of skin, he instead refers to his “arms as sound as when I wooed” and his “heart as merry as when our nuptial day was done” (1.6.30–31) and then appeals to his soldiers to follow him into battle once more by saying: “If any such be here / (As it were sin to doubt) that love this painting / Wherein you see me smeared” (1.6.67–69). Martius thus presents his skin as a canvas, a closed surface that is painted with blood rather than bleeding from open wounds. As Andrea Stevens claims, “Instead of a depleating leakage, this blood-as-paint becomes for Martius a hardening armour that makes him impregnable.”67 Martius uses a similar image of surface a moment later when he meets Tullus Aufidius in a duel: “’Tis not my blood/ Wherein thou seest me masked” (1.8.10– 11). His own skin is unruptured (“’Tis not my blood”) and the blood he is covered in is that of his enemies: a comment by which he seeks to irritate his opponent. This blood helps him to narratively create a second layer of surface, a mask. The images of mask and paint recur in the aftermath of the battle, when Martius has just received his new by-name. The first thing he says as Coriolanus is “I will go wash. / And when my face is fair you shall perceive / Whether I blush or no” (1.9.66–68). Here, he underlines that the blood on his skin is only external, can be washed off and he thus tells the exact opposite of the “one whole wound” narrative told by Cominius when referring to him as if “he were flayed.” The blush—blood that colors the blood-covered skin from the inside—adds yet another layer of surface here. In contrast to the paint and the mask images, however, this layer suggests that emotions can literally surface and thus betray the impression the person was meaning to give.68 The blush appears a second time in the play, when Coriolanus claims that putting on the gown of humility in the marketplace is a part he “shall blush in acting” (2.2.144). In contrast to the battlefield, he will, of course, not be covered in blood then. Stevens consequently suggests that “his blood grants him precisely the refuge from the gaze that the ritual of the gown demands he surrender.” The image of blood-as-paint thus becomes “a face-saving device.”69 In contrast to Marsyas’s flaying as “a state of exposure more intense, more unbearable, than mere nakedness,” Martius’s describing the blood on his skin as paint helps him “sever blood from its relationship with vulnerability.”70 It is important to note that the paint and mask images are narratively construed by Martius himself. Cominius, in fact, corrects his initial narrative evoking flaying when he adopts Martius’s version of the blood as a superficial matter a moment later: “The blood upon your visage dries; tis’ time / It should be looked to. Come” (1.9.92–93). Martius has thus momentarily won Cominius

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over for his scar narrative, although the general later reverts to telling wound narratives. The 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company production embraced this blood-as-paint notion throughout. Martius’s first entrance during the battle of Corioles showed him lifting a heavy rolling gate for his soldiers to enter the town, with his naked arms and his clothes covered in blood. When Coriolanus later appeared in the marketplace, however, there were no visible wounds nor any signs of pain, creating a portrayal along the lines of Martius Coriolanus’s scar narratives. Conclusion Once Coriolanus has been banished from Rome at the end of act 3 and is set to attack his hometown as an ally of the Volscians, his wounds disappear from the skin narratives of the Romans. Not only are his wounds no longer potentially accessible for their semantic appropriation, but the Romans have no means to speak of him even in human terms. Even his former friends and allies describe him as a tiger (5.4.28) and as “a thing / Made by some other deity than nature / That shapes man better” (Cominius [4.6.91–93]). Coriolanus’s own image of himself as a lonely dragon when he leaves Rome (4.1.30) is taken up by both Aufidius (“fights dragon-like” [4.7.23]), and by Menenius: menenius: . . . This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing. . . . When he walks, he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell and his hum is battery. He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in. (5.4.12–24) The imagery in Menenius’s final portrayal of Coriolanus is of anything but a man with a vulnerable surface. Skins of dragons, gods, and—even more—inanimate objects, such as engines and “things,” are closed surfaces that do not allow for a narrative appropriation by the Romans.71 Turning away from Rome, Coriolanus finally seems to have escaped the Romans’ desire to keep his wounds open to their narrative appropriation. But the triumph is brief because his death, significantly, comes in the form of an inversion of the Roman marketplace scenes. There, he refused the Romans access to his wounds. At the end of the play, the Volscians kill him in public, with their swords penetrating his skin, fulfilling his own last defiant command: “Cut me to pieces” (5.6.112).

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Notes I want to thank my friends and colleagues who commented on earlier versions of this article— Virginia Richter, Ursula Kluwick, Zoe Lehman, Jakhan Pirhulyieva, Selina Wüthrich, Lara Portmann—and my students who gave me critical feedback in class, for this project especially Nino Töndury and Nils Lüthi. I also thank my two reviewers for their helpful comments and the editors for including this article in their volume. 1. For the protagonist’s name, I follow the Arden Shakespeare’s policy, based on long-term editorial practice, of referring to him as Martius until the moment he receives his by-name after the battle of Corioles (1.9.64), and thereafter as Coriolanus. Peter Holland, ed., Coriolanus, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 210 n. 66. 2. R. J. Evans, “Displaying Honourable Scars: A Roman Gimmick,” Classica 42 (1999): 77–94. 3. Holland counts sixteen, with the runner-up I Henry IV at seven. Since I also count “wounded” as a reference to wounds, my total is twenty-one in Coriolanus and ten in I Henry IV. See Peter Holland, introduction to Holland, Coriolanus, 47. 4. Sean Benson, “‘Even to the Gates of Rome’: Grotesque Bodies and Fragmented Stories in Coriolanus,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 30, no. 1 (1999): 95–112. 5. Janet Adelman, “Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Macbeth and Coriolanus,” in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), 130–64. 6. Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1990): 455–69; Andrew Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 63–69; Benson, “‘Even to the Gates of Rome,’” 95–112; Adelman, “Escaping the Matrix,” 152. 7. On wounds as vaginas or mouths, see Adelman, “Escaping the Matrix,” 149; as fetishes, see Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 153. 8. For Coriolanus, see, for example, Lisa S. Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound’: Virtus, Vulnerability, and the Emblazoned Male Body

in Coriolanus,” in Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 145–59; Cynthia Marshall, “Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–118; Andrea Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Sachini Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings in Shakespeare,” Opticon1826 (2016): 1–39. 9. Karmen McKendrick, Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 4, 24. A seminal work for skin studies is also Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, trans. Naomi Segal (Oxon: Routledge, 2018). 10. Adelman, “Escaping the Matrix,” 153. 11. Critics have claimed that Coriolanus never soliloquizes, but there is, in fact, one notable exception, in the context of his refusal to show his wounds (2.3.110–22), which I discuss below. Jennifer Low points out that Coriolanus “resists the traditional theatrical vulnerability of the soliloquizer, in itself a metaphorical openness to penetration” (“‘Bodied Forth’: Spectator, Stage and Actor in the Early Modern Theatre,” Comparative Drama 39, no. 1 [2005]: 1–29, at 19). See also Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound,’” 152, 154, and Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 95. 12. Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 106. 13. E.g., Antony and Cleopatra: “It wounds thy honour” (1.4.70); II Henry IV: “I speak of peace while covert enmity / under the smile of safety wounds the world” (Ind. 9–10). In Coriolanus, the only possible exception is in the hero’s parting speech to his mother: “When most struck home, being gentle wounded craves” (4.1.8), but this image for his mother’s former courage still uses as its reference point an actual wound. John Wilders, ed., Antony and Cleopatra, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1995); James C. Bulman, ed., King Henry IV Part 2, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 14. Seneviratne has recently offered an intriguing investigation of wounds and narratives in the play, but she does not

Skin Narratives sufficiently differentiate who narrates (she suggests the wounds do), who reads the text on the protagonist’s skin, and what this text is, exactly (“Bodily Surfaces and Coverings”). 15. Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). For my expansion of the concept along the lines of “mouvance,” the medievalist concept of textuality, see Nicole Nyffenegger, “Saint Margaret’s Tattoos: Empowering Marks on White Skin,” Exemplaria 25, no. 4 (2013): 267–83. I also used the concept of the tattoo narrative in my discussion of the afterlives of Auschwitz tattoos: Nicole Nyffenegger, “The Illicit Touch: Theorising Narratives on Abused Human Skin,” in Touch, ed. Andrea Pavoni et al., Law and the Senses (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018), 195–234. 16. DeMello, Bodies of Inscription, 12. 17. Regarding the semantic instability of the mark on skin, see also Claire Goldstein’s contribution to this volume. 18. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 97. 19. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “wound, n. 1a,” 2nd ed. (1989), accessed December 2020, https://‌www‌.oed‌.com‌/view‌/Entry‌/230431, and s.v. “scar, n.2 1a,” https://‌www‌.oed‌.com‌/view ‌/Entry‌/171985. For the usage in the Latin sources, see Evans, “Displaying Honourable Scars,” 77–94, esp. 77 n. 1, concerning the ambiguity between wounds and scars. 20. All references to plays include act, scene, and line numbers. 21. See Benson, “‘Even to the Gates of Rome,’” 109: “His past is literally displayed in the scars on his body, but he will not show them to the plebs”; Jagendorf, “Coriolanus,” 466: “The physicality of the encounter is insisted on by the language of tongue, mouth, teeth, and scar”; Pascale Drouet, “Resisting Counterfeiting and Bodily Exhibition in Coriolanus,” in The Spectacular in and around Shakespeare, ed. Pascale Drouet (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 85–98, at 86: “How the demagogic performance imposed upon him might reduce the wounds to properties and postiche, especially since they are ‘unaching.’” Emphases in all three quotes added. 22. For example, Seneviratne presupposes the conceptual existence of scars that are

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consequently “reconceptualised as wounds, so Martius’s skin is not an enclosing, protective barrier against the outside world. Linguistically, scars are reopened, inverting the natural, healing progression of wounds into scars” (“Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 16). 23. Terry Eagleton, among many others, has described the conflict aptly as “the tension between the way a man conceives of himself and the social character which is offered for him to make his own” (Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama [New York: Schocken, 1976], 113). 24. Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 104. 25. Ibid., 112. 26. All references to the play are to Holland, Coriolanus. 27. Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37. 28. Thomas North, trans., The Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by . . . Plutarke of Chæronea: translated out of Greeke into French by J. Amyot, . . . Bishop of Auxerre . . . , and out of French into Englishe by T. North. (The Lives of Annibal and Scipio African [by D. Acciajuoli], translated into French by C. de la Sluce, and Englished by T. North) (London: T. Vautroullier and J. Wright, 1579), 244, https://‌www‌.bl‌.uk‌/collection‌-items /norths‌-translation‌-of‌-plutarchs‌-lives. 29. Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound’”; Marshall, “Wound-Man”; Stevens, Inventions of the Skin; see also Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 26. 30. For other possible contemporary resonances of Coriolanus’s wound-showing, see William W. E. Slights, “Bodies of Text and Textualized Bodies in Sejanus and Coriolanus,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 181–93, at 186; for Renaissance stage practices of the representation of wounds and blood, see Maik Goth, “‘Killing, Hewing, Stabbing, Dagger Drawing, Fighting, Butchery’: Skin Penetration in Renaissance Tragedy and Its Bearing on Dramatic Theory,” Comparative Drama 46, no. 2 (2012): 139–62. 31. Philip Brockbank, introduction to Coriolanus, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1976), 1–89, at 46. 32. On the “body-culture” of the Renaissance in connection with Coriolanus, see Claudia Corti, “The Iconic Body: Coriolanus

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and Renaissance Corporeality,” in Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, ed. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Nancy Isenberg, and Maddalena Pennacchia (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 57–76. 33. Brockbank, introduction to Coriolanus, 46. 34. Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 94, 106. 35. See Frédérique Fouassier, “‘Thou Art My Warrior / I Holp To Frame Thee’: The Construction of Masculine Identity in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus,” Culture, Society and Masculinities 4, no. 1 (2012): 48–62; Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound.’” 36. Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound,’” 150. Emphasis original. See also Kahn, Roman Shakespeare. 37. Holland, Coriolanus, 251 n. 12. 38. “The Citizen refuses to allow the word ‘noble’ to be the sole prerogative of the patricians but instead demands that it be transferred across the social structure.” Holland, Coriolanus, 251 nn. 8–9. 39. See I Henry IV: “To prove that true / Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds / Those mouthed wounds” (1.3.95–97); Julius Caesar: “[thy wounds] / (Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips / To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue)” (3.1.259–61). David Scott Kastan, ed., King Henry IV Part 1, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series; David Daniell, ed., Julius Caesar, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). 40. Holland, Coriolanus, 250 nn. 6–7; see Benson, “‘Even to the Gates of Rome,’” and Jagendorf, “Coriolanus.” 41. Holland, Coriolanus, 189 n. 38. 42. “[You,] rubbing the poor itch of your opinion / Make yourselves scabs” (1.1.160–61); “You herd of—Boils and plagues / Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred / Farther than seen, and one infect another / Against the wind a mile!” (1.4.31). 43. See also Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 19, which notes that the OED clarifies that naked can mean “in undergarment.” 44. On the different options of staging this abrupt refusal in a variety of productions, see Holland, Coriolanus, 255 nn. 75–76. It seems clear to me that it is a spur-of-the-moment decision that Coriolanus takes when faced with the spectacle-hungry citizens.

45. John Dover Wilson, in the Cambridge New Shakespeare edition of 1960, fittingly claims that Coriolanus “whines this sarcastic rigmarole like a beggar”; quoted in Holland, Coriolanus, 258, note to lines 124–29. 46. See also Jagendorf, “Coriolanus,” 465–66: “The play does not allow us to hear ‘voice’ simply as ‘vote.’” 47. Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 103. 48. The two recent London productions I focus on here interpreted this scene differently. The 2012 Donmar production had Virgilia protest loudly to Menenius as if to assure him there are no wounds, while the 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company one, in contrast, put her in the background, moaning to Valeria as if to express disdain at the unnatural glee of Menenius and Volumnia. Coriolanus, directed by Josie Rourke, Donmar Warehouse, filmed for National Theatre Live in 2012, accessible on www.dramaonlinelibrary.com; Coriolanus, directed by Angus Jackson, Royal Shakespeare Company, filmed live in October 2017, released by Opus Arte on DVD in 2018, 170 min. 49. Constance C. Relihan, “Appropriation of the ‘Thing of Blood:’ Absence of Self and the Struggle for Ownership in Coriolanus,” Iowa State Journal of Research 62, no. 3 (1988): 407–20, at 414. 50. Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 16. 51. Jeffrey Sychterz, “Scarred Narratives and Speaking Wounds: War Poetry and the Body,” Pacific Coast Philology 44, no. 2 (2009): 137–47, at 140. 52. Cf. Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 16. 53. Jagendorf, “Coriolanus,” 462. 54. DeMello, Bodies of Inscription, 156. 55. Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 103. 56. See also Seneviratne’s apt observation on Antony and Cleopatra’s Scarus referring to his battle mark as an H, which is suggestive of “ache.” Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 7. 57. Elaine Scarry, “Among School Children: The Use of Body Damage to Express Physical Pain,” in Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture, ed. Sarah Coakley and Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 279–316, at 281. 58. For the performance of pain in the play, see Marshall, “Wound-Man,” 107; for discussions of the Donmar production, see Anna

Skin Narratives Blackwell, “Adapting Coriolanus: Tom Hiddleston’s Body and Action Cinema,” Adaption 7, no. 3 (2014): 344–52; Katherine Larsen, “Radway Roundtable Remarks,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 4, no. 2 (2014): 1–4. I discuss the relation between wounds and race in productions of Coriolanus in a forthcoming article. 59. See Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 16. 60. Relihan, “Appropriation of the ‘Thing of Blood,’” 415. 61. On Coriolanus’s identity in connection with his modes of speaking more generally, see Jarrett Walker, “Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1992): 179–85. 62. Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 153. 63. See also Benson, “‘Even to the Gates of Rome,’” 96. 64. Holland, Coriolanus, 242 n. 75. Note that monstrosity is connected to (wound-) showing

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and tale-telling also in the Third Citizen’s speech discussed above. 65. This may even be “physical” in the medical sense, as Holland suggests: “Bloodletting was a standard medical treatment, not least for the angry and passionate” (Coriolanus, 195 n. 18). See also Paster, Body Embarrassed. 66. Starks-Estes, “‘One Whole Wound.’” 67. Stevens, Inventions of the Skin, 15. 68. On blushes as writing on skin, see also Nicole Nyffenegger, “Blushing, Paling, Turning Green: Hue and Its Metapoetic Function in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, ed. Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 145–65. 69. Stevens, Inventions of the Skin, 15, 69. 70. Ibid., 50, 69. 71. See also Seneviratne, “Bodily Surfaces and Coverings,” 3.

Chapter 9

Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe Craig Koslofsky

In early modern Europe, branding (including branding on the face) was a significant form of criminal punishment. It inflicted intense pain, left a permanent mark on the skin, and dishonored its recipient. In the period from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, northern European judicial branding developed two key features. The brand came to represent a mitigation of punishment, available only for first offenders or for lesser crimes, and branding on the face was gradually supplanted by branding on the shoulder, elsewhere on the back (often between the shoulder blades), or at the base of the thumb. A brand on the shoulder or “in the hand” was not meant to be easily visible in everyday life; instead it was intended to mark an offender so that authorities could identify a recidivist. The offender’s skin became the site on which his or her crime was recorded—legible upon inspection by authorities but not visible in everyday life. These developments in early modern European penal branding become more distinctive when we compare them with the history of skin marking in the Atlantic world. In this chapter, I first survey branding on the face and its condemnation in sixteenth-century France, England, and the city-states of Nuremberg and Frankfurt. I then examine changing conceptions of penal branding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of early modern fantasies of legibility and the realities of labor supply in the Atlantic world. Roman and Renaissance Challenges to Branding on the Face The ancient Roman practice of marking the faces and bodies of soldiers, runaway slaves, and criminals with tattoos or brands continued in the Byzantine Empire and in the early medieval kingdoms of the West. Ninth-century Frankish law prescribed branding on the forehead for counterfeiters, for example. By the fourteenth century, penal branding on the face was practiced across northern Europe—although

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punitive facial marking was not as common among the repertoire of medieval punishments as it had been in ancient Rome.1 Broadly understood, Roman law transmitted the practice of judicial marking into medieval Western Europe. But the discovery, study, and assimilation of the vast legal compilations of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (a process that started in the twelfth century) also revealed to medieval jurists a fundamental restriction on marking the bodies of convicts. The Codex Iustinianus preserves an edict of Emperor Constantine from 316 CE: “If someone has been condemned to the mines for the crimes he has been caught committing, let him not be marked on his face, since the penalty of his condemnation can be expressed both on his hands and on his calves, and so that his face, which has been fashioned in the likeness of the divine beauty, may not be disgraced.”2 The punitive facial marking described here was likely a form of tattooing rather than branding, but all medieval and early modern commentators understood this edict to refer to branding.3 Beginning in the late fourteenth century, jurists and officials in Western Europe began to challenge branding on the face. Some echoed the words of this edict directly; others repeated the argument without mentioning the Codex Iustinianus. The Somme rural, ou le grand coustumier général de practique civil et canon of Jean Bouteiller (d. 1395) notes that in some regions criminals were branded on the cheek with the arms of the city in which they were convicted. But Bouteiller considered it wrong to “deface the face made in the resemblance of our savior’s image,” referencing Constantine’s prohibition.4 Judicial branding on the face and mounting challenges to it circulated together through the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe and until the abolition of slavery in Europe’s colonized territories. Thanks to the work of Katherine Dauge-Roth, we have a clear picture of the history of branding in early modern France, where branding on the face and other forms of judicial mutilation were replaced by penal branding on the shoulder. The process was slow but distinct: the last sentence of branding on the cheek passed by the Parlement of Paris was recorded in 1562. In 1603, an annotated print edition of the Somme rural of Jean Bouteiller explains that “we no longer use the punishment of branding or marking on the face, but [brand] on the shoulder instead.”5 Writing in favor of the shoulder brand in 1640, another French jurist explained that it “cannot be seen and indicates just as well that they [the convicted] have been touched by justice.”6 French legal commentators seem to have distinguished more clearly than their English or German counterparts between the shaming force of visibly branding or mutilating the face and the record-keeping function of a concealed brand. The discrete brand on the shoulder recorded who had been “touched by justice” without “displaying his ignominy at the same time.”7 Perhaps because its purpose was more clearly defined, penal branding was practiced for much longer in France than in the Holy Roman Empire or England. In France judicial branding was abolished in 1791,

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only to be reinstated by Napoleon with the penal code of 1811. Branding on the shoulder in France and its empire was finally abolished in 1832.8 In England, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, branding on the face appears regularly in legislation and literature, often invoked but seldom applied. The contrast between the public shame of visible judicial branding and the documentary function of a concealed brand was never sharply articulated. In the wake of the plague, facial branding was prescribed to control labor: a 1361 statute punished laborers and craftsmen who left their work for higher wages elsewhere with imprisonment and the possibility of branding on the face with the letter F for falsity (fauxine in the original law). There is no record of any laborer actually branded under this law, but it signals long-lasting connections between skin marking and the control of labor in the English social imagination.9 Moral stigma and punishment for failure to labor come together two centuries later: the Elizabethan Vagabond Act of 1572 required anyone convicted of the offense to be “grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right eare, with a hot iron of the compasse of an inch about, as manifestation of his wicked life, and due punishment received for the same.”10 English law stood outside the Roman legal tradition of the Continent, so the prohibition of facial branding in the Codex Iustinianus would not be cited by English jurists challenging the law. But in the Parliamentary debate leading up to the 1572 Vagabond Act, a member of Parliament from Worcestershire, one Mr. Sands, “endeavoured to prove this Law to be over sharp and bloody,” and one could infer that he objected not to the age-old punishment of whipping but to the law’s innovation: burning through the ear with a hot iron.11 The inequity of this disfiguring punishment drew further reproach: in the 1590s, a commentator observed that “the Rogue that liveth idly is restrained, the fidler and plaier that is maisterless is in the same predicament, both these by the law are burned in the eare,” but then he asked: “Shall men more odious ’scape unpunished”?12 This complaint also suggests that the 1572 statue was no dead letter and that it saw some enforcement. This judicial mutilation applied only to vagabonds. But some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English authors imagined branding a much wider range of criminals on the face. In his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Philipp Stubbes argued that every “man or woman” guilty of fornication ought to be “cauterized, and seared with a hotte Iron uppon the cheeke, forehead, or some other parte of their bodie that might be seene, to the end that the Adulterous Children of Sathan, might be discerned from the honest and chast Christians.”13 Despite Stubbes’s cruel fantasy, until the passage of a 1699 act requiring penal branding on the face for shoplifting and other property crimes, this type of penalty had never been enforced as a statutory punishment in England for anything other than vagrancy. As several scholars of Shakespeare have shown, in his era, the “harlot brow” was never actually branded.14 In 1604, a new act authorized the branding of irredeemable rogues “in the left shoulder with a hot burning iron of the

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Fig. 9.1  Quaker leader James Naylor, branded on the forehead for blasphemy. From Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or, A description and history of the hereticks and sectaries sprang up in these latter times (London: W. Wilson for John Marshall and Robert Trot, 1662), 244. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

breadth of an English shilling, with a great Roman ‘R’ upon the iron”—a punishment similar to the judicial branding in use in France at the time.15 Exemplary punishments inflicted on specific individuals could include branding on the face. The notorious “Judaizer” John Traske (ca. 1585–1636) advocated the “Jewish doctrine about meats and drinks” and by 1618 had gathered a number of followers in London. He was imprisoned and accused of “having a fantastical opinion of himself with ambition to be the father of a Jewish faction.” In 1619 the Court of Star Chamber sentenced Traske to life in prison, but first he was to be whipped, “to have one of his ears nailed to the pillory,” and then “to be burnt in the forehead with the letter ‘J’ in token that he broaches Jewish opinions.”16 Traske soon recanted and in 1620 published a treatise renouncing his “Judaizing” ways. But the mark on his forehead must have stayed with him for the rest of his life. Perhaps the best-known instance of branding a specific person on the face was the brutal punishment of the Quaker leader James Nayler (or Naylor; 1618– 1660). In October of 1656, Nayler rode into Bristol as he and his fellow Quakers reenacted the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Nayler was seen as a blasphemous imitator of the Christian savior, and he and his followers were arrested and charged under the Blasphemy Act of 1650. Convicted by Parliament and subjected to a horrific sequence of mutilating punishments, Nayler was burned in the forehead with the letter B for his crime (fig. 9.1).17

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Neither these spectacular punishments nor the proposals and threats to brand prostitutes and vagrants on the forehead should overshadow the most common form of penal branding in early modern England: “burning in the hand” as an aspect of “benefit of clergy.” By 1600, many first-time male felons in England could claim “benefit of clergy”—a formal legal status that saved them from capital punishment and reduced their sentence to branding on the ball of the left thumb. The branding took place in the courtroom, with the convict’s hand held fast by a shackle (fig. 9.2).18 Benefit of clergy was expanded by a 1623 statute to include women, so most first-time offenders could now claim this one-time reduction of punishment and be branded or “burned” in the hand.19 Persons convicted of manslaughter (including, for example, the playwright Ben Jonson) were branded on the thumb with the letter M; thieves were branded with the letter T.20 This punishment was not meant to disfigure—the brand could only be seen on close inspection. It was intended to mark an offender so that the mitigation of benefit of clergy could not be claimed a second time. Criminal law on the Continent operated in very different terms, but German, French, and English penal branding began to converge on two key features: the brand reflected a mitigation of punishment for first offenders or lesser crimes, and the brand moved away from the face because it was not meant to be immediately visible in everyday life, serving instead as a record authorities could reference on the body of the suspect. Judicial branding was shifting from a visible moral condemnation to a practical attempt to wed mitigation with social control. In sixteenth-century Germany, two challenges to branding on the face inspired by the prohibition in the Codex Iustinianus appear in the records of criminal justice in the Imperial Free Cities of Nuremberg and Frankfurt. In 1527, the Nuremberg jurist and humanist Christoph Scheurl (1481–1542) condemned the practice in an entry recorded in the city’s Ratschlagbücher (records of the opinions of the city council’s legal advisors).21 He explained that “the human face, which was created in the divine image, should not be harmed”—clearly referencing the rationale of the Codex Iustinianus.22 His comments had no discernable effect on criminal punishment in Nuremberg or its hinterland, however. In the journal of Nuremberg’s master executioner Frantz Schmidt, each instance of branding he noted or performed from 1578 to 1612 involved branding on both cheeks, followed by flogging and banishment.23 A similar situation arose in Frankfurt. In terms like those of Scheurl, an unknown Frankfurt official noted in margin of the city’s Strafbuch (record of punishments) in 1585 that branding on the face was unlawful because it deformed and scarred the human face, which was made in the divine image. The marginal note begins: “The punishment of marking the human face is wrong.” The note appeared alongside the record of the branding on the forehead of one “Dietz Dietherich from Stolberg” in 1574.24 This page of the Frankfurt Strafbuch also bears an ink print made by the city’s eagle seal—presumably the stamp used to brand Dietherich and other convicts

Fig. 9.2  Burning in the hand of Joseph Relph, Old Bailey criminal court, London, 1778. From William Jackson, The New Newgate Calendar (London, 1795), between pp. 322 and 323. Photo: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo.

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Fig. 9.3  An ink print made by a branding iron representing the Frankfurt city seal, alongside the condemnation of branding on the face. Frankfurt Strafbuch (1585), fol. 17r. Frankfurt am Main, Institut für Stadtgeschichte, FFM H.15.33 (Criminalia: Akten) Nr. 13156.

(fig. 9.3). As in the Nuremberg case, this denunciation of branding on the face had no effect on local practice. The Frankfurt Strafbuch records an instance of branding on the shoulder in 1585, as well as brands inflicted on the cheek, forehead, shoulder, and back. In 1681, for example, a Jew was branded with the sign of the gallows on his forehead. The last recorded instance of any form of penal branding in Frankfurt occurred in 1695. Across the Holy Roman Empire, facial brands were still common enough in 1675 to lead the Kiel professor of philosophy and natural history Johannes Ludwig Hannemann to mistake honorable African facial scarification for the mark of a criminal or fugitive when describing a West African woman who died in the city in December 1675.25 In the diverse territories of the empire, penal branding declined only in the course of the eighteenth century.26 Despite the letter of the law, recidivist offenders in England, France, and Germany accumulated multiple brands instead of more severe punishment. The 1673 case of Caesar Gombelaut from “Lier, in Brabant” illustrates this issue. Gombelaut was caught stealing gold and silver thread during the autumn Frankfurt fair. He was rumored to be a practiced thief, suspected of similar previous crimes in Frankfurt and in nearby Mainz. On November 13, 1673, the Frankfurt city council sent to Mainz for information about their prisoner Gombelaut, and they later sought the same from Kassel and Cologne, but no evidence of any prior convictions was forthcoming. The Frankfurt city council decided there was sufficient suspicion to question Gombelaut under torture about other thefts. It

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was only in December 1673, during this torture, that the officials discovered two brands on the prisoner’s back: Gombelaut bore a wheel-shaped brand from the city of Bruges and another that seems to have been unrecognizable. Certain that Gombelaut was (at least) a third-time offender, the city ordered his death. He was hanged on February 13, 1674.27 Moving through the porous borders and legal systems of the Spanish Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, Gombelaut’s skin eventually betrayed him. But it was a slow and unreliable process: the penal brands on his skin do not seem to have been noticed until well after he was arrested and jailed. Fantasies of Legibility Disguise, imposture, and mistaken identity fascinated early modern Europeans. Arnaud du Tilh, tried and executed in 1560 after successfully impersonating the French peasant Martin Guerre, is probably the best-known early modern impostor today, but there were many more. As the work of Valentin Groebner has shown, authorities relied on “reading” bodies for signs of true identity, such as a scars, birthmarks, or general “complexion.”28 But European expansion into the early modern world brought distinctive skin cultures, practices, and discourses from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas into contact with one another: Native North American tattoos appeared on French voyageurs, European brands were inflicted on African bodies, and Ottoman and West African forms of cutaneous smallpox inoculation were adopted in London and Boston. Despite (or due to) the growing variety of ways to mark skin and know skin, no one could rely upon it with certainty. For authorities, the skin could never entirely fulfill their desire for clear and unambiguous information. As a result, the era is filled with fantasies of legibility. Concerns about identity and legal status haunted the old regime and the Atlantic world. For colonial authorities and masters of bound labor, these concerns were existential: in a world of violently coerced labor, interimperial mobility, frontier opportunities, and uncertain identities, authorities constantly imagined skin could conclusively identify individuals and allow their classification into stable groups. They drew on old ideas about marking, branding, and stigma from antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as on a new sense of the utility of dermal marking practices that they observed in West Africa and the Americas.29 Slave brands, Native American tattoos, and other dermal signs were especially useful in vast regions characterized by multiple languages, scarce labor, diffuse authority, and high mobility. Many colonial economies, from Potosí to the Potomac, operated under these constraints, constantly forced to import, coerce, contain, and retrieve laborers. Marked skin took on a new importance in these labor regimes: whole nations could become legible if one understood— as the Jesuit Alonso Sandoval explained—the “signals” on their skin. For his

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slave-trading contemporaries in seventeenth-century Cartagena, it was “certain and . . . known among the people who deal with the merchants that bring the aforementioned blacks” that each of these “nations have their own señales [markings or scarifications].”30 Such signals could be used to identify runaways or affix legal status to an individual. In contrast to the “discreet” branding on the rise in Western Europe, social legibility in the New World relied on marks that could be seen easily by anyone. Fantasies of legible skin filled the Euro-Atlantic region in the early modern centuries. Again, one must start with the branding of enslaved persons. The practice varied: most captives purchased in Africa were marked with tax brands, owners’ brands, or trading company marks, but some creole (that is, native-born) slaves were not marked at all. An early memorandum (ca. 1669) promoting “the Royal African Company’s Interest in the Plantations . . . in the Island of Jamaica” called for the systematic branding of every “Black” in Jamaica: “All Blacks now in the Island or hereafter to be brought thither should be marked with one General Brand. And that any which should after bee found without that Brand should be forfeited, Branded, and Sold.” The unsigned Royal African Company (RAC) document claimed, “This office would absolutely prevent Interloping [smuggling] and [protect] . . . the Island of Jamaica from Rebellions of their Blacks.” Social legibility would enforce this law: half of the profit from the sale of a forfeited slave would go to “the White Informer, with freedom to him that is a white servant who discovers a concealed Black of his Masters.”31 These RAC officials imagined Jamaican “Whites” looking over the skin of the slaves of other masters and noting who did not have the requisite “General Brand” for the island. Reading the legal status or moral character of another individual from his or her skin was a similar dream.32 In Europe this fantasy was played out, for example, in a popular utopian novel of the late seventeenth century, Denis Vairasse’s History of the Sevarambians. This work, which appeared first in English (1675 and 1679) and then in French in two parts (1677–79), describes an antipodean region whose inhabitants and climate alike disagree with the “extravagant desires of lust and lechery” of the shipwrecked Europeans who discover the land.33 In the pure air of Sevarambé, “at the first entertainment of inordinate lust, such disorder happens in the blood and veins of men, that their countenances are immediately changed, and their skins are covered with Boils and Scabs, chiefly their Noses, which have so great a correspondency with the noble Members. For this cause the Inhabitants of Sevarambé abominate the least sign of lasciviousness.” The very “Air and nature of this Country” affect everyone, setting “a mark upon all men that touch any other women than their own. And such [Sevarite] Virgins as forget themselves, are spotted visibly to the eyes of all beholders.” Because “the Air and Country” makes visible the moral state of all persons, the Sevarites, described as “wisest of all men” can easily distinguish “all the disorderly persons” and the licentious “from all the rest by some visible mark upon

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their Noses or Foreheads, which causeth them to be immediately banished out of the Country.”34 Vairasse returns several times to this conceit, fascinated by a utopia built upon this sort of constant dermal moral legibility. In reality, social illegibility was a problem for colonial authorities. When the Penn-Venables expedition left Barbados for Hispaniola (and eventually Jamaica) in 1655, they took along many debtors and indentured servants who did not have permission to leave the island. In response to complaints from Barbadian planters about the loss of their servants, the recruiters claimed ignorance: with “their indentures not being writ in their foreheads,” they explained, how could they tell who was a servant and who free?35 The Virginia rebel Nathaniel Bacon seethed over the unrecognizability of “painted” Native men allowed to trade with the English. In his 1676 manifesto, he charged that the governor’s privileged traders “doe still notwithstanding the late Act made to the contrary, admit Indians painted and continue to Commerce.”36 After Bacon’s Rebellion collapsed, royal commissioners reported that Bacon had claimed common settlers were not safe among any Indians: “Nor would the people understand any distinction of friendly Indians and Indian Enemeyes, for at that time it was impossible to distinguish one nation from another, they being deformed with Paint of many colors.”37 The ability of Native men to disguise themselves and thus avoid being recognized as enemies or debtors appears in several accounts of English-Native relations in colonial Virginia.38 Even when enslaved Africans were marked by their skin color, by their owners’ brands, and by judicial wounding, colonial authorities still worried about social illegibility. In 1704, Nicolas de Gabaret, colonial governor of Martinique, terrified by increasing marronage on the island, surveyed the most disfiguring punishments inflicted on enslaved people on neighboring French, English, and Dutch islands. He noted that captured Maroons had concealed their identities, finding “creative ways to hide the marks of their previous crimes—wearing headscarves over cropped ears and using herbs to fade the scars left by branding,” as Brett Rushforth has discovered. To increase the social legibility of captured Maroons returned to slavery, Gabaret “proposed cutting off the noses of rebellious slaves instead, a much harder mark to erase.”39 When enslaved people fled to towns, joined Maroon communities, or crossed imperial borders, social illegibility provided an opportunity to hide in plain sight, avoid capture, or refashion one’s self. “Reading” an individual’s origins, character, and economic or legal status from his or her face or skin became both an everyday task and a potent fantasy in the early modern Atlantic world.40 A Fantasy Fulfilled? Crime, Labor, and Branding on the Face The skin-marking practices I have discussed thus far sought to make subjects more socially legible under specific colonial conditions, characterized by scarce and

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coerced labor, a diversity of cultures and languages, and interimperial mobility. These new and hybrid practices arose in part from existing early modern European fantasies of social or moral legibility, reaching back to attempts to mark, contain, and control laborers after the Black Death. But the surprising decline of the socially visible branding of criminals in early modern England and Europe in this period reveals, by contrast with the colonial setting, how marked skin functioned under different configurations of labor and community. This leads us to consider from a new perspective some of the forces that shaped the rise of skin color and race in the eighteenth century. In early modern England, Parliament once tried to turn the fantasies and threats about branding criminals on the face into reality. In any legal system, mobile criminals, like the aforementioned Caesar Gombelaut, were difficult to identify. In England, a “law-and order” panic in the 1690s led to a new attempt to mark offenders much more visibly than by burning in the hand or branding on the shoulder. On May 2, 1699, a private Parliamentary newsletter reported: “Yesterday the Lords passed the Bill against house breakers, with this amendment, viz.: that offenders be burnt on the left cheek within an inch of the nose, that it may be seen, and that the judge shall see it done.”41 This new disfiguring punishment was added to a bill to secure homes, shops, stables, and movable property. The resulting “Act for the better apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing of Felons that commit Burglary, Housebreaking, or Robbery in Shops, Ware-houses, Coach-houses, or Stables or that steal Horses,” known as the Shoplifting Act of 1699 (10–11 Will. 3, c. 23), made theft of goods worth more than five shillings a capital offense and required “Offenders entitled to Benefit of Clergy, to be burnt in the Cheek instead of the Hand, in open Court.” The act spoke the language of deterrence: And forasmuch as many Evil-disposed Persons might be deterred from offending should the Punishment by Law to be inflicted on such Persons be made more visible: Be it further enacted That . . . all and every Person and Persons who shall be convicted of or for any Theft or Larceny and shall have the Benefit of the Clergy allowed thereupon or ought to be burnt in the Hand for such Offence instead of being burnt in the Hand shall with the usuall Mark wherewith such Offenders according to the Laws now in force ought to be burnt in the Hand be burnt in the most visible Part of the Left Cheek, nearest the Nose, which Punishment shall be inflicted in Open Court in the Presence of the Judge who is hereby directed and required to see the same strictly and effectually executed.42 The direct origins of the Shoplifting Act seem to reach back to a proposal drafted in the 1680s by the essayist and retired statesman Sir William Temple (1628– 1699). In an “Essay on Popular Discontents,” Temple addressed crime in England

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and recommended that those convicted of “common Thefts and Robberies” be permanently marked by branding or other mutilation of the face. The proposal was first printed in the 1701 Miscellanea: The Third Part . . . by the late Sir William Temple, Bar; Published by Jonathan Swift. Temple’s former secretary Swift posthumously published various completed and unfinished works by Temple.43 The essay proposing the judicial mutilation of convicted thieves was described by Swift as “written many Years before the Author’s Death” in 1699.44 Temple’s writings were shared in manuscript, and his sanguinary idea must have been in circulation in the 1690s. Temple proposed, “A Liberty might at least be left to the Judges and the Bench . . . to inflict either Death, or some notorious Mark” on convicted thieves and robbers “by slitting the nose, or such Brands upon the Cheeks, which can never be effaced by Time or Art.” Temple then moved immediately from branding on the face to colonial and bound labor: “Such [disfigured] Persons to be condemned either to Slavery in our Plantations abroad, or Labour in Work-Houses at home; and this either for their Lives, or certain Numbers of Years.” However long their servitude or sentence in the workhouse might last, “the distinguish’d Marks of their Guilt would be not only perpetual Ignominy, but discover them upon escapes, and warn others of their Danger wherever they are encountered.”45 Temple imagined the threat of bound labor as a deterrent to crime, and facial branding as a hypervisible warning to others. His proposal and the Shoplifting Act of 1699 imported the colonial association of branding and slavery into English criminal law. They both reflect the long-standing association of skin marking with the control of labor in the English social imagination, but by combining a highly visible sign of abjection, transportation, and “Slavery in our Plantations abroad” either for life or for “certain Numbers of years,” Temple’s language pushes English felons into the conditions of the branded and enslaved Africans of England’s slave societies abroad. Temple’s fantasy of legibility embraced the colonial connection between dermal marking and slavery, and he anticipated (and may have helped enact) the use of branding on the face at home in England. But the rise and fall of actual branding on the face in England unfolded over the brief period from 1699 to 1707, as arguments about anonymous free labor (cited in the repeal of the act) won out over hypervisible marking and life-long punishment. This rapid reversal helps reveal why visible penal branding (especially on the face) declined in Europe during the early modern era. In May 1699 London’s Old Bailey Session Papers, the published record of the city’s central criminal court, reported on two felons “Burnt in the visible part of the Left Cheek, near the Nose (according to the New Act of Parliament) . . . James Jones, and Samuel Clarke.”46 Given the novelty of this punishment, how were such facial brands inflicted? Records suggest that across England local officials ordered and purchased new devices designed to immobilize and protect the convict’s face while the branding iron was applied to the cheek. In 1700, one such

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Fig. 9.4  English device used for branding on the cheek, ca. 1700. Drawing from S. Meeson Morris, “The Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire [part 3],” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 11 (1888): 368.

“engine” was purchased by the keeper of the Kent county jail at Maidstone at the cost of £3 five shillings, “according to Act of Parliament for burning in the left cheek.”47 One of these devices survived to the late nineteenth century in the Ludlow Museum in Shropshire, where an antiquarian published an accurate explanation of the device and two sketches clearly showing an opening to allow branding on the left side of the face through the “visor” that covered the eyes and nose (fig. 9.4).48 This new form of punishment was eliminated by another act of Parliament in January 1707: among the last convicted in London and “Burnt in the Left Cheeck” were “Elizabeth Clemtree, Jane Barham, Ann Collins and Mary Ball.”49 Legal historians have concluded that branding on the face was rejected because it “merely produced hardened criminals. Since no one would employ a person with the marks of criminality so clearly on his face, the first offender was forced

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into a life of crime.”50 As the 1707 act repealing branding on the face explained, it had utterly failed to deter crime: “And whereas it hath been found by Experience that the said Punishment hath not had its desired Effect by deterring such Offenders from the further committing such Crimes and Offences but on the contrary such Offenders being rendered thereby unfit to be intrusted in any Service or Employment to get their Livelyhood in any honest and lawful Way become the more desperate.”51 Under a labor regime very different from that in the colonies, the 1699 innovation was abandoned. The repeal makes no reference to the face as a divine image nor to the inequity of inflicting on shoplifters and petty thieves a punishment previously reserved for notorious vagabonds or extraordinary blasphemers. Instead, Parliament acknowledged the unsuitability of this form of dermal marking for a wage-labor economy. In contrast with the labor shortages of the colonies, there was little need to import, coerce, or contain laborers physically in eighteenth-century Britain. The ongoing transition to impersonal, interchangeable (preindustrial) free labor relied on a vast pool of surplus workers. Facial branding forced the convict out of the labor pool entirely, however. Unable to “get their Livelyhood in any honest and lawful Way,” convicts would either resort to crime or become a burden on the nation’s poor relief. With labor coerced through the market, marking individual laborers with a brand on the face rendered them “thereby unfit to be intrusted in any Service or Employment.” In other words, it made their status too legible. Moving from legislation to observation, evidence of the everyday legibility of the facial brand appears in a range of sources. A presentment from late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century Winchester describes one John Edwards, “a tall lusty fellow” resting on his horse outside Winchester’s venerable Dog and Star alehouse “with a pott of beer in his hand.” Edwards apparently toasted, “Here is King James’ health!,” so that “a young man standing by said, ‘I don’t love to hear soe much of James; you have been burnt in the cheek already,’ or words to that effect, the said person [Edwards] having a patch on his cheek.”52 And in The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account for July 1703, we learn of the Lancashire woman Elizabeth Tetherington, a repeat offender convicted of housebreaking who was sentenced to death. Tetherington had often felt “the Severity of the Law . . . as having been burnt in the Cheek several times for diverse Robberies she had committed, and been concern’d in; which nevertheless (as it is most usual) had left her so miserably poor, that (to her great grief) she was utterly unable to make any the least amends to them she had wrong’d.”53 As the account explained, branding on the cheek left the convict “utterly unable” to earn an honest living. The facial mark lacked the subtlety (if one may use that term) of burning in the hand. The existing English practice of more discretely branding convicts on the hand, coupled with transportation to labor-poor regions of the empire for some felons, deployed the criminal justice system to help manage the supply of labor on both sides of the Atlantic.54

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Branding on the face created other dermal complications as well. Some scholars have noted that “peculiar markings on a person’s left cheek close to the nose were often publicly recognized as a shoplifter’s brand. When no one would employ innocent individuals with similar natural markings, public outcry altered the form of punishment.”55 Others scholars have suggested that branding on the cheek “had been in fact evaded by court officials” as too severe a punishment in many cases—a judgment that may have reflected the growing association of branding with African skin.56 In the mid-eighteenth century, penal branding of all kinds declined and burning in the hand was abolished in England in 1779, at the height of the slave trade.57 As the world leader of a trade that relied upon the branding of enslaved Africans, the English came to see any form of penal branding as too brutal to inflict within the legal system of their own country. The burning in the hand of Joseph Relph in 1778 was illustrated and included in a compendium of “the Most Notorious Malefactors . . . Who Have Suffered Death and Other Exemplary Punishments” precisely because, by the late eighteenth century, Britons considered once-common judicial branding now to be an exemplary or extreme punishment (see fig. 9.2).58 Why did penal branding in Europe became less visible during the early modern era? When English and French jurists rejected disfiguring punishments, such as branding on the face, in favor of more discreet branding, they sought a marked but productive subject—one who might be reintegrated into the community and the economy after punishment. In the German-speaking lands, no single approach dominated: banishment increased in the eighteenth century while judicial branding declined. Across Europe, challenges to branding on the face shifted in this period: the argument that it disfigured the human face “made in the resemblance of our savior’s image” was supplanted by the concern that it removed workers from the labor pool. As a relic of an age of face-to-face social legibility, branding on the face would be replaced by both the anonymity of free labor and the modern apotheosis of the dermal mark: skin color. Notes 1. Walter Schönfeld, “Brandmarken und Tätowierungen Europas in ihrer ärztlichen und kulturgeschichtlichen Spiegelung vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit,” Der Hautarzt: Zeitschrift für Dermatologie, Venerologie, und verwandte Gebiete 1 (1950): 412–18. 2. Codex Iustinianus 9.47.17: “Si quis in metallum fuerit pro criminum deprehensorum qualitate damnatus, minime in eius facie scribatur, cum et in manibus et in suris possit poena damnationis una scriptione comprehendi, quo facies, quae ad similitudinem pulchritudinis caelestis est figurata, minime maculetur.” This

edict also appears in the Theodosian Code; see Mark Gustafson, “The Tattoo in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17–31, and Mark Gustafson, “Inscripta in fronte: Penal Tattooing in Late Antiquity,” Classical Antiquity 16, no. 1 (1997): 79–105. 3. C. P. Jones concludes that stigmata were applied to slaves and convicts by tattooing but that “the penal branding of humans . . . was probably practiced by the Romans, [although]

Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe the evidence is surprisingly sparse” (“Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 [1987]: 139–55, at 155). 4. Jean Bouteillier, Somme rural ou le grand coustumier général de practique civil et canon (Paris: Macé, 1603), 871, quoted in Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 253. 5. Bouteillier, Somme rural, quoted in Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 227. 6. Quoted in Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 227. In the Netherlands, courts gradually shifted “from more-visible marks to less-visible ones” in the sixteenth century, branding on the ear or the ball of the thumb. See Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70. 7. Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 226. 8. Hans Hattenhauer, Die Brandmarkung in das Gesicht: Zur Geschichte eines Rechtsakts (Tübingen: Eberhard-Karls-Universität, 1994), 59–60, and Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body, 246. 9. Kellie Robertson, “Branding and the Technologies of Labor Regulation,” in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 133–53, at 135–40. 10. William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44, and see “An Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent” (Vagabond Act), 14 Elizabeth I, c. 5, 1572 in the Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/PU/1/1572/14Eliz1n5. 11. Gregory Durston, Crime and Justice in Early Modern England, 1500–1750 (Chichester: Barry Rose Law, 2004), 78, and Simonds D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal of the Votes, Speeches and Debates, Both of the House of Lords and House of Commons: Throughout the Whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth, of Glorious Memory (London: Printed for Jonathan Robinson, 1693), 165: “The Bill against Vagabonds was read the first time, after which ensued divers Speeches” (April 13, 1571). 12. Quoted in Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 45. 13. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses: Containing a Discoverie, or Briefe

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Summarie, of Such Notable Vices and Imperfections, As Now Raigne in Many Christian Countreyes of the Worlde . . . (London: Richard Jones, 1583), in the section on “The horrible Vice of Whoredome” (n.p.). 14. See P. B. Roberts, “Written on the Forehead,” Notes and Queries 56, no. 4 (2009): 574–76, and Standish Henning, “Branding Harlots on the Brow,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2000): 86–89. 15. Legal act of 1604, quoted in Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 43. 16. James S. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 23; Shapiro notes that “twelve days later Thomas Lorkin reported that ‘the sentence against the Jew hath been put in execution.’” 17. See Sarah Covington, “‘Law’s Bloody Inflictions’: Judicial Wounding and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 272. The judicial mutilation and facial branding of the lawyer and Puritan author William Prynne (1600–1669) in 1637 was perhaps even more brutal than that inflicted on Nayler; see Joel Konrad, “‘Curiously and Most Exquisitely Painted’: Body Marking in British Thought and Experience, 1580–1800” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2011), 156–57. 18. This image was published in William Jackson, The New Newgate Calendar, or Malefactor’s Bloody Register: From the Year 1700, to the present Time; Embellished with curious Copper-Plates, vol. 5 of The New and Complete Newgate Calendar; or Villany Displayed in All Its Branches; Containing New and Authentic Accounts of All the Lives, Adventures, Exploits, Trials, Executions and Last Dying Speeches . . . of the Most Notorious Malefactors . . . Who Have Suffered Death and Other Exemplary Punishments . . . (London: Alexander Hogg, 1795), 318–23 (illustration after p. 322). The record of Joseph Relph’s trial is in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://‌www‌.oldbaileyonline‌.org, version 8.0, June 28, 2021), December 1778, trial of Joseph Relph (t17781209-51). 19. John G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England: Felony Before the Courts from Edward I to the Sixteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 115–64; Durston, Crime and Justice, 693.

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20. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder; Mainly from Essex Sessions and Assize Records, Essex Record Office Publications 56 (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1970), 164–65. David Riggs notes that none of Jonson’s rivals or enemies seem to have mentioned the ignominy of the brand (Ben Jonson: A Life [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 53). 21. On the branding “through both cheeks” of the Nuremberg sculptor Veit Stoss (before 1450–1533), see Schönfeld, “Brandmarken und Tätowierungen.” 22. Hermann Knapp, Das alte Nürnberger Kriminalrecht: Nach Rats-Urkunden erläutert (Berlin: Guttentag, 1896), 62: “Dass dess menschen angesicht, wölichs nach gottlicher pildnuss erschaffen were, nit belaidigt werden sole.” 23. Joel F. Harrington, The Executioner’s Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 7, 15, 59, 90, 97. In the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of more than three hundred principalities and city-states, branding was always followed by banishment. 24. “Poena Stigmatis in facie Hominis est illicita.” Adalbert Erler, “Brandmarken ins Antlitz,” in Festschrift Karl Siegfried Bader: Rechtsgeschichte, Rechtssprache, Rechtsarchäologie, Rechtliche Volkskunde, ed. Ferdinand Elsener (Zürich: Schulthess, 1965), 115–20, and Theodor Schwisow, “Zwei Brandmarken aus dem jüngeren Strafenbuch,” in Frankfurter Beiträge Arthur Richel gewidmet, ed. Theodor Schwisow (Frankfurt am Main: Hauserpresse, 1933), 26–28. 25. See Craig Koslofsky, “Superficial Blackness? Johann Nicolas Pechlin’s De Habitu et Colore Aethiopum Qui Vulgo Nigritae (1677),” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 140–58, at 140–44. 26. Ernst Schubert, Arme Leute, Bettler und Gauner im Franken des 18. Jahrhunderts, Darstellungen aus der fränkischen Geschichte 26 (Neustadt a. d. Aisch: Degener, 1983), 308–11. 27. Karl-Ernst Meinhardt, Kriminalfälle aus der Reichsstadt Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1964), 79–84. 28. Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (Brooklyn: Zone, 2007). 29. See Mairin Odle’s contribution to this volume and Margaret M. Olsen, Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 138–52. 30. Sandoval’s work has been edited and translated with an introduction by Nicole von Germeten: Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008); David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 22–23. 31. British Library, Egerton MS 2395, fols. 466v–67r. This manuscript was annotated and published in Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–35), 1:174. 32. Mark Dawson shows how early modern English people used traditional humoral categories to assess one another on sight in his Bodies Complexioned: Human Variation and Racism in Early Modern English Culture, c. 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). For an examination of descriptions of fugitive slaves and runaway servants in the following period of 1750 to 1775, see Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth–Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 33. Denis Vairasse, The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 34. Ibid., 63–64. 35. Larry Dale Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54. 36. Aaron R. Walden, ed., The Widow Ranter or the History of Bacon in Virginia: A Tragi-Comedy [by Aphra Behn]; A Critical Edition Based on the Huntington Library Copy of the 1690 Edition, with a Full Complement of Contemporary Documents and Records of Bacon’s 1676 Virginia Rebellion (New York: Garland, 1993), 143. 37. Ibid., 188. Spelling modernized. 38. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Susan Scott Parrish (1705; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 150. 39. Brett Rushforth, “The Gauolet Uprising of 1710: Maroons, Rebels, and the Informal Exchange Economy of a Caribbean Sugar

Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe Island,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2019): 75–110, at 99. 40. Perhaps the best evidence of the importance of dermal social legibility is found in the thousands of newspaper advertisements describing runaway slaves, servants, apprentices, soldiers, and sailors in the Atlantic world. The descriptions in these advertisements always refer to the scars, tattoos, or general “complexion” of the person sought. The ubiquity of these newspaper advertisements in the colonial Atlantic testifies to a labor regime based on the scarcity of labor and its coercion through slavery, indenture, and other forms of bound labor. I discuss this further in my current book project, The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World. 41. “William III: May 1699,” in Calendar of State Papers Domestic: William III, 1699–1700, ed. Edward Bateson (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1937), 157–58. 42. For 10–11 Will. 3, c. 23, see The Statutes of the realm: Printed by command of his majesty King George the Third, in pursuance of an address of the House of Commons of Great Britain. From original records and authentic manuscripts (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1810–28), 7:512. 43. William Temple, Miscellanea: The Third Part; Containing I. an Essay on Popular Discontents; II. an Essay Upon Health and Long Life; III. a Defence of the Essay Upon Antient and Modern Learning; with Some Other Pieces . . . Published by J. Swift, ed. Jonathan Swift (London: B. Tooke, 1701). Many thanks to my talented student Merrick Robinson for finding Temple’s discussion of penal branding. 44. Scholars agree that Temple’s essay on popular discontents and another on “health and long life” were written before 1686. See “Preface to Temple’s Miscellanea: The Third Part,” ed. Hermann J. Real, with the assistance of Kirsten Juhas, Dirk F. Passmann, and Sandra Simon, Online.Swift / Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies, Münster, October 2011, updated July 2016, http://‌www‌.online‌-swift‌.de‌/preface ‌_miscellanea‌.html. 45. Temple, Miscellanea, 64–65. 46. Defendants Jones and Clarke: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://‌www‌.oldbaileyon line‌.org, version 8.0, June 26, 2021), May 1699 (s16990524-1). 47. Durston, Crime and Justice, 696–97. 48. S. Meeson Morris, “The Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire [part 3],”

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Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 11 (1888): 349–81. 49. Defendants Clemtree, Barham, Collins, and Ball: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://‌www‌.oldbaileyonline‌.org, version 8.0, June 26, 2021), January 1707 (s17070115-1). 50. J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 491; Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989), 281. 51. 5–6 Anne c. 6: “An Act for repealing a Clause in an Act intituled ‘An Act for the better apprehending prosecuting, and punishing Felons that commit Burglaries Housebreaking or Robberies in Shops Warehouses Coach houses or Stables or that steal Horses,’” in Statutes of the realm, 8:563. See also Meeson. “Obsolete Punishments,” 363. 52. Quoted in “Winchester: Introduction,” in A History of the County of Hampshire, ed. William Page (London: Victoria County History, 1912), 5:6 n. 80. 53. Elizabeth Tetherington was first convicted in London in May 1695, trial t16950508-27, and executed for theft in 1703; see Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://‌www‌.oldbaileyonline‌.org, version 8.0, June 26, 2021), Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, July 1703 (OA17030721). This case was first noted by Konrad, “Body Marking,” 163. 54. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 22, and the work of Simon P. Newman, especially A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 55. Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 61. 56. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 491; Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis, 61. 57. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 309. A few rarer forms of penal branding continued to be used into the nineteenth century. 58. The New and Complete Newgate Calendar suggested that the severe punishment of Relph arose in part because “the accused party was what is called a lieutenant of a press-gang; that is, the principal savage among savages” (322).

Chapter 10

Mouches Volantes The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France

Claire Goldstein

Brought back in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century by the pop star Madonna, in a self-conscious tribute to Marilyn Monroe, the cosmetic beauty mark evokes, in condensed graphic shorthand, everything decadent and seductive about old regime France.1 A cosmetic accessory used since Roman antiquity, the mouche (literally “fly”) or paste-on beauty mark, emerged as a fashion phenomenon in seventeenth-century France, before becoming a staple of eighteenth-century cosmetic practice. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, worn by the likes of Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Edie Sedgewick, and Dita von Teese, mouches evoke the potent mix of refinement and intrigue that characterized the high stakes sociability of the French old regime. While mouches function as a tiny but clear and unambiguous reference to the social mores of a specific time and place—if they are, in this way, a stable sign—what they signify is the opposite of clear and stable. In this chapter, I inquire into the complicated set of meanings that accrued to this practice of cosmetic body marking in France during the seventeenth century, the period when the name mouche emerged and the practice became popular in Europe and also the period with which the practice of paste-on beauty marks has become indelibly associated.2

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A Sign of the Ancien Régime In a publicity poster for Christian Vincent’s 1990 film La discrète, a photographic restaging of the so-called language des mouches advertises a film about weaponized seduction set against a backdrop of intellectualized spite and the intricate nexus of gender and power (fig. 10.1). To French viewers, the plot of Vincent’s film would be immediately recognizable as a kind of modern-day Liaisons dangereuses in which a jilted semisuccessful lady-killer intellectual named Antoine, egged on by his cynical older friend Jean, embarks on a plan to seduce and then dump an unsuspecting and naïve younger woman (Catherine, played by Judith Henry) for sport and eventual literary glory. Adopting the visual conventions of an aristocratic portrait, from Catherine’s classic updo to the angle of her nude torso, which, from the vantage point of the pictorial framing, evokes the deep décolleté of an old regime court dress, the mouche map on the poster declares the film’s historic-aesthetic engagements and signals its chief preoccupations: with surfaces and depths; with the interrelation between knowledge, plotting, power, and seduction.3 Graphic lines elucidate how the position of each beauty mark encodes a semisecret message about a woman’s intentions, availability, and character. The curly arrows inscribe the analytical gaze and chalk-talk scheming of seduction, rendering the surface of the woman’s face a kind of battlefield on which Antoine and his friend Jean, a literary editor, plot their shared conquest of Catherine, women in general, and the publishing world. The intricate negotiations between the author and the typist over the signification of the film’s eponymous beauty mark and the woman whom it comes to name begin when sophisticated Antoine, always prepared to wow with a literary anecdote, spies a mole on Catherine’s chin and declares her “une discrète,” later “la Discrète.” Dragging Catherine out for fancy cocktails and trying to impress her with witty stories about cultural figures, Antoine (Fabrice Luchini) appears quite self-assured about his worldly superiority, about his reading of the mark, and—by metonymic extension— about his reading of the young typist, who is, quite literally, “his mark.” Any good student of history, however, would recognize Antoine’s slippery footing as he sizes up the situation. Indeed, he has identified an apposite historical reference for the amorous conquest that the film—and his projected tell-all piece—set out to chronicle, but he has overlooked the single most salient characteristic of the beauty mark’s semiotics from which the film takes its name. Discretion and all else that mouches might express is cosmetic performance. Mouches are inherently mobile. If the woman’s face is a battlefield upon which seduction might be plotted, as with the famous letter 19 in Les liaisons dangereuses, a letter from Cécile to Danceny (dictated to the young woman by Valmont), when the amorous adventure reaches its conclusion and the dust has settled, it is not entirely clear who is the writer and who the copyist.

Fig. 10.1  Publicity poster for Christian Vincent’s La discrète starring Fabrice Luchini, Judith Henry, and Maurice Garrel, 1990. By permission of Lazennec.

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The beauty mark that gives Vincent’s film and its central character the name “la discrète” indexes central preoccupations explored in the literature and philosophy of the French ancien régime. But as Antoine should have known, the mouche, like the historically inscribed economy of sexual politics in which it participates and for which it stands, can be difficult to pin down. Indeed, I will argue that its defining feature is exactly this trait. The paste-on beauty mark raises—and then complicates—interconnected issues of historicity, reference, and the dynamics of seduction not only when it appears in the form of modern pastiche but already in the period when the cosmetic practice became popular. I will endeavor to trace some of the historical meanings of mouches that arose with this accessory’s popularity in seventeenth-century France and touch on how mouches are exemplary of the way the many varieties of worn accessories that proliferated in this period challenge the integrity and the (epidermal, species, and other) limits of the human individual. In short, I will strive to find meaning in beauty marks with less arrogance and heartbreak than Antoine— and certainly with less malice and misogyny. Ovid’s Mouches Mouches look like a bodily mark, a stable somatic index, but remain a variable sign with a complicated relationship to reference and historicity. On the web page of the company L’Orféa, which sells bijoux de peau (jewels for the skin)— twenty-two-carat gold stickers for the skin, handmade in France—the deluxe line of contemporary mouches are marketed with a quote attributed to Ovid: Que ces mouches sans vie ont de vivacité! Par leur noir aiguillon l’amour est excité; Ces petits assassins arment la beauté même, Et leur air agaçant dit: Je veux que l’on m’aime. How these lifeless flies [mouches] are vivacious! By their black stinger, love is stirred up; These little assassins arm beauty herself And their irritating attitude says: I want to be loved.4 This quatrain from a popular eighteenth-century French translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria highlights many of the characteristics most associated with the ancien régime practice of body marking with mouches.5 The verses depict arousal provoked by the mouches as an experience that breaks down the opposition between life and death, between surface and depth, and between plural accessory object and singular speaking subject. In the first verse of the quatrain, multiple phonic elements highlight the paradox of the mouches’ simultaneous lifelessness

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and animation. The closely related yet contradictory key terms “sans vie” and “vivacité” appear in stressed position, at the hemistich and end of the quatrain’s first verse, and are further underlined by the proliferation of tense vowel sounds. Consonant sounds likewise reinforce the paradoxical pair of terms as the onomatopoetic alliteration vie/vivacité (picked up later in the “veux” of seduction and desire) evokes the drone of a live fly, a noise that gets under the skin and cannot be shooed away. This sonic drone evokes the “agaçant,” or troubling sexual arousal the mouches provoke, an agitation announced by a proliferation of initial vowel sounds from verses two through four. Arousal (the “panting” assonance of “ah,” “ah,” “ah”) begins with needling assault (aiguillon, assassin, arment, air agaçant) and ends with the more lax, open sounds of the subjunctive wish: que l’on m’aime as the initial heightened rhyme pair vivacité/excité melts into même/aime. This quatrain comes to a very satisfying and poetically conventional conclusion: the first three and a half verses describe the mouches’ effects, and then the second half of the final verse finishes with a first-person enunciation. Some complicated ramifications arise, however, from the way the verses stage the arousal of desire. The mouches’ (nonliving, paste-on) stingers mediate between the abstractions of “love” and “beauty” to finally speak, in the final clause, in the singular first-person voice of a “Je,” who wants to be loved. The quatrain voiced by the mouches thus highlights the way the tiny accessories establish an intimate relationship between living and dead, human and nonhuman, epidermal and sentimental. Who voices whom in that final verse? If “I” want to be loved, where does the love, the desire originate? How does the desire of multiple epidermal accessories inhere in a singular speaking subject? In similarly complicated ways, the contextual layering—the use of a classical citation in eighteenth-century translation in twenty-first-century e-commerce— dramatizes the dynamics of deferral that characterize the mouches’ relation to reference. Mouches in the contemporary advertisement reference the ancien régime French past, but the origin of mouches reached back to the beauty practices of the ancient world. Furthermore, there is a compelling parallel between the historical deferral of mouches and the practice of patching itself, whereby a cosmetic accessory draws our attention to a bit of skin through the teasing act of covering. Is there a blemish or scar hidden beneath? Or is the patch itself the only thing we are looking at? The quatrain quoted on the website for L’Orféa is cited in numerous modern and contemporary pieces about mouches from nineteenth-century antiquarian histories to countless present-day fashion and history blogs on la mode des mouches (the fashion of beauty marks). The lasting association between makeup mouches and Ovid gives a popular ancien régime sartorial practice the kind of classical roots the so-called French classical era highly valued, by inscribing mouches in a long libertine tradition via Ovid’s sexiest and most controversial

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book, the Ars amatoria.6 Written in the year 1 or 2 CE, the Ars employs elegiac couplets, a playful tone, and mythological references alongside advice for men (in the first two books) and women (in the third and final book) on how to attract, manage, and please a lover of the opposite sex. The advice is frank and practical, although it also sometimes has a satirical edge. Contemporary readers often comment that the text seems strikingly up-to-date. For example, the third book, from which this quote is drawn, instructs women on flattering colors to wear based on skin tone, which hairstyles and sexual positions might be best suited for different physiognomies, and the relative merits of older and more experienced lovers, among other useful topics. Ovid’s Ars would have been a meaningful reference for cultured readers in ancien régime France. There was a robust medieval tradition of translating the Ars into vernacular prose and poetry. In the medieval period, the Ars served a double purpose and was consequently read in two divergent ways: as a basis for philological instruction (especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and as an influential reference for discourses on love.7 In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the Ars was superseded in popularity by the Metamorphoses and Heroides, but it was still the object of regular print editions and translations, adaptations, and satires.8 The quatrain depicting mouches in the French verse translation of Ovid is drawn from two verses in the Latin original. Certain characteristics of what will become recognizable as a seventeenth-century mouche are already visible in the classical source text, while others, such as the name mouche and the association with flies that this name brings to the equation, are distinctly seventeenth-century accretions. Following the evolution of the Ovidian verse that served as the source of the rhymed quatrain that became one of the most cited topoi on applied beauty marks illuminates the emergence of the particular body-marking practice we still recognize as the mouche in contemporary pastiche, such as L’Orféa. In the original Latin, the mention of applied beauty marks comes in part 4 of book 3, in a section where Ovid urges his female acolytes to remember good grooming—epilation, dental hygiene, skin and complexion care: “Arte supercilii confinia nuda repletis, Parvaque sinceras velat aluta genas.”9 Roy K. Gibson suggests translating these lines as: “With art you fill up the bare common borders of the eyebrow,” continuing in a verse that is challenging to render, “and a little patch of leather covers the cheeks [so that they appear] unblemished.” Many English translations opt not to directly render aluta, an uncommon word that is hard to translate. Gibson defines aluta as “a soft piece of leather used for a variety of purposes: shoe leather . . . medical uses . . . a loin cloth. Here it refers to a beauty patch, elsewhere called a splenium, often used to cover up blemishes.”10 In classical texts and commentaries, the patch emerges as a highly ambiguous cosmetic practice.11 Susan Stewart notes, for example: “As a finishing touch, beauty patches known as aluta or splenia made from leather softened

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with alum were worn to set off the appearance.”12 On the other hand, she adds, “Although beauty patches (aluta or splenium) might be worn either because they were considered decorative or because they could hide a blemish, freed slaves and criminals also used these to cover up brand marks.”13 Marguerite Johnson explains that, as described by Martial and Pliny, “the patch disguised unsightly blemishes and could also, when cut into appealing shapes, add its own form of adornment.”14 The word mouche seems to have entered French around the middle of the seventeenth century. The Littré historical dictionary attests the first use of the term for beauty mark in French in a pièce galante—saucy piece—from 1655. The Littré dictionary entry on mouche gives examples from Thomas Corneille’s 1667 comedy Le baron d’Albikrac as well as from the court observations of SaintSimon.15 Some slightly earlier references to mouches can also be found, including, for example, an anonymous 1652 mazarinade that claims mouches exemplify how a painted portrait can be deceptively flattering.16 The practice of mouche-wearing in seventeenth-century France fully develops the kind of playfulness of signification already hinted at in Ovid’s corpus sincerum.17 While the mouche might be used to hide an unattractive imperfection (and some historians of makeup note the waning popularity of the stick-on beauty mark following the widespread adoption of smallpox vaccination), mouches serve not only as a handy cover up “so that the cheeks appear unblemished” but primarily as a weapon of seduction in their own right, an arm in the libertine arsenal—the “black stinger” that “stirs up” love. Mouches appear liberally in the fashion prints that emerged and became broadly popular in late seventeenth-century France, decorating the highly stylized faces of the fashionable male and female figures.18 The first edition of France’s official dictionary, the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, places the artificial beauty mark as the last of twelve meanings under the word mouche: it is a “certain small piece of black taffeta that Ladies put on the face, either to cover some blemishes, or to make their complexion appear whiter.” Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690 makes no mention of the possibility that a mouche might be covering up an imperfection but rather specifies that a mouche can be taffeta or velvet and is something worn by women “for ornament, or to make their skin look whiter.” Furetière foregrounds the libertine character of the accessory, noting that “the devout rail loudly against les mouches as being a mark of great coquetry” and adding that “long-cut mouches are called assassins.” Across the Channel in England, the practice of cosmetic patching, outlawed by Oliver Cromwell, was persistently identified as a French vice. Following the Stuart Restoration, patches emerged in force, along with the word mouche.19 Now considered a markedly French affectation, mouches appear in English critiques of French foppishness and dissipation as well as in the polemics about women and creativity that Frances Dolan analyzes.20 Mouches feature on the

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bodies of coquettes and fop characters as in Aphra Behn’s 1687 farce The Emperor of the Moon. Mary Evelyn’s Mundus muliebris: Or, The ladies dressing-room unlock’d, and her toilette spread in burlesque; Together with the fop-dictionary, compiled for the use of the fair sex makes clear the strong association in late seventeenth-century England between the fashion for patches via both the term mouche and the repetition of French words: “Mouches for pushes, to be sure, / From Paris the tré-fine procure.”21 The Anglicized form mouchet also features in B. E.’s slang dictionary, New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (ca. 1698). Mouches in Seventeenth-Century French Literature I do not believe it is a coincidence that the fashion for mouches—and indeed for fashion accessories in general—seems to arise at the same time as the worldly periodical press.22 French literary references, and especially references from newly invented magazines, reveal a public intrigued by this fashion and its ambiguous meanings. Looking to the popular French periodical, Le Mercure galant, arbiter of taste and tracker of trends, we see that, to some degree, the mouche is already an enigma in the era in which it emerged. In fact, it serves literally as the enigma (under the enigma rubric) of the June [misprinted as May] 1699 issue: They name me accomplice to two great Murderers They say that my black malice Causes every day many wounds, See if they do me justice; I always hide flaws, And show off the advantages Of those who use me. And all of the unlucky who delight in me Are hardly reputed well-behaved.23 This riddle—which drew scores of write-in responses from readers—including the delicious and, in my opinion, very apt “Explication of the enigma of the Mouche by another Enigma”—plays with the ambivalent nature of the mouche.24 Complicit with the pox and love equally, these paste-on patches draw the eye to bared flesh even as they hide or highlight the marks of disease, infection, and physical decomposition that wearers’ contemporaries knew might lie underneath. Markers of eros and thanatos alike (the poem’s two murderers), the noir assassin is an engine of lust literally pasted over corporeal signs of decay; the black mark draws the eye as an enigma, a kind of fetish, or possibly a kind of “moveable type” inscription. (Pattes de mouche is the French expression for “chicken scratch” scrawl.)25

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Occupying this complex nexus of disgust and desire, attention-grabbing visibility yet also mystery, the mouche appears as a common topos in late seventeenth-century libertine texts and becomes a concern of moralizers. The abbé de Choisy, a theatrical cross-dresser, recounts with evident narrative pleasure piling on mouches as he prepared to dazzle and charm.26 In his 1687 catechism, on the other hand, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet insists that women must not come to communion wearing mouches.27 For Jean de La Bruyère, these epidermal accessories are the sign of sexual deviance or insufficient masculinity: “It is particular to effeminates . . . to wear mouches.”28 Mouches appear in Furetière’s 1666 Roman bourgeois as the signal example of the questionable sartorial practices of coquetry.29 In Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales, kings and ladies alike adorn themselves with beauty marks in order to wage campaigns of seduction. In the story “Finette Cendron,” Finette’s cruel sisters apply mouches and curl their hair as they steal Finette’s finery, and in “Le Nain Jaune,” a king applies a mouche to his face as he does himself up in the mirror to impress a fairy who holds him captive.30 If the physically mobile, consummately untrustworthy mouche can be construed as a sign, it is as a sign of mobility itself via the charge of coquetry (emotional inconsistency can be mobile in French or mobile in Italian). In François d’Aubignac’s rather nasty Histoire du temps, ou Relation du Royaume de Coqueterie: Extraite du dernier voyage des Holandais aux Indes du Levant (History of the times, or relation from the kingdom of Coquetry: excerpted from the most recent voyage of the Dutch to the East Indies), mouches are displayed conspicuously in the store on the fictional island of Coquettes, and the island’s workers waste away their time and labor cutting and arranging the little black marks.31 The workers “are occupied solely by cutting mouches and preparing diagrams to correctly arrange the assassins on the nose, which no one can work at until after completing a master-piece.”32 Marked by these mouches that draw the eye to white skin but let us see no further, the ladies of this island society are, in Jeffrey N. Peters’s words, “identifiably corrupt, the dangerous usurpers of male privilege.”33 It seems that in seventeenth-century France, some degree of mouche wearing could be reasonable, however. Lecerf de la Viéville illustrates his 1705 comparison between (tacky) Italian and (tasteful) French music with an extended allegory about the over-the-top application of mouches by Italian tarts versus the judicious application by French ladies.34 In the Mercure galant and other texts from worldly or gallant milieus, where there is less anxiety about—and more affirmation of—mobility and women in general, the enigmatic origins of mouches and their general lack of fixity become the occasion for play and pleasure, as demonstrations of wit. The fictional faiseuse de mouches, or lady mouche maker, in the Recueil de Sercy promises in her letter to a potential female client that her patches will attract admirers:

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To make the eyes sweeter, to ornament the face, To put on the forehead, or to place on the breast, And as long as a skillful hand Knows how to use them well They are never put on in vain If my mouche is put to use, That gallant man who gives you the cold shoulder, If he isn’t hooked today, will be tomorrow Whether he is indifferent, or acting the vain, In the end the mouche will sting him.35 Through word play on “pique,” which means to sting—like an insect bite—but also to arouse, as in “to pique someone’s interest,” the beauty mark mouche invokes its insect homonym. The text builds a second bridge between mouche as beauty mark and as fly when the sales pitch and guide to paste-on patches opens onto a rhymed fable about the invention of mouches. The inclusion of the explanatory fable seems to suggest that part of the seduction or sting of a mouche is the itch to know its origins, to wonder what lies behind the spot, either in a prosaic sense (what blemish or mark is behind this spot?)—or in a more symbolic one (what kind of seductive message might lie behind this mouche?). The text’s playful mythologization channels this curiosity for origins with a mythological story. Venus is annoyed to see Cupid hunting flies, so he hides the one in his hand by smashing it onto his breast. The result so flattering that she wants one too, which sets off what we would call a viral trend. Soon all the goddesses and then all the mortals are clamoring for black marks. If no one in seventeenth-century French galant literature seems to posit a serious derivation of how splenium came to be called mouche (or even a farfetched derivation, which is noteworthy in this era, when fanciful etymologies proliferated), flies seem always to hang about at the periphery of discourses about applied beauty marks, as we saw in the French rendering of Ovid at the start of this chapter. Like the accessory, which can never completely disavow its relationship of proximity to disease, flies are emissaries of death. They commune with cadavers and swarm carcasses. They evoke the proximity of the disgusting and erotic—corporality, lust, and putrefaction. Furthermore, their signature constant buzzing tracks one of the beauty mark’s most troubling attributes: the way that the paste-on patches render mobile marks that are ostensibly fixed. A scar or pox mark is the fixed somatic inscription of something that happened just at this spot, which will not go away, and birthmarks in stories are always the tether that returns lost souls to their identity. The kind of artificial permanence of the mouche (a mark that moves at will) undermines the integrity and stability of the ultimate signifier of identity, the human face. Counterfeiting a birthmark or a scar, mouches gesture toward permanence while also

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acknowledging that this “permanent” feature is actually a theatrical construct, making identity itself an object of play. A final libertine trait shared by flies and their namesake mouches is promiscuous indeterminacy (in Emile Zola’s Nana, the eponymous character is described as “the Golden Fly,” la Mouche d’or, who has risen from the filth to seduce and infect the aristocracy).36 To be a fly on the wall is the classic libertine fantasy, but in the pornographic scenario, while the fly is useful because it is unobserved, mouches buzz about the face in order to be seen. The fact that flies go anywhere is another classic libertine topos. In Jean Regnard’s play Le distrait (1697), a frustrated lover addresses the servant Lisette as mouche when he asks her to slip in where he cannot go to see the object of his affection.37 Benjamin Franklin writes to Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, in the voice of flies who buzz over from his apartments to hers in order to propose that Franklin and Madame Helvétius should make “heretofore one Household.”38 In the Mercure galant and other worldly literature, both types of mouches facilitate encounters between death and desire. Short narratives that give them voice (“thing” narratives for beauty marks and fly narratives, like Franklin’s) reveal that flies and beauty patches enact surprisingly parallel transgressions. A rhymed fable from the October 1681 Mercure galant dramatizes the interchangeability of the insects with the accessories that share their name by collapsing the two. Vying with Dame Ant for the coveted armchair, the promiscuous fly brags of how she flits about transgressing boundaries of station and sexual propriety as easily as she crosses physical thresholds: Did I not kiss Isabelle As often as her Spouse, Without her being chagrined, or him being jealous about it? I don’t say anything about the advantage I have of enhancing the brightness of her face, Nor of that of entering into the Room of a King At all hours; only I Can go to his dinner to eat his soup.39 The fly leaps with agility from female to male lover, from Isabelle’s face (as beauty mark) to the king’s inner sanctum and his soup plate (as insect that can transgress the boundaries of propriety and the laws of physics). As a sign and decadent consumer of polymorphous pleasure, this sybaritic fly literally cannot be pinned down. It is a sign that refuses to signify, a supplemental figure of mobile indeterminacy, a buzzing enigma that proliferates ambiguity, a piece of moveable type or epidermal inscription that rests resolutely on the constantly changing surface. This consummate agent of mobility is, I think, as close as we can come to answering the little knot of questions posed by the

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emergence of a fashion for patches called mouches in seventeenth-century France. A mouche is seductive in ancien régime France because it inhabits a shadow—it is ambiguity itself, a little sign without a stable signified meaning. However, as much as mouches can never be pinned down, they always rouse curiosity and draw attention to the question of origins. With this in mind, I will share a final story. In 1678, the Mercure galant invited readers to submit fables about the origin of mouches: “[Lady readers] sometimes wear Mouches in order to please. I ask them to inform me, through a little Fable that they construct as they wish, what could have been the origin of these Mouches. The Gods might figure in this Fable, and everyone inventing according to her own imagination [son génie], you can promise yourself more pleasure than would have been found in doing the same thing in different ways. This plan can serve for some very gallant fictions, depending on the different Subjects that people will treat.”40 Practically the entire April 1678 special issue of the Mercure galant is devoted to readers’ fables about L’origine des mouches galantes (The origin of gallant mouches), and most of the explanations involve flies. In one response, conveyed in the subsequent issue by Elena Cornaro Piscopia of Venice, the polyglot Venetian savante (who had been granted her doctor of philosophy in that year from the University of Padua), provides an etymology and an origin for mouches that ties together many of the threads I follow here.41 After Augustus Cesar’s victory, his daughter Julie received a parrot as a tribute gift from the Indians. When the parrot dies, she is disconsolate, and her lover (or admirer) Ovid writes her a poem. To help cheer her up, the Indians give Julie little insects called “Mukas, which the Romans mistranslate [par corruption] Muscas.” Julie tries the Indian beauty trick of applying one to her face. She is gorgeous. Ovid swoons and writes a steamy metamorphosis about the mouches, for which the poet is banished, and the fable suppressed: “Julie showed it to Augustus, who remarked several liberties, which slyly broke the respect that a Roman Nobleman should have for the Daughter of an Emperor; which is why Augustus resolved to exile Ovid.”42 Piscopia’s fable adroitly ties up the origin of accessory mouches with the mystery of Ovid’s exile, a subject of significant fascination in ancien régime France.43 Piscopia concludes, “Nevertheless people claim that some Copies remained in Rome, which made known that Julie was the Goddess of Hearts, and that the three Graces who accompanied her were the three Flies [Mouches] Julie used. The Misfortune of time has stolen from us this masterpiece of Ovid’s, and Julie’s species of gallant Flies [Mouches] has been lost, along with their scent. Now, they are counterfeited with little pieces of taffeta glued on, and Ladies use them commonly in France.”44 Ovid’s original poem, like the original species and the original word, are all lost in translation and corruption. What remains is a shared aura of mystery and seduction that connects Ovid’s Rome with Louis XIV’s France, distilled in small fabric patches.

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Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have repeated the assertion that mouches are mobile: they cannot be pinned down in placement, origin, or meaning. This obdurate resistance to fixity seems to generate endless curiosity and desire on the part of readers and observers, evident in both the arousal celebrated in the eighteenth-century rendering of Ovid and the mouche maker’s ditty we saw above. This curiosity, in turn, might account for the endlessly popular and very appealing notion, held not only by Antoine in the film La discrète but in countless accounts of mouche-wearing from the nineteenth century on, that there was an elaborated semiotics of placement, a so-called language of mouches. Nothing about mouches is very certain, but as far as I can ascertain, the idea of a language of mouches seems to appear first in satirical pieces of the eighteenth century before being taken seriously in retrospective accounts of the fashion.45 Mouches doubtless served—as clothes do in general—as an expressive component of self-presentation.46 However, when read in context, magazine descriptions of ladies placing their mouches to express certain political ideas or emotional complexions do not really seem to promise an accurate description of a clear and functioning language; rather these articles are witty reactions to a popular fashion—something along the lines of a clever magazine story about the language of handbags or theories expounded among friends about how you can tell everything about a college student by his or her choice of backpack.47 Eighteenth-century pieces that have been cited as elaborations of the language of mouches, when scrutinized closely, appear to be clever and observant social commentary rather than failproof or elaborated systems of communication. For example, in 1711 the English magazine Spectator reports: “Politically minded dames used their patches as party symbols: the Whigs patching on the right, and the Tories on the left side of their faces, while those who were neutral decorated both cheeks.” This passage is quoted in modern and contemporary accounts of patching as evidence of the communicative use of patches without attention the rest of the passage, which goes on to talk about zealous ladies insisting that their marriage contracts allow the right to patch freely, thus showing the satirical tone of the whole conceit.48 It is hard to identify the origins of the enduring “à clef” reading of the meaning of mouches, but it might be an article entitled “Position des Mouches” from the January 23, 1764, Bibliothèque des Dames, which describes nine zones of patching, each with a related message and name. The writer, in fact, complains that women are wearing mouches in an unattractive way and offers a systematized “position of Mouches” in order to remedy the common sloppy and displeasing way they are being worn: I found myself yesterday in an assembly, where I saw some very lovely faces, but very badly patched [mouchetés]. In the whole circle comprising

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more than thirty women, I only saw two Mouches placed according to the rules. I have already declared myself against this mania for placing little pieces of black taffeta on the face. As I however do not claim to have enough eloquence to bring back the fair sex [from this practice], I want at least to teach the proper position of Mouches to Ladies who think that this artificial accessory enhances their beauty. One can distinguish above all nine types of Mouches which are placed in the following way.49 Without attention to the critical frame, the system the satirical writer proposes has had a vigorous afterlife. It appears, for example, in English in 1787 in the New Lady’s Magazine.50 That translation is repeated verbatim in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, from where it has seemed to spread as energetically as a mouche to countless retrospective pieces on the curiosity of this small beauty accessory.51 Notes I would like to thank Juliette Cherbuliez, Katherine Dauge-Roth, Anna Uhlig, and the anonymous readers for helpful comments on drafts of this project and the UC Davis Academic Senate small grant program for support of this project. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 1. The association between beauty marks and old regime France continues to be perpetuated in the fashion and beauty press. See, for example, Sophie Schulte-Hillen, “Is Cindy Crawford Really Done Modeling? Celebrating the 9 Best Beauty Marks of All Time,” Vogue, February 1, 2016. 2. Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset introduces mouches in a rich volume of articles on Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 135–38. 3. In a review of the film, Michael Wilmington notes, “As in Antoine’s mole map, the outwardly cool and inwardly compassionate ‘La Discrète’ invites us to stare fixedly at each character’s physiognomy, searching for clues to the souls beneath” (“‘La Discrète’: Beautifully Played Game of Seductions,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1992, http://‌articles‌.la times‌.com‌/1992‌-11‌-27‌/entertainment‌/ca‌-1134 ‌_1‌_la‌-discrete). 4. “Mouches,” L’Orféa, accessed August 1, 2017, http://‌www‌.lorfea‌.fr‌/collections‌/mouches ‌/mouches.

5. This translation was much republished throughout the eighteenth century, seemingly all across Europe. For example, it was published in Amsterdam and Paris by la Veuve Duchesne in 1706 as Œuvres galantes et amoureuses d’Ovide . . . and in 1756 as Œuvres galantes et amoureuses d’Ovide . . . Traduction en vers français, then again in 1771 in Amsterdam by Marcus Rey, and in 1785 by an unnamed London publisher. The British Library record attributes this Ars translation to Joseph Cuers de Cogolin (1702–1760) but, if correctly dated, the 1706 edition seems to point otherwise. On the Cuers de Cogolin translation, see Stephanie Loubère, “L’art d’aimer” au Siècle des Lumières (Oxford: SVEC, 2007), 224–31. 6. Loubère, “L’art d’aimer,” provides a learned analysis of the various currents of adaptation and translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria in France from the Renaissance until the early nineteenth century. Helena Taylor analyzes the way Ovid’s life writing in seventeenth-century France tracked contemporary aesthetic concerns: “Although he was an ancient poet, Ovid became key to the formulation of aspects of self-consciously ‘modern’ cultural movements, genres, and aesthetics” (The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 3). 7. On instruction, see Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s “Ars

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Amatoria,” “Epistulae ex Ponto,” and “Epistulae Heroidum” (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1986). On discourses on love, see Marilynn Desmond, “Gender and Desire in Medieval French Translations of Ovid’s Amatory Works,” in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James Clark, Frank Coulson, and Kathryn McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108–22; Marilynn Desmond, “Venus’ Clerk,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. J. F. Miller and C. E. Newlands (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 161–73. According to Desmond, translations of the work influenced discourses on love from the Roman de la rose to Chaucer and served as an important intertext to Christine de Pisan among others: “The translators adapt the didactic claims of Ovid’s praeceptor without importing the elaborate ironies that Ovid’s mythological and contemporary allusions make possible” (Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence [Ithaca: Cornell University Press], 75). 8. Ann Moss catalogues a significant corpus of Latin editions and commentaries printed in France before 1600: Ovid in Renaissance France: A Survey of the Latin Editions of Ovid and Commentaries Printed in France Before 1600 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1982). 9. Ovid, Ars amatoria, Book 3, ed. and trans. with an introduction and commentary by Roy K. Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201–2. 10. Ibid., 178. 11. Anna S. Uhlig, who generously helped me through this passage, observed: “Gibson doesn’t mention an alternative reading of sinceras as ‘genuine.’ The ambiguity would be classic Ovid, though: the corpus sincerum is both natural and artificial, simultaneously hidden and constructed by urbane cosmetics.” Conversation with author, 2016. 12. Susan Stewart, Cosmetics and Perfumes in the Roman World (Gloschestershire: Tempus, 2007), 47. 13. Ibid., 60. On the branding of criminals and the enslaved in the early modern period, see Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper’s as well as Craig Koslofsky’s contributions to this volume. 14. Marguerite Johnson, Ovid on Cosmetics: “Medicamina Faciei Femineae” and Related Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 120.

15. “She waits and waits for this Baron, / Going from mirror to mirror, making up her mouth, / Ten times she takes off and then puts back on the same mouche, / Will she think of you as she takes care to look seductive?” (Elle attend ce Baron si long-temps attend, / De miroir en miroir se façonnant la bouche, / Elle oste, et puis remet dix fois la mesme mouche, / Dans ce soin d’agréments songera-t’elle à vous?) Thomas Corneille, Le baron d’Albikrac, 1668, 2.1, in Chefs d’oeuvre de T. Corneille (Paris: Beaujouan, 1836), 1:34. 16. “A Tous Les Habitans de la terre, L’Heureux Genie Salut Les advenues du bien souverain de l’homme” (1652, n.p.). 17. See n. 11. 18. The appearance of mouches on the otherwise very simplified and stylized features of figures depicted in fashion prints indicates that these accessories were considered important elements of fashion in their own right. Kathryn Norberg and Sandra Rosenbaum have published a collection of wide-ranging essays, as well as selected images from an album of late seventeenth-century French fashion prints acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Kathryn Norberg and Sandra Rosenbaum, eds., Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV: Interpreting the Art of Elegance (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014). In the seventeenth century, mouches as a fashion accessory appear commonly in fashion plates although generally not in painted portraits: “Almost the only surviving pre-eighteenthcentury images in Britain that definitely depict women wearing patches appear to be prints— prints that either show the latest fashions (that is fashion plates), or are satirical or critical. In other words, they are only very rarely portraits” (Karen Hearn, “Revising the Visage: Patches and Beauty Spots in Seventeenth-Century British and Dutch Painted Portraits,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 [Winter 2015]: 809–23, at 818). However, Hearn has recently found evidence of an overpainted beauty patch in a 1659 portrait of a woman by Cornelius Johnson, an English painter active in Holland. Hearn and Bianca du Mortier (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) both attest to “a specific (but previously little-recognized) fashion in the northern Netherlands that appeared in portraiture between the 1640s and 1680” (813). 19. “Costume masks, patches, French hairstyles become public style and scandalize

Mouches Volantes the Puritans. . . . It’s also from France that the court gets a taste for tea, unknown up to this point.” H. Fornernon, “Chronique de la Chute d’une République, 1658–1660,” Le Correspondant 135 (June 25, 1884): 953–72, at 971–72. Richard Corson documents a prerevolutionary fashion for patching that may even date to the Elizabethan era, however, he also emphasizes the renewed vigor of the trend when it returns to England with the Restoration (Fashions in Makeup from Ancient to Modern Times [1972; rev. ed., London: Owen, 2003], 101, 111, 142–44). Fenja Gunn notes that patching “became particularly important in the Restoration period and the eighteenth century” (The Artificial Face: A History of Cosmetics [New York: Hippocrene, 1973], 92). Frances E. Dolan dates the English fashion for patches to the late seventeenth century (“Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art Nature and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108, no. 2 [March 1993]: 224–39, at 233). 20. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil,” traces the interconnected critical discourses in parallel terms that proscribed both women’s access to creative endeavors and cosmetic practice. 21. Mary Evelyn, Mundus muliebris: Or, The ladies dressing-room unlock’d, and her toilette spread in burlesque; Together with the fop-dictionary, compiled for the use of the fair sex (London: R. Bentley, 1690), 6. 22. Several factors contributed to the proliferation of a wide range of popular fashion accessories at this historical moment. Conditions of trade and methods of production made new materials and products available and transported them ever more efficiently to diverse markets. At the same time, new print media, especially the feuille volante fashion plate (see Norberg and Rosenbaum, Fashion Prints) and the worldly periodical or “la petite presse” pioneered by Jean Donneau de Visé’s Mercure galant accelerated the pace of the fashion cycle and enlarged the geographical and social reach of new modes. Changed out quickly and at considerably less work or expense than a whole garment, accessories (and the related category of trimmings) constitute the most fitting response to the fast pace fashion took on in the regime of print. 23. “De deux grands Meurtriers on me fait la complice / On dit que ma noire malice / Cause tous les jours bien des maux, / Voyez si l’on me fait justice; / Je cache toujours les défauts, / Et fais valoir les avantages, / De ceux

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qui me donnent employ / Et tous ces malheureux qui se plaisent de moy / Ne sont reputez guere sages.” Le Mercure galant (May [June] 1669): 276–77. 24. Ibid., 376. 25. I am indebted to Larry Norman for this observation. 26. François-Timoléon de Choisy, Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme (Toulouse: Ombres, 1995), 30–31 46, 47, 88, for example. 27. “Que faut-il observer particulièrement à l’égard des habits (quand on communie)? . . . Les femmes doivent baisser leurs jupes, et faire descendre leurs coiffes un peu plus bas que les yeux: ne point paraitre avec la gorge découverte, ni avec des mouches sur le visage.” Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “Catéchisme du diocèse de Meaux” (1687), in Œuvres complètes de Bossuet (Bar-le-Duc: Guérin, 1863), 11:443–525, at 498. 28. La Bruyère is discussing the depiction of character “types” on stage in the theater: “It is the hallmark of the effeminate man to wake late, spend part of his day getting dressed, looking at himself in the mirror, perfuming himself, putting on mouches, sending and receiving notes” (C’est le propre d’un efféminé de se lever tard, de passer une partie du jour à sa toilette, de se voir au miroir, de se parfumer, de se mettre des mouches, de recevoir des billets et d’y faire réponse). La Bruyère, “Des ouvrages de l’esprit,” no. 52, in Les charactères ou les mœurs de ce siècle (1688; Paris: Garnier frères, 1876), 40. 29. Antoine Furetière, Le Roman bourgeois (1666; Paris: Quintin, 1880), 198: It was even worse when he recognized that Polyphile not content with her own God-given beauties, sought out artificial ones. Until this point he had nothing against the makeup, pomades, mouches, and hair pieces arrayed on his mistress’s dressing table; if it hadn’t been that seeing her one evening in dark hair, he didn’t recognize her the next day as a blonde. Regarding the mouches he saw covering her face on a daily basis, he had thought until this point that it was to cover blemishes or irritations. But he was not long in this belief before becoming entirely disabused. It was not God who inspired Woman, it was Woman who instructed God and, who taught him to follow fashion.

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(Ce fut bien pis, quand il reconnut que Polyphile ne se contentant pas des beautés dont le Ciel l’avait partagée, en recherchait d’artificielles. Il n’avait pas jusque-là jugé en mal du fard, des pommades, des mouches et des tours de cheveux, ranges sur la Toilette de sa Maîtresse: si ce n’est que l’ayant vue un soir en cheveux noirs, il la méconnut le lendemain dans sa chevelure blonde. A l’égard des mouches dont il voyait chaque jour son visage couvert, il avait cru jusqu’alors que c’était seulement pour cacher des bourgeons ou des égratignures. Mais il ne fut pas long-temps à cette école sans se déniaiser tout à fait, et il devint malicieux au dernier point. Ce n’était pas le Dieu qui inspirait la Dame, c’était la Dame qui instruisait le Dieu, et qui le fit devenir coquet.) 30. In “Le Nain Jaune,” the king primps and speaks to the mirror as the fée du Désert, who has hidden herself away, watches him: “‘Faithful counselor,’ he said, ‘help me see what I can do to make myself more agreeable to the charming fairy of the Wilderness; for my desire to please her constantly preoccupies me.’ Then straight away he did his hair, powdered himself, and put on a mouche” (“Fidèle conseiller, lui dit-il, permets que je voie ce que je peux faire pour me rendre agréable à la charmante fée du Désert; car l’envie que j’ai de lui plaire m’occupe sans cesse.” Aussitôt il se peigna, se poudra, se mit une mouche). Madame d’Aulnoy, Contes de madame d’Aulnoy (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1882), 44. 31. François d’Aubignac, Histoire du temps, ou Relation du Royaume de Coqueterie: Extraite du dernier voyage des Holandais aux Indes du Levant (Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1654). 32. “ne sont occupez qu’à tailler mouches & dresser des plans pour bien arranger les assassins sur le nez, à quoy nul ne peut travailler qu’apres chef-d’œuvre.” Ibid., 46. 33. Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 129; Peters discusses d’Aubignac’s allegorical description of the fictional island of Coquetterie: a “cynical récit à clef satirizing contemporary salon society in post-Fronde France, the Histoire du temps rewrites the ‘Carte de Tendre’ and offers a wholly different portrait of seventeenth-century women” (126).

34. While Italian music is “an old refined coquette, covered in rouge, in white face makeup and in mouches . . . without soul, without sincerity: fickle, only wanting to change places and pleasures at every moment” (une vielle coquette raffinée, chargée de rouge, de blanc et de mouches . . . sans âme, sans sincérité: inégale, ne demandant qu’à changer à tout moment de lieux, de plaisirs), French music is “a young person of noble but modest carriage . . . with lovely natural colors, a great distaste of everything false and borrowed; a mouche or two from time to time, to cover a small blemish or temporary redness . . . neither coquette, nor overly flirty: a gentle, simple, natural soul” (une jeune personne d’un port noble, mais modeste . . . de belles couleurs naturelles, un grand éloignement de tout ce qui est faux et emprunté; une mouche ou deux de temps en temps, pour couvrir ou quelque petite élevure, ou quelque rousseur d’accident . . . ni coquette, ni follement badine: un esprit doux, simple, naturel). Jean Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville de Fréneuse, Comparaison de la Musique Italienne et de la Musique Française (Brussels: F. Foppeus, 1704–6), reprinted as vols. 2–4 of P. Bourdelot et al., Histoire de la musique et de ses effets . . . (Amsterdam: Le Cène, 1725), 2:144–45. 35. “Pour adoucir les yeux, pour parer le visage, / Pour mettre sur le front, pour placer sur le sein, / Et pourvu qu’une adroite main / Les sache bien mettre en usage / On ne les met jamais en vain / Si ma mouche est mise en pratique, / Tel galant qui vous fait la nique, / S’il n’est aujourd’hui pris, il le sera demain; / Qu’il soit indifférent ou qu’il fasse le vain, / A la fin la mouche le pique.” “La faiseuse de mouches,” in Recueil de pièces en prose de les plus agreables de ce temps, compose par divers autheurs, ed. Charles Sorel (Paris: Ch. Sercy, 1661), 4:54–63. 36. The journalist Fauchery describes Nana as “a sun colored fly, hatched from the trash, a fly who took death from the roadside corpses, and who, buzzing, dancing, twinkling with jewels, poisoned men simply by landing on them in the palaces where she flew in through the window” (une mouche couleur de soleil, envolée de l’ordure, une mouche qui prenait la mort sur les charognes tolérées le long des chemins, et qui, bourdonnante, dansante, jetant un éclat de pierreries, empoisonnait les hommes rien qu’à se poser sur eux, dans les palais où elle

Mouches Volantes entrait par les fenêtres). Emile Zola, Nana (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1968), 215. 37. “Toi, fine mouche, / Va conter mon amour à l’objet qui me touche” (You, lovely mouche, / Go tell my love to the object of my affection). Jean Regnard, Le distrait 1.7, in Théâtres Français: Œuvres de Regnard (Paris: M. Ardant frères, 1847), 1:204. 38. Benjamin Franklin, “Les Mouches à Mme Helvétius,” December 1780?, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 29, 2017, https://‌founders‌.archives‌.gov ‌/documents‌/Franklin‌/01‌-34‌-02‌-0154, 227. Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 34, November 16, 1780, Through April 30, 1781, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 226–27. Bruno Roche traces how Cyrano de Bergerac uses a comic story about a fly to demonstrate and support the Epicurian theory of the void (“Lucrèce et Cyrano: Stratégies Libertines pour l’approche du Chant III du De Rerum Natura,” in “Les libertins et la science,” ed. Anthony McKenna and Pierre-François Moreau, Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle 9 (2005): 211–24, at 212–13. 39. “Ne baisay-je pas Isabelle / Aussi souvent que son Epoux, / Sans qu’elle s’en chagrine, / ou qu’il en soit jaloux? / Je ne dis rien de l’avantage / Que j’ai de rehausser l’éclat de son visage, / Ni de celui d’entrer dans la Chambre d’un Roy / A toute heure; il ne tient qu’à moy / D’aller à son dîné manger de son potage.” “La Mouche et Le Fourmi, Fable,” Le Mercure galant (October 1681): 103–7, at 104–5. 40. Extraordinaire du Mercure galant 2 (April 1678): 199–200: [Les lectrices] portent quelquefois des Mouches par agrément. Je les prie de m’apprendre par quelque petite Fable qu’elles bâtiront comme il leur plaira, quelle peut avoir été l’origine de ces Mouches. On peut faire entrer les Dieux dans cette Fable, et chacun inventant selon son génie, vous pouvez vous promettre beaucoup de plaisir de ce qui sera trouvé diversement sur la même chose. Ce dessein qui peut fournir à de très-galantes fictions, selon les différentes Matières qu’on traitera, ne m’est point venu de moi-même. Je le dois à Monsieur l’Abbé de la Valt d’Aix en Provence. C’est lui qui a fait ces belles Lettres sur les Enigmes qui

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sont au commencement du premier Extraordinaire. 41. Extraordinaire du Mercure galant 4 (October 1678): 77–90. 42. “Julie le fit voir à Auguste, qui y remarqua quelques libertés qui choquaient couvertement le respect qu’un Chevalier Romain devait avoir pour la Fille d’un Empereur; ce qui fut cause qu’Auguste résolut d’exiler Ovide.” Extraordinaire du Mercure galant 4 (October 1678): 77–90, at 87. 43. Loubère, “L’art d’aimer.” 44. Extraordinaire du Mercure galant 4 (October 1678): 77–90, at 87–88: Cependant on prétend qu’il en resta quelques Copies à Rome, qui firent connaître que Julie était la Déesse des Cœurs, et que les trois Grâces qui l’accompagnaient étaient les trois Mouches dont Julie s’était servie. Le Malheur des temps nous a ravi ce chef-d’œuvre d’Ovide, et l’espèce des Mouches galantes de Julie s’est perdue avec leur odeur. On les contrefait présentement avec de petits morceaux de taffetas gommé, et les Dames s’en servent communément en France. Il n’y a que les Courtisanes qui en portent à Venise, parce que nos coutumes sont différentes de celles des Français, encore bien que nous suivions leurs inclinations, et que nous aimions leurs galanteries. 45. The language of fans is similarly appealing to modern aficionados of the ancien régime. For example, in Stephen Frears’s 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, an explanation of the “language of fans” is added to the Marquise de Merteuil’s dialogue as an expository device to show her particular mode of scheming seduction. Like the language of mouches, this also is seen by most scholars to be a retrospective invention of the nineteenth century. Scholars have also discredited popular legend about a “language of quilts” supposedly used in the Underground Railroad. 46. According to Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, “Like fans, ribbons worn in knots at the arms, waist and bosom were part of the vocabulary of allusion, as were patches worn on the face” (Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006], 78). 47. In a closer to contemporary context, Alison Lurie’s book The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981) purports to

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decode just this kind of semiotic “reading” of the meaning of clothes. Fred Davis surveys semiotic attempts at decoding a meaning of clothing, concluding that that “low semanticity” of clothing reflects a “code . . . radically dissimilar from those used in cryptography” and characterized by “awesome, if not overwhelming, ambiguity” (Fashion, Culture and Identity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], see esp. ch. 1, “Do Clothes Speak? What Makes Them Fashion?”). 48. Sarah Jane Downing, Beauty and Cosmetics: 1550–1950 (Oxford: Shire, 2012), 26. 49. Bibliothèque des Dames, no. 4, January 23, 1764, 63: Je me trouvai hier dans une assemblée, où je vis de très jolis visages, mais très mal mouchetés. Dans tout le cercle qui

comprenait plus de trente têtes de femme, je ne vis que deux Mouches placées selon les règles. Je me suis déjà déclaré contre cette manie de se placer de petits morceaux de tafetas noir sur le visage. Comme je ne me flatte pourtant pas d’avoir assez d’éloquence pour en faire revenir le beau sexe, je veux au moins apprendre la vraie position des Mouches aux Dames qui croient que cet agrément postiche relève leur beauté. On distingue sur-tout neuf sortes de Mouches qui se placent de la manière suivante. 50. “Fashionable Patches,” New Lady’s Magazine, January–February 1787, 44. 51. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, June 7, 1823, 48.

A f t e rwo r d

Cultural Inscriptions Body Marking After 1800

Peter S. Erickson

Practices of marking the body have shifted radically since the early modern era. The late eighteenth century, as Michel Foucault famously argued, marked a shift away from the public branding and torture of criminals in Europe. The authorities, it seems, became ever more reluctant to mark the body. “One no longer touched the body,” as Foucault put it, “or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself.”1 To the extent that executions were still carried out, a certain reticence, even an embarrassment, entered into the proceedings. Far from the elaborate spectacles that had characterized early modern Europe, executions would henceforth be carried out with as little physical contact as possible. Ideally, they would take place instantaneously and painlessly behind closed doors. It is worth investigating precisely how this transformation of criminal punishment took place and pondering what we might learn from looking back, across the divide of the eighteenth century, toward an altogether different understanding of the body and its marking.2 Foucault, for his part, worried that this shift had been “attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of ‘humanization,’” an approach that risked “dispensing with the need for further analysis.”3 The transformation of criminal punishment in the eighteenth century came

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about, in his view, not primarily because society had somehow become more humane or because of a gradual shift toward modern legal codes and democratic self-government. Rather, it was part of a whole range of new techniques and ways of understanding and policing the body: practices of surveillance and incarceration, a new “micro-physics” of power, as he put it, and a different “political economy” of the body.4 Foucault’s arguments open up the possibility of an examination of a diverse set of factors—aesthetic, political, theological, cultural, economic, medical, and philosophical—that have shaped the history of the body and practices of marking it. It might come as no surprise, in this context, that aesthetic modernism was founded precisely upon a polemic against the marked or decorated body, preferring clean lines and surfaces to arabesques. In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos infamously derided tattooing as primitive and effeminate, arguing that architectural form should model itself on the bare body instead. Denounced as a juridical practice, stripped of its spiritual meaning, and robbed of its aesthetic value, bodily inscription seemed to be on the brink of cultural irrelevance, condemned to the realm of kitsch.5 Since the nineteenth century, body marking has persistently (and unfairly) been associated with “primitivism,” criminality, and the lower classes. If bodily inscription nevertheless remains so prominent in the modern age, if we cannot seem to let go of it, and if it is so compelling from a theoretical perspective, the reason is not only because physical torture never truly became obsolete, in spite of liberal rhetoric about its abolition. The modern state’s reluctance in applying force has always limited itself to certain kinds of bodies—bodies that represented a certain racial and cultural ideal.6 The history of state power can, sadly, still be told through tracing marks upon the flesh.7 The ongoing relevance of bodily inscription, however, as recent scholarship has emphasized, also stems from the extent to which the “bare” body is itself culturally and historically constituted. The unadorned “naked” body, as scholars such as Judith Butler point out, is as much a product of artifice as its decorated counterparts. The body is not a bare canvas, a blank page, waiting to be inscribed by culture. Rather, the body is itself a product of culture.8 It is shaped by a range of aesthetic values, cultural conventions, constraints, and prohibitions.9 Appeals to the unadorned body should thus be viewed critically. Its organization, its composition, and even our understanding of its precise boundaries have shifted over time. Especially since the 1970s, body marking has reemerged in theoretical discourse as a critical practice with the potential to unsettle normative and gendered ideas of the body and to point to ways in which the body is itself always already marked.10 Practices of body marking have come to seem like a means of opening up and freeing the body, of releasing it from a set of constraints. It is a means of making bodies otherwise legible, of reinscribing them according to an alternative

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set of norms, and of pointing the way to a different way of inhabiting them. This impulse has, without question, been an important source of scholarly interest into premodern and early modern models of body marking. Criminal Branding It has been noted that the decline of juridical practices of branding the body was accompanied by a corresponding rise in anthropometry—that is, of a discourse dedicated to precisely mapping the body’s surface, whether through physiognomy, phrenology, or fingerprinting, in order to identify it and define its characteristics.11 To paraphrase Siegfried Kracauer, the apparently smooth face revealed itself under the exacting gaze of the microscope, and later of the photographic lens, to be a kind of lunar landscape, marked by a series of craters and mountain ranges all but invisible to the naked eye. The photographic close-up revealed, as Kracauer put it, “new and unsuspected formations of matter.”12 Fissures opened up on the surface of the body, fissures that were specific and unique to each individual and thus obviated the need for the state to mark the body in the first place. As Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky each note, early modern practices of branding the criminal’s body were intended not primarily as a form of torture but as a technique of identification. The mark on the criminal’s body was designed to catch repeat offenders and to provide for an escalation of their punishment, should they ever be caught again.13 The precise measurement of the body, as well as the increasing turn of the state toward bureaucratic record keeping, made this form of branding unnecessary. The body is revealed, under the medical gaze, to be literally “already marked.” Individuals can be identified through the shape of their face, the lines on their fingertips, or the bumps on their skull. In this context, tattooing or branding the body could even be seen as counterproductive since it could serve to obscure or to render these “natural” marks illegible.14 The fact that these practices of measurement were so often pseudo-scientific, that they purported to not only be able to identify the individual but also to draw conclusions about their moral character, illustrates the extent of the modern age’s faith in experts’ ability to “read” the body’s surface. Nowhere was this transformation of the status of skin––and the propensity for reading moral characteristics into it––more profound than in the example of skin color, what Frantz Fanon famously referred to as the “epidermalization” of structures of power.15 It is not so much that state practices of body marking came to an end but that they were transposed into another dimension: the skin itself, perhaps as never before, came to bear the weight of signification that practices of body marking had once represented. Insisting that these marks are inherent, that they inhere in the body’s surface rather than being inscribed there by culture, is a means of obscuring their

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cultural origins. One no longer inscribed these marks into the body but claimed to “find” them there, already present, indeed visible on the surface for all to see. They are rendered natural, even timeless. If these marks were believed to be self-evident, however, and if they would henceforth serve as incontrovertible evidence in criminal proceedings, they nevertheless maintained a level of ambiguity that was characteristic of scientific progress in the nineteenth century: these marks were understood to be legible but only with expertise. To interpret them properly required years of careful study. And tellingly, a final interpretation of these signs was perpetually deferred: they were not yet legible, but someday they might be. They could be identified, traced, and photographed but only in the future would their true meaning be deciphered. The Redefinition of Skin This new attentiveness to the body’s surface corresponded to a major shift in physiological understandings of the body in the eighteenth century. Albrecht Koschorke emphasizes the extent to which the eighteenth century represented a shift away from a humoral model of the human body—as a vessel containing a variety of fluids or “humors”—and toward a neuronal model of the body—as an enclosed network of nerves. This new understanding of the body had profound consequences for how skin was understood: skin became what contained the individual and what marked the boundaries of the self. It was seen, for that reason, as something that should be preserved and protected as much as possible. Insofar as the body is now conceived as composed of a nervous system, with a brain at the center, the skin becomes a key organ in sensory perception, directly connected to the nerves.16 As Craig Koslofsky notes, skin was only just “emerging as an independent object of study, discourse, and representation in the seventeenth century.”17 Under the traditional humoral conception of the body, skin as such held little particular interest. It was not even particularly associated with the sense of touch, which was understood, dating back to Aristotle, “as a property of the flesh itself”—not a product of the surface but something that emerged from within the subject.18 It was only in the eighteenth century that a modern conception of the skin as a highly sensitive and alert surface, wired with nerve endings, developed. This shift had profound cultural and political consequences. If the early modern body had been understood to be porous and been characterized by a promiscuous exchange of fluids, the ascendant bourgeois ideology of hygiene was characterized precisely by an attempt to “dry up” the spaces between bodies, as Koschorke has put it so colorfully.19 One sought to separate bodies and ensure their individual autonomy. If medicine had previously been preoccupied with practices of bloodletting, of releasing excess, and of draining away potentially

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harmful fluids, there was a new focus on maintaining the body’s own internal circulation and protecting it from harmful external influences.20 This reconceptualization of the body affected a whole range of practices and prohibitions, from daily chores and habits to the stigmatization and perceived ill effects of masturbation.21 Hygiene indeed came to serve an almost existential role for the bourgeois middle class.22 It was through hygiene that one demonstrated one’s right to autonomy, proved one’s work ethic, and asserted one’s individual integrity.23 This new understanding reflected a heightened sense of the need for self-control and self-discipline on the part of ordinary citizens, who would henceforth be closely monitored and observed by the state but who would also be expected primarily to discipline themselves.24 For Koschorke, this shift was responsible for creating nothing less than a new “culture of the self,” whose consequences can hardly be overestimated.25 Understanding the body as organismal and neuronal placed a special emphasis on its internal organization. This was the era of the discovery of germ theory and a deeper understanding of the circulatory system, but also of new theories of global trade and communication. The rise of this new conception of the body influenced, among other things, a range of economic models, which would henceforth be based on internal circulation within a market, much as blood circulates internally within the body.26 We can speculate about which came first, this new physiological understanding of skin or economic theories of circulation? Social organization and theoretical models have a tendency to reflect one another, as Koschorke suggests. It is crucial, in examining the cultural history of the body, to keep in mind the reciprocal influence that these different discourses for describing the body and society have had on each other. Scientific discoveries develop hand in hand with new cultural norms, which, in turn, motivate and seek to rationalize (and naturalize) themselves through scientific research.27 An “Ethics” of the Skin The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of an ethics preoccupied with skin. As the sensitive surface of the skin becomes acutely linked to one’s autonomy and sense of self, it moves to the center of ethical discourse. This was articulated most strongly in the twentieth century by the philosopher Jean Amery. It is significant that when Amery reflected on his experience of being tortured at the hands of the Gestapo in July 1943, he stated emphatically, “The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel.”28 This is the kind of claim that would be almost nonsensical prior to the eighteenth century: to insist that it would be possible—and indeed, on a moral

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level, absolutely necessary—to separate the body totally from other bodies as well as from the environment around it, to maintain with absolute assurance, to police assiduously, the boundary separating the self from others. Skin becomes, on a primal level, a core part of one’s autonomy as an individual. This articulation of the importance of skin is directly bound to its capacity as a sensing surface, identified with its capacity for “feeling.” What I find so striking about Amery’s argument is not the way that he insists on his own personal integrity but the way that he specifically frames it in terms of his skin. My point in making clear the rise of “skin” as a centerpiece of ethics is not to relativize its importance or to lessen its significance to those whose right to bodily autonomy has been violated. My purpose instead is to point to the specific way in which those violations, within a cultural context, have come to be articulated and understood through the specific form of pain that those violations elicit. The skin has become fundamental to Western morality insofar as it has become the very definition of what it means to be a self, apart from others. This redefinition of skin and its rearticulation as fundamental to the self has heightened the importance of scenes of its violation in instances of rape, sexual assault, and torture. These are acts that, in the modern context, as Amery notes, pointedly, intentionally, and insistently violate the boundaries of the self. Coming to a sense of the way modern notions of skin are bound in a cultural milieu is crucial to understanding the agony with which those violations are experienced.29 An Aesthetics of the Skin This moral transformation of skin corresponded to an aesthetic transformation. The eighteenth century began to articulate, within the context of the rise of neoclassicism, an aesthetic emphasis on the bare and unadorned body. Painting became increasingly preoccupied with skin: not the ruddy color of flesh that had characterized Renaissance and Baroque painting but the specific qualities of an individual’s complexion. As Mechtild Fend argues, if earlier painters had been predominantly preoccupied with flesh, with its substance and its physical presence and haptic qualities, then painters in the late eighteenth century increasingly became preoccupied with the visual appearance and properties of skin, as well as with racial purity and mixing.30 For evidence of this transition, one need only look, for a particularly extreme example, to the French Romantic painter Anne-Louis Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion (1791), in which the nude skin of a sleeping Endymion is bathed in light. His whiteness takes on an almost blinding, unearthly aura.31 In JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres’s later La grande odalisque (1814), as Fend points out, the artist’s emphasis on the contour of the body and the complexion of skin seems to take such precedence over the body’s own internal organization that the figure itself begins to lose shape. Ingres’s Odalisque devolves into a serpentine

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line of white skin. Arms and spine are strangely elongated. Contour, if I may put it this way, seems to predominate over substance.32 What Fend describes is not so much a transition from a form of painting based on flesh to a form of painting based on skin but rather the origins of an ongoing competition between two different approaches to the figure. The proper representation of skin moves to the center of an ongoing argument over the aims and characteristic features of painting. Is the most significant fact about oil paint, in contrast to other artistic media, that it can realistically capture the specific qualities of flesh, as many had believed in the Renaissance? Or should painting strive instead to depict form and line? This new aesthetic emphasis on skin was closely linked to a set of racial and aesthetic assumptions that accompanied the rise of neoclassicism. Neoclassicism’s fetishization of bare marble, as Sarah Bond recognizes, helped to shape attitudes toward skin color and racial aesthetics.33 As art historians have known for centuries and as ultraviolet and advanced scanning technology continue to affirm, it is simply false to believe that ancient sculpture consisted of bare marble. In most cases, marble was painted. The remnants of bare marble statues from the ancient world, however, have not only instilled a false sense of skin tones in the past but also helped to craft modern Europeans’ aesthetic sensibility, to shape their sense of what is beautiful. Bond points to work by historians and anatomists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who measured Greek statuary to derive the perfect proportions of the human figure and the racial ideal. If European art and architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries claimed to have left bodily ornamentation and marking behind, modern art, as Anne Cheng convincingly argues, remains haunted by it. This is due, first and foremost, Cheng believes, to a kind of indeterminacy as to precisely what constitutes “bare” and what is ornamentation. Skin itself, Cheng notes, both belongs to the body and yet also belongs merely to its surface, its “outside.”34 The Early Modern Body The essays in this volume address the sheer variety of ways that body marking was practiced in the early modern world and, in this sense, can help to deepen our sense of the historic transformation of conceptions of skin that would take place in the eighteenth century. The articles here are characterized by an acute sense that practices of body marking from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were not static but underwent continual change and that, far from being antiquated, they were themselves deeply responsive to the modern world, with its new forms of technology, new demands placed upon the state, and new encounters with colonized peoples. Dauge-Roth points elsewhere to the fact that criminal branding was commonly associated with printmaking in early modern France. Branding represented

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nothing less, in the context of the seventeenth century, than an attempt to apply technologies of print to the body. It reflected an aspiration to make bodies universally legible, within the context of a newly risen, ever more centralized absolutist state. Often thought of as an age-old practice, as indeed nineteenth-century polemicists would argue, its use in this period was acutely related to the evolving place of texts and bodies in the early modern world: the growing literacy of the population, the spread of print technology, and the need to control an increasingly urban, shifting, and anonymous population.35 Particular attention has been given to the historical specificity of religious practices of interpreting marks upon the skin. Stedman, in this volume, points to the rise and fall of the stigmata within the course of the seventeenth century. She reads the stigmata not as a broad religious phenomenon but as the product of a specific historical and cultural moment, corresponding to a particular period in the evolution of theories of mind and of the imagination as well as in the history of the shifting status of women, who made up the vast majority of individuals who claimed to experience the stigmata. In her contribution, Dauge-Roth explores how religious practices of marking and branding the body as a means of curing illness came up against physicians’ efforts to rationalize and control the application of medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Church authorities, in the face of competing demands by physicians and religious tradition, seem most often to have opted simply for the status quo, seeking to maintain a place for traditional practices in the modern age. Ana Fonseca Conboy, in her chapter, explores the ambiguity with which theologians frequently equated baptism with a kind of brand or “invisible mark.” She notes that, if receiving baptism was akin to receiving a “mark,” it was a troublingly invisible one. This was a particular problem for a visual medium like theater. It was considered potentially sacrilegious to “perform” a sacrament on stage since this might raise questions about the performance of sacraments more generally, such as who had the right to perform them and what distinguished theatrical performances from those performed by priests. If the baptism took place off stage, however, how was one to “display” its success? How could one make visible a mark that is invisible? Conboy examines how French dramatists in the seventeenth century sought to solve this problem in martyr dramas. Pilgrimage tattoos might be thought of, indeed, as an effort to literalize this metaphor of the “invisible mark,” to make visible and to imprint on the body one’s experience of redemption, as seen in Mordechay Lewy’s historical account of such tattooing in this volume. Nicole Nyffenegger, too, in her contribution, examines the troubling status of bodily marks and wounds on the early modern stage, focusing on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Nyffenegger focuses on the play’s protagonist, who, though carrying wounds from a recent military campaign, refuses to display them in public, raising questions about what it means

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to showcase the body on the stage and whether the display of wounds received in battle, far from being a genuine and irrefutable sign of authenticity, itself remains trapped in theatrical representation. For another approach to this question of the ethics of how and whether to reveal marks on the body’s surface, Claire Goldstein, in her contribution, points to the way that artificial beauty marks were designed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to draw attention to flesh but also to hide its imperfections and cover up its faults. The mouche, moreover, as an artificial spot, imitated the natural mole or birthmark, raising questions about which marks are natural and which are contrived. More troubling, the term mouche (French for fly) echoed the vanitas motif in Baroque painting, the fly perched on the edge of a flower blossom that reminded viewers of transience and mortality. The mouche thus both idealized and problematized notions of flesh, imitating and substituting itself for the marks that we find on the surface of the skin but also reminding us of the transience of all flesh. Another major theme in this compilation of essays relates to the question of colonial encounters, which shaped, already at this early stage, the way that Europeans thought of marking the body. Mairin Odle points to the way that European travelers in colonial America in the sixteenth century remained, albeit in a limited way, open to the significance of Native American practices of skin marking, tattooing, and painting, commonly comparing these markings to their own use of the written word, even if their interest in the marks was most often closely associated with their desire to better understand the peoples that they would henceforth oversee and dominate. Koslofsky notes, in his contribution, that even as England began to abandon corporal punishment in the eighteenth century, the branding and flogging of enslaved Africans continued apace. Indeed, he suggests that it might be precisely because of the growing association of branding with slavery that the practice of judicial branding declined in England. Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper, in their joint contribution to the volume, argue for understanding the branding of slaves within the context of the broader rise of the practice of stamping or “branding” commodities for import and export on a global market. Finally, Xiao Chen decenters early European accounts of Taiwanese skin marking by contrasting their accounts with those of Chinese visitors to the island. The body, which has long been perceived as timeless and ahistorical, is increasingly being subjected to a historical analysis of the way it has been transformed across the modern era. These transformations were, this volume argues, as much a matter of aesthetics as they were of physiology, as much moral as they were scientific. This volume helps make the case for a deep consideration of the theological, aesthetic, and scientific debates that led to the modern conception of skin.

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Stigma

Notes 1. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), 11. Emphasis added. 2. On the prohibition against criminal branding in England, see esp. Craig Koslofsky’s contribution to this volume. On the continued use of branding in the slave trade and in colonial spaces, see the chapter in this collection by Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper. 3. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 7. 4. Ibid., 25–26. 5. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside: Ariadne, 1998). 6. Regarding the history of slavery, see esp. Koslofsky’s and Keefer and Hopper’s contributions to this volume. 7. On the threat of violence underlying modern bureaucratic institutions, see David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (New York: Melville House, 2016), esp. 31–33. 8. Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2007), 175–93. Mechthild Fend has proposed a history of the metaphor of skin as a page or canvas, arguing that it originated in the late eighteenth century (“Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860,” Art History 28, no. 3 [2005]: 311–39, at 313), although Mairin Odle points out an earlier association of tattooing and writing already in the sixteenth century in her contribution to this volume. 9. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Butler’s discussion of Douglas in “Bodily Inscriptions,” 178–83. 10. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 2–13. 11. Friedrich Kittler, “Eine Detektivgeschichte der ersten Detektivgeschichte,” in Dichter—Mutter—Kind (Munich: Fink, 1991), 197–218, at 217. Kittler is particularly interested in the way that the body’s surface is interpreted here in terms of a modern scientific discourse of statistical analysis and measurement as opposed to earlier theological and symbolic readings. 12. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 48.

13. On the pragmatics of criminal practices of marking the body, see also Katherine Dauge–Roth, “Textual Performance: Imprinting the Criminal Body,” in Intersections, ed. Faith Beasley and Kathryn Wine (Tübingen: Narr, 2005), 126–42. 14. See Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 5–15. 15. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008). 16. Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 2003). 17. Craig Koslofsky, “Knowing Skin in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1750,” History Compass 12, no. 10 (2014): 794–806, at 794. 18. Ibid., 798. 19. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr, 43. 20. On this reversal of the polarity of medicine, see Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr, 56–59. 21. Ibid., 76–86. 22. See also Anne McClintock’s brilliant and memorable reading of hygiene in the context of nineteenth-century domesticity and colonialism in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 33–36. 23. Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr, 45–46. 24. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 25. Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr, 54. 26. Ibid., 66–76. 27. Ibid., 49–50. 28. Jean Amery, “Torture,” in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 21–40, at 28. 29. On Amery and his usefulness for thinking about the question of bodily autonomy and sexual assault, see Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 30. Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces,” 16. On this development. see Oliver Wunsch, “Rosalba Carriera’s Four Continents and the

Afterword Commerce of Skin,” Journal18 10 (Fall 2020), https://‌www‌.journal18‌.org/‌5218. 31. See especially Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 32. Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces,” 229–30. 33. Sarah E. Bond, “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color,” Hyperal-

267

lergic, June 7, 2017, https://‌hyperallergic‌ .com‌/383776‌/why‌-we‌-need‌-to‌-start‌-seeing‌-the ‌-classical‌-world‌-in‌-color. 34. Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 36–37. 35. See Dauge-Roth, “Textual Performance.”

Contributors

Xiao Chen is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation, “‘Abandoned in the Prosperous Age’: Law, Ethnicity, and the Rise of a Convict-Labor Regime in the Qing Empire,” examines two legal innovations—criminal tattooing and frontier banishment—in the building of the Qing Empire. His publications include a chapter about the constitutional movement in China during World War II in 1943: China at the Crossroads. Ana Fonseca Conboy is Associate Professor of French in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in St. Joseph, Minnesota, where she teaches courses in French language, culture, and literature. Her research centers on seventeenth-century French baroque theater, particularly how metatheater and theater within theater are woven into the hagiographic corpus, as well as how theater and religious practices and customs coexisted and exerted mutual influence. Other research interests involve French language pedagogy and phonetics. Her recent articles include “Voir l’audible, aspirer à l’invisible inaccessible: L’hypotypose comme adaptation aux règles classiques dans la dramaturgie hagiographique française du XVIIe siècle” in Folia Litteraria Romanica and “Awakening Imagination: Glimpses of Ignatian Spirituality in Seventeenth-Century French Hagiographic Theatre” in Performance Matters. Katherine Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she teaches Francophone literature, culture, and history. Her research focuses on the history of the body and material culture in the early modern world. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France, which examines the manifestations and meanings of the marked body in France and the French North American colonies from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. She has published articles on demonology, criminal branding, textual amulets, graffiti, women and science, and teaching early modern and contemporary France. Her current book project, Lunatics: Men, Women, and the Moon in Early Modern France, puts into dialogue early modern scientific, popular, and literary texts and images that used the moon to reinforce or challenge traditional gender roles. Peter S. Erickson is Associate Professor of German at Colorado State University. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, art, and religion in the

270

Contributors

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For his dissertation, “Religious Conversion in the Late German Enlightenment: Goethe, Schiller, Wieland,” he used archival research to show how narratives of religious conversion have shaped the development of the modern novel. Prior to joining Colorado State, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Oakland University in Michigan. His research has been supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Claire Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis. Her first book is titled Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents That Made Modern France. She is completing a book manuscript about how comets in the age of the sun king organize curiosity, scrutiny, resistance, and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation and crystalize alternative (nonofficial, sometimes contestable) networks, in which information and texts circulate. She is currently researching accessories and the limits of the human in early modern France. Matthew S. Hopper is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University; a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and the Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays, and his writing has been published in Annales, Itinerario, and the Journal of African Development. He is currently writing a history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world. Katrina H. B. Keefer is an Adjunct Professor at Trent University, Ontario, in both History and Cultural Studies. She is a cultural historian who specializes in identity, body marking, slavery, and initiatory societies in West Africa. She is a contributor to the Liberated Africans Project and the Studies in the History of the African Diaspora—Documents (SHADD) projects, both of which engage with biography in the Atlantic world. Keefer is coleader for a major digital initiative entitled Decoding Origins, one portion of which includes “The Language of Marks,” a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which analyzes permanent body marks to better discern origins and birthplace. Keefer is developing other projects for the hub, including one specifically pertaining to the practice of branding during the period of slavery. She has previously published on body marking, the Poro initiatory society, and identity.

Contributors

271

Craig Koslofsky is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He works on early modern daily life, and his books include Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe and The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700. With support from a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he is working on a new book titled The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, 1450–1750. He and Roberto Zaugg (Universität Zürich) have edited, translated, and published the travel journal of Johann Peter Oettinger, a seventeenth-century German barber-surgeon. Oettinger’s unique account of his travels in Germany, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and West Africa includes the only German-language description of a slaving voyage in this era. Mordechay Lewy is an independent scholar interested in medieval history. From 1975 to 2012, he worked for the diplomatic service of Israel, with postings in Bonn, Stockholm, and Berlin and service as Israeli ambassador to Thailand and to the Holy See in Rome. His dissertation is titled “Der apokalyptische Abessinier: Wandel eines frühislamischen Motivs in der Literatur und Kartografie des Mittelalters.” His research interests include medieval body marking, the history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and pilgrim tattoos, medieval cartography, and eschatology in Judaism. Lewy organized the first international conference on the history of body marks in 2011 at Urbaniana University in Rome. Nicole Nyffenegger is a lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She works on representations of human skin in medieval and early modern English literature, in particular on the relationships of skin to text and narrative, as well as on the representation of pain in texts and on stage. Her publications include an article on “Saint Margaret’s Tattoos,” the chapter “Blushing, Paling, Turning Green: Hue and Its Metapoetic Function in Troilus and Criseyde” in the edited volume Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, and an article on Auschwitz tattoos and nineteenth-century books bound in human skin titled “The Illicit Touch: Theorising Narratives of Abused Human Skin,” included in the volume Touch. Mairin Odle is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, where she teaches courses in Native American Studies and early American culture. Her research interests include Native-newcomer relations, the history of the body, and the narration of lived experience in early America. Her first book, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America, investigates how cross-cultural body modification in early America remade both physical appearances and ideas about identity. The book

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traces how practices of tattooing and scalping were adopted and transformed by colonial powers. Allison Stedman is Professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she specializes in seventeenth-century French cultural history. She is the author of Rococo Fiction in France, 1600–1715: Seditious Frivolity (winner of the Choice 2013 outstanding academic title). She is also coeditor and translator of the Countess de Murat’s 1699 experimental novel, A Trip to the Country, and the editor of a modern French edition of this same novel (Voyage de campagne). Her research since 2013 has focused on exploring the mind-body connection in early modern France. She is currently completing a book manuscript on that subject, Imagining and Forgetting: The Mind-Body Connection in Early Modern France (1580–1715), funded by a 2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship. She is also coeditor and translator of a second novel by Murat, The Sprites of Kernosy Castle (1710), forthcoming in the “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series.

Index

Abbeville, Claude, 147, 158–59n7 Abregé de la vie et miracles de S. Hubert, 188 Act for the Governing of Negros (Barbados), 72–73 Aerts, Jan van, 87 aesthetic modernism, 258 Affagart, Greffin, 91 Afonso, Dom, 75 Afonso I (King of Kongo), 75 African coast, branding practices on, 68–70 Africans archival records of, 59–60 branding of, 3, 64, 170, 227, 229 scarification by, 2, 226, 228 See also enslavement agony, 127–28, 129, 130–31 Album of Taiwanese Customs and Products, An (Qingren taiwan neishan fandi fengsu tuce), 49, 51 Algonquians communication by, 32–33 illustration of, 24, 29–30 John White’s paintings of, 23 literacy of, 32–33 social status among, 25 tattoos on, 20, 25, 29–30, 31 Alves da Silva, Constantino, 77 Alyagon, Elad, 44 Amery, Jean, 261–62 Ampitheatre (Vanini), 134 Anatomy of Abuses (Stubbes), 222 angels, 100, 113, 114, 122n78, 131, 136, 156–57 Angels’ Chapel, 105, 114 Anglophone sources, slave branding and, 66 animals as chattels, 63, 64 Anne of Austria (Queen of France), 185 annunciation, tattoo of, 113 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d (the Artificial Changeling) (Bulwer), 3 Apocalypse, 1–2, 146, 164 Aquinas, Thomas, 164 Arab women, tattooing practices of, 90–91 archive, defined, 59–60 Areacheros, Elias, 93–94 Armenian tattooists, 97–101, 115–16 Ars amatoria (Ovid), 241–45 artists, significance of, 21 ascension of Jesus Christ, as motif, 100, 112, 113

Aubignac, François d’, 246 Augustine of Hippo, 5, 143, 144, 145, 157 Aulnoy, Madame d’, 246 Bacon, Nathaniel, 229 baptism by blood, 161n52 descriptions of, 152 early Christian theorization of, 144–45 early modern theology of, 145–48 sacred sign of, 7 in Scripture, 144–45 significance of water in, 144 of slaves, 74 symbolism of, 158n4 as tattoo motif, 113 visible aspects of, 145 baptismal mark debates regarding, 146 in French martyr plays, 148–50 hagiographic protagonists and, 150–53, 157 as invisible, 149 military mark and, 143 overview of, 157–58, 264 power of, 147 as protection against demons, 147 symbolism of, 144 transformed behavior and, 153–55 visible consequences of, 153–57 Baptista, John, 92 Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo, 66 Barbados, 60, 72–73 barbarians, 41–42, 43–44, 55n22 Barbier de Montault, Xavier, 171, 174, 175 Barbosa, Francisco Joze Fernandes, 76, 77 Barlowe, Arthur, 22 Baro, Balthasar, 149, 151, 152 Le baron d’Albikrac (Corneille), 244 beauty mark, paste-on (mouche) artificial, 11 artificial permanence of, 247–48 criticism of, 246, 250–51 history of, 238 overview of, 10, 250–51, 265 Ovid and, 241–45 paradox of, 241–42 playfulness of, 244 purpose of, 250 seduction and, 244, 249

274 beauty mark, paste-on (mouche) (continued) in seventeenth-century French literature, 245–49 sexual arousal and, 242, 244 significance of, 241–42, 245 as sign of ancien régime, 239–41 visibility of, 245–46 Beckert, Sven, 63 Before Imagination (Lyons), 125 Bellmann, Robert Herbert, 104 benefit of clergy, branding and, 224 Berry, Daina Ramey, 63 Bethlehem, 95, 117 Bethlehem dragomans, 89–90, 92–94 bezoar stone, 112 Bibliothèque des Dames, 250–51 birthmarks, 11, 186, 195n73 Bizayans, 42–43, 54n5 blush, 214 body, 259, 260–61, 263–65 See also face; facial branding body language, 20 body memory, 60 Bond, Sarah, 263 Boroni, Alessandra, 114 Bosman, Willem, 68 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 246 Bouflet, Joachim, 125 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 4, 48–49 Bouteiller, Jean, 221 bovine gall, 102, 122n82 brain, 141n42, 260 Branco, Paulo Joze, 76, 77 brand economy, 63 Brandenburg African Company (BAC), 68 branding on African coast, 68–70 of Africans, 3, 170, 227, 229 in Barbados, 73 benefit of clergy and, 224 in Brazil, 72–73 in British colonies, 70–73 on cheek, 231–32 commodification through, 58–59, 62 of criminals, 230, 232–33, 259–60 dehumanization and, 62–65 devices for, 232 and slave ship Elizabeth, 75–78 employment and, 147 in England, 222, 230–34 enslavement and, 58–59, 227–28, 265 exclusion and, 62–65 in France, 221–22 in Frankfurt, Germany, 226–27 of goods, 60–61

Index of hands, 53, 62, 220, 225 hiding of, 229 of horses, 168 identity and, 61–62 illustration of, 223, 225 in Jamaica, 228 for laborers, 222, 230, 231, 233 legibility and, 227–29, 231, 237n40 of Maroons, 229 ostracizing through, 61, 64 overview of, 58, 78 in Portuguese Africa, 73–75 print of, 226 to protect from or cure rabies, 167–80 as punishment, 44, 61, 62, 220–21, 223, 224, 230, 232–33 records of, 65–66 records regarding, 70 scope of, 65–68 on shoulder, 220, 221, 222–23 as signals, 227–28 significance of, 263–64 stigma of, 180 See also facial branding; irons, branding; pilgrimage tattoos; tattoos bravery, tattoos representing, 47 Brayer, Nicholas, 184 Brazil, 64, 72–74, 147 Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, A (Harriot), 20, 25, 26, 28–29 Britain, 25–26, 71 See also England British colonies, 70–73 Brittannia (Camden), 25–26 Brun, Jacques Le, 125 Bruyère, Jean de La, 246 Bry, Theodore de, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 36n45 Bulwer, John, 3 Burchett, George, 116–17 Butler, Judith, 258 Cain, mark of, 1, 145, 159n15, 164 Calvin, John, 146, 194n64 Camden, William, 25–26 Candidius, Georgius, 39 Candido, Mariana, 74 Cape of Good Hope, 76 capitalism, 63, 233 Caribbean, 6, 64–65, 66, 70–73 Carswell, John, 97–98, 112 Carvalho, Marcus J. M. de, 76 Castodio, Luis, 77 Catherine, Saint, 186 Catholic Church/Catholicism, 7, 146–48, 178, 181

Index Catholic Reformation, 137–38, 144, 178 Chambers, Douglass B., 70 character, 145–46 Charmes, Gabriel, 102, 116 cheek, branding on, 231–32 See also face; facial branding Chen, Xiao, 9, 37, 265 Cheng, Anne, 263 Chewhan people, 53 Cheyfitz, Eric, 22 China/Chinese colonization, 9, 10, 38, 40–43, 44–54 Christianity, attitudes toward tattooing in, 86–87 Chrysostom, John, 149 circumcision, 2, 146, 147 Clarke, Samuel, 231 Clarkson, Thomas, 72 Codex Iustinianus, 221, 222, 224 coins, minting of, 62 Colart, Alixis, 183 Collet, Pierre, 189, 194n64 colonization Chinese, 9, 10, 38, 40–43, 44–54 European, 22, 31, 36n44, 265 commodity cultures, 63 communication, through skin marking, 20, 23, 29, 90-91, 250 Companhia Geral do Grão Paré e Maranhão, 74 Conboy, Ana Fonseca, 7, 143, 264 Confucianism, 41 Constant, Jacob, 39, 40 Constantine (Emperor), 86, 221 Cook, James, 4, 85 Coptic tattooists, 97–101 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) blood within, 213–14 blush within, 214 characterization within, 203 monstrous term within, 204, 205 overview of, 9–10, 11, 199–200, 264–65 performances of, 210–11, 215, 218n48 scar narratives within, 208–15 theory-oriented criticism of, 200 tongues image within, 204–5 wound discussion within, 202, 205–7, 210, 212–13 wound identity within, 201 wound narratives within, 208–15 wound significance within, 200 Corneille, Pierre, 149, 151, 153–55 Corneille, Thomas, 244 Coryate, Thomas, 90 cosmetic patching, 244–45, 250 Cotovicus, Johannes, 92

275

Courcelles, Dominique de, 125 Council of Trent, 137, 146, 148, 181 criminals, 59, 220-22, 230, 232–33, 257–58, 259–60 Cromwell, Oliver, 244 cross, 87–88, 89 See also Jerusalem cross cross-cultural encounters, 21, 22, 31–32, 38–43 crucifixion of Jesus Christ, 90, 102, 104–5, 109, 112, 113, 130–31 crusaders, skin markings of, 87 culture of the self, 261 cut, of Saint Hubert, 181–85, 188, 189–90 Dagobert (King of the Franks), 126 Dagregisters Zeelandia (Pebel), 40 D’Alviera e Silva, Joze Antonio, 77 Dampier, William, 85, 118n2 Dan people, 43–44, 55n35 Dasemunkepeuc, 25 Dauge-Roth, Katherine, 1, 5–6, 7, 20, 44, 125, 163, 221, 259, 263–64 dehumanization, 58, 62–65 DeMello, Margo, 64, 201, 210 Descartes, René, 7, 126–27, 131–34 Desfontaines, Nicolas, 149, 151 De stigmatismo, sacro et profano, divino, humano, daemoniaco (Raynaud), 3, 138n1, 146 devil’s mark, 146–47 Dickinson, John, 62 Dictionnaire chrétien, 145, 147, 158n4 La discrète (film), 239–41, 250 Le distrait (Regnard), 248 divination tray, 2 Dodart, Denis, 184 dogs, 166, 173 Dolan, Frances, 244–45 Domingos Gomez Louriero & Sons, 77 Dominicans, 46 dragomans, Bethlehem, 89–90, 92–94 Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspoedige Reysen (The perillous and most unhappy voyages of Jan Struys), 56n50 Drogarman, Atala, 92–93 Dubois, Laurent, 70 Duncan, John, 76 Dutch, 39–40, 46 Dutch East India Company, 39 Easter, 96, 97 ecstasy, 127–28 Edict of Nantes, 138 Edwards, John, 233 Edward VII (King of United Kingdom), 116

276 Egyptians, tattoo usage by, 85–86 Elizabeth (slave ship), 75–78 employment, branding and, 233 Eneman, Michael, 102 England, 222, 224, 230–34 See also Britain enslavement baptism and, 74 body memory within, 60 branding for, 58–59, 227–28, 265 markings of, 3, 8, 15n26 overview of, 58 paradox within, 64–65 privileged slaves within, 69 records regarding, 66–68 royal stamp and, 73–74 runaways from, 70–72 scope of, 65–68 slaveholder practices regarding, 60 slave value within, 64–65 epidermalization, 259 Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa), 66 Erickson, Peter S., 257 Esquivel, Jacinto, 45–46 “Essay on Popular Discontents” (Temple), 230–31 ethics of the skin, 261–62 Ethiopians, skin markings of, 91, 120n36 Europe, 4, 163, 165–67 See also specific locations European colonization, 22, 31, 36n44, 265 Europeans communication by, 20 hybrid skin marking on, 3, 88, 91-111 Levantine Christian tattooing of, 9, 91-111 literacy and, 22–23 marking of enslaved people by, 3, 68-78 Native Americans and, 20, 21–22, 30–31 perception of tattooing by, 51–52, 54 physical characteristics of, 39 pilgrimage tattoos of, 91–92, 117 skin color classifications by, 40–41 Eustache, Saint, 149–53 exclusion, through branding, 62–65 Fabri, Felix, 87 face baptism sign on, 144, 145 Christian mark on, 146, 160n24, 164 cultural markings on, 91 as lunar landscape, 259 relic insertion on, 167 Saint Hubert cut on, 181–85, 188, 189–90 facial marking branding devices for, 232

Index criticism of facial branding, 220–27 as punishment, 64 regulations regarding, 8 symbolism of, 192n29 Fanon, Frantz, 259 Fanselow, Frank, 63 Fayet, François, 171, 174, 176, 177 Fend, Mechtild, 262–63 Ferreira, Roquinaldo, 73–74 “Finette Cendron” (d’Aulnoy), 246 Flávio dos Santos Gomes, 76 Fleischman, Richard, 64–65 Fleming, Juliet, 27, 28 flies, 247, 248 forehead. See face; facial branding Formosans, See Indigenous Taiwanese Foucault, Michel, 3, 257 France, 124–25, 137, 221–22, 238, 244 Franciscans, 87–88, 89–90, 92 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 87, 88, 128–31, 134, 137 Francke, August Herman, 109 Frankfurt, Germany, 224, 226–27 Franklin, Benjamin, 248 French martyr plays, 148–50 frescos, 85–86 Friedrich III (Emperor of Germany), 116 Fuentes, Marissa, 60 fugitives, branding of, 61 See also criminals Furetière, Antoine, 170, 179, 244 Gabaret, Nicolas de, 229 Garcia V (King of Kongo), 75 Gaudio, Michael, 32 Gaulle, Francisco de, 54n5 Gaustato, Salvador, 77 Gazetteer of Taiwan Prefecture, 41 Gell, Alfred, 20 gender, tattoos reflecting, 50–51 George, Saint, 113 George V (King of United Kingdom), 116 germ theory, 261 Gerson, Jean, 178 Gibson, Roy K., 243 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 262 Goldstein, Claire, 10, 238, 265 Golgotha, tattoo of, 112 Gombelaut, Caesar, 226–27 Gonçalves, Manoel, 74 grace, 164 Graham, Steven, 99 La grande odalisque (Ingres), 262–63 Gregory of Tours, 168, 180 Groeben, Otto Friedrich von der, 94, 102, 106–9 Groebner, Valentin, 227

Index Guerre, Martin, 227 Hairabedian, Alexander, 97 Hairabedian, Barouyr, 97 Haley, Marie Philip, 153 Hammurabi, Code of, 61 Han Chinese, 54n2 hands, marking of, 53, 62, 220, 225 Hannemann, Johannes Ludwig, 226 Harriot, Thomas exploration by, 19 phonetic writing system of, 31–32 writings of, 21–22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32–33 Hartman, Saidiya, 59–60 Hawthorne, Walter, 72 head-hunting tattoos, 43–47, 56–57n52 healers controversies regarding, 185–87 marked by a cutaneous sign, 185–87, 195n73 Pauliani, 186, 195n74 of Saint Catherine, 186 of Saint Hubert, 182–83, 184–87, 189 heal/healing ambivalence regarding, 189–90 branding and incisions for, 7, 163 cutaneous marks as sign of ability to, 186, 195n73 cut of Saint Hubert and, 181–85, 188, 189–90 keys as source of, 167–77 of rabies, 7, 165–67, 178–79, 189–90 with relics, 181–82, 186, 187–89 superstition regarding, 164 See also healers Histoire du temps, ou Relation du Royaume de Coqueterie (d’Aubignac), 246 Historie of Great Britaine (Speed), 26 History of the Sevarambians (Vairasse), 228–29 Hodgeson, Thomas, 69 Holland, Peter, 204, 205 Holy Land, 9, 25, 89 See also pilgrimage tattoos Holy Sepulcher, 104, 105, 112 Hopper, Matthew S., 8, 58, 265 Hostetler, Laura, 49–50 Huang Shujing, 48 Hubert, George, 185 Hubert, Saint Abbey of, 168, 170, 178, 181, 182, 185, 187 cut of (la taille), 181–85, 188, 189–90 invoking power of, 168 keys of, 170, 174–77, 178, 180 (see also irons, branding) representation of, 172, 173 Hunt-Kennedy, Stefanie, 72, 73

277

Huygens, Christiaan, 126, 131, 133 hygiene, 261 identity, skin marking and baptismal mark and, 144–50, 157 of Bizaya people, 43 enslavement and, 75, 227–28 expression of, 44, 190, 247–48 of hagiographic protagonists, 150–53 Indigenous Taiwanese and, 38, 42–43 imagination according to de Sales, 126–31 according to Descartes, 126, 131–34 according to Montaigne, 126 end of, 135–37 significance of, 125–26 stigmata and, 126–34, 135–37 Imbert-Gourbeyre, Antoine, 124–25 Indigenous Americans. See Native Americans Indigenous Taiwanese, 39–40, 45, 52, 53 as barbarians, 41–42 characteristics of, 39 customs of, 41, 49 head-hunting by, 43–47 illustration of, 50, 52 Qing Empire and, 41 skin markings on, 38, 39, 41–42 tattooing of women, 50–51 tattooing, overview of, 47–52, 56n50 infection, 166, 185 See also rabies Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 262–63 Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations, An (Wanguo jinzheng kaolue) (Zou), 47 Investigations of the Savage Customs in Six Categories (Fansu liukao) (Huang), 48 irons, branding controversy regarding, 177–80, 192n28 overview of, 167–68 process of using, 170–71 for rabies cure, 167–68, 192n27 of Saint Hubert, 170, 174–77, 178, 180 of Saint Peter, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 182 symbolism of, 192n29 types of, 169, 170–71, 174 Isert, Paul Erdmann, 69 Islam, tattoo prohibitions within, 87 Italian Galley (slave ship), 69 Jagendorf, Zvi, 209–10 Jamaica, 70–72, 228 James, Saint, the Greater, 100, 115 James I and VI (King of England and Scotland), 103

278

Index

Jansenism, 138 Japanese Empire, Taiwan added to, 47 Jerusalem, 25, 91–92, 116–17 See also pilgrimage tattoos Jerusalem cross description of, 104 illustration of, 88 symbolism of, 88–89, 90 tattoo of, 105, 108, 112, 113, 115, 116 See also pilgrimage tattoos Jerusalem tattoos, 85, 98, 102 See also pilgrimage tattoos Jesuits, 138 See also specific authors Jesus Christ crucifixion of, 90, 102, 104–5, 109, 112, 113, 130–31 keys of the kingdom and, 170, 174 stigmata of, 128–29 tattoo of, 104, 105, 108 Johnson, Marguerite, 244 Jones, James, 231 Jonson, Ben, 224 Josse, Toussainte, 135 Journal of the Illustrious Nuns of the Ursuline Order, 135 Judaism, tattoo prohibitions within, 86 Judeo-Christian traditions, skin markings within, 2, 86-87 Justinian (Emperor), 221 Kaempfer, Engelbert, 85 Kahn, Coppélia, 213 Katherine Galley (slave ship), 69 Keefer, Katrina H. B., 3, 8, 12n4, 58, 265 Keevak, Michael, 40 keys of heaven, 171, 176, 177 Keyssler, Johann Georg, 96, 102 kinship relations, tattoos representing, 49 Kleinpaul, Rudolf, 102 knighthood, Jerusalem cross as symbol of, 89 Kollonitz, Siegfried von, 109–17 Kongo, Kingdom of, 73–75 Koschorke, Albrecht, 260, 261 Koslofsky, Craig, 1, 8, 68, 220, 259, 260, 265 Kracauer, Siegfried, 259 Kupperman, Karen, 25 laborers, branding of, 222, 227–28, 230, 231, 233 ladies-in-waiting, tattoos of, 44 Lancre, Pierre de, 186 law, 61, 72-73, 86, 220-22, 224 Lebrun, Pierre, 171, 180, 182, 184, 187 Lewy, Mordechay, 4–5, 9, 85, 264 Libri medicinales (Aëtius of Amida), 94

Ligniville, Anne-Catherine de, 248 Lin Lin, 37–38 Lin Qianguang, 41 literacy, 22, 31–32 Lithgow, William, 92, 93, 94, 103–4 Liushiqi (liošici), 51 livestock, within brand economy, 63, 64 Livingstone Smith, David, 63 Lonckjouw people, 40–41 Loos, Adolf, 258 Lopez da Silva, Manuel, 77 L’Orféa (cosmetics company), 241, 242 Louis, Jean, 188 Louis XIII (King of France), 185 Louis XIV (King of France), 185 Ludolf, Heinrich W., 109–17 Lund, Johann, 105 Lundius, Johannes, 95, 105, 117 Lusophone sources, branding records within, 67 Lyons, John D., 125, 136 Lypos, Jacques, 183 Madonna, 238 magical-medicinal writing, 163 Maimonides, 86 Manuel, Pedro, 164 marble, Neoclassicism’s fetishization of, 263 marginalized people, tattoos and, 44 mark of God, 2, 149 mark of the Beast, 1–2, 146, 164 Maroons, 229 Marquis of Angosse, 171, 174, 177 marriage, 50–51 Marshall, Cynthia, 201 Martyr, Peter, 28 martyrdom, 148–50 Le martyre de saint Eustache (Desfontaines), 149, 151 Mary (mother of Jesus), tattoo of, 100, 112, 113 Master of the Life of the Virgin, 173 Maundrell, Henry, 95, 102 Maunoir, Julien, 132, 140n30 McKendrick, Karmen, 200 medical cauterization, 167–77 medical empiricism, 188–89 medicine, popular errors within, 163 Meere, Michael, 144, 148 Meillassoux, Claude, 64 Meinardus, Otto, 104 “Memoria de las cosas pertenecientes al estado de la Isla Hermosa” (Esquivel), 45 Mercure galant, 245, 246, 248, 249 Mersenne, Marin, 126, 133, 134 Michaëlis, Sebastien, 159n11 military mark, 143

Index miracles, demand for, 180 See also healing Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, The, 251 Miscellanea (Temple), 231 Mishnah, tractate Makkot, 86 Mitchell, M. D., 69 modernism, 258 monopoly, of tattooing, 44 Monroe, Marilyn, 238 Montaigne, Michel de, 126 “Moors,” skin markings of, 91 Morga, Antonio De, 42 Morgan, Philip, 64–65 Morgues, Jacques le Moyne de, 39 Moryson, Fynes, 88, 89 motifs, pilgrim-tattoo, 103–17 Motte-Guyon, Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la, 136–37 Mouche. See beauty mark: paste-on (mouche) Mount Zion, tattoo of, 112 multi-media literacy, in early America, 23 mummies, evidence of tattoos on, 85–86 mysticism, physical repercussions of, 131–32 Nana (Zola), 248 Napoleon, 222 National Archives (UK), 67–68 Native Americans, 22, 27-28, 229 communication by, 20 European viewpoints regarding, 9, 21–22, 28, 30–31 literacy and, 22–23 marking practices, 19–20, 28 significance of bodies of, 19–20 tattoos of, 4 nativity, tattoo of, 113 Naylor, James, 223 Nazareth, tattoo of, 112 Neo-Aristotelian rules of drama, 148–49 Nerses the Goldsmith, 91, 93, 97 New Lady’s Magazine, 251 Newman, Andrew, 32 North, Thomas, 203 Nuremburg, Germany, 224 Nyffenegger, Nicole, 5, 10, 199, 264–65 Odle, Mairin, 9, 19, 44, 265, 266n8 Oettinger, Johann Peter, 68 Official Gazetteer of Zhuluo County, 49, 50 Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 231 Oldroyd, David, 64–65 On the Countries in the Eastern and Western Oceans (Dong xi yang kao), 47–48

279

Ossomocomuck (Outer Banks, North Carolina), 19–20 ostracization, through branding, 61, 64 Outer Banks, North Carolina, 19–20 Ovid, 241–45, 249, 250 ox gall, 102 Palestine, 90–91, 97 Pantao people, 45–46 Pappenheim, Alexander von, 88 Paré, Amboise, 167 Passaert, Barend, 40 Paster, Gail Kern, 201–2 Pasteur, Louis, 189–90 Paul, Saint, 86, 90, 159n11, 182, 195n74 Pebel, Thomas, 40 Pedro, Dom, 75 Percy, George, 23 Pessaert, Barend, 39 Peter, Saint illustration of, 171, 174 invoking power of, 168 key of, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 182 Peters, Jeffrey N., 246 Petit, Pierre, 133, 140n38 Philippines, 4, 9, 42–43 Phillips, Thomas, 68–69 phonetic writing system, 31–32 Picard, Marie-Amice, 131–33, 140n29 Picts (ancient Britain), 25–28 piercing instruments, 96 Pierotti, Ermete, 96–97, 102–3 pilgrimage tattoos Armenian and Coptic tattooists and templates for, 97–101 Bethlehem dragomans and, 89–90, 92–94 of European pilgrims, 91–92, 117 examples of, 88–89, 93, 98, 100 Holy Land and, 25 illustration of, 105, 106, 108, 115, 116 motifs for, 103–17 overview of, 117, 264–65 piercing instruments for, 96 pigments for, 102–3 in portraits, 109–12 process for, 102–3 side effects of, 102–3 significance of, 9 symbolism of, 96 symbols used in, 87 technique of administering, 94–95 woodblock technique for, 95–97, 101, 115 See also under tattoos Pintados (picti), of Philippines, 42–43 Pinto, Ofelia, 65

280

Index

Piscopia, Elena Cornaro, 249 Pitt Rivers Museum, 193n32, 193n34 Plutarch, 203 Polyeucte, martyr (Corneille), 149, 153–55 portraits, as source for Jerusalem pilgrim tattoos, 109–17 Portraits of Five Members of the Utrecht Jerusalem Brotherhood, 89 Portuguese Africa, 73–75 Portuguese marks, 66, 67 pouncing, 27 Prynne, William, 64 punishment branding/tattoos as, 44, 61, 62, 220–21, 223, 224, 230, 232–33 of criminals, 230, 232–33, 257–58, 259–60 Qing Empire, 41, 54n2 Qu Dajun, 43–44 rabies, 165–67, 178–79, 189–90 Raleigh, Walter, 19 Raynaud, Théophile, 3, 146 Razzouk, Anton, 99 Razzouk, Georgette, 99 Razzouk, Hagop (Jakob), 97–98, 99 Razzouk, Wadia, 99, 100 Recueil de Sercy, 246–47 Regnard, Jean, 248 Reis, João José, 76 relics, 115, 148, 181–82, 186, 187–89 Relph, Joseph, 225, 234 Remacle le Loup, 168 Renaudot, Théophraste, 166 resurrection of Jesus Christ, tattoo of, 108, 112, 113, 114–15 Reyersen, Cornelis, 39 Richon, Suzanne de, 135 Robert, Jean, 171 Robinson, Merrick, 71 Roch, Saint, 186 Rois, Sabastiao Joze, 77 Roman bourgeois, 246 Roman Empire, 10, 61, 86 Rome, 7–8 Rotrou, Jean, 149, 151, 155–57 Rourke, Josie, 210 Royal African Company (RAC), 228 Royal Jamaica Gazette, 72 Royal Navy, ships captured by, 67–68 royal stamp, 73–74 Royal West African Squadron, 69 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 41 runaways, branding of, 70–72

“Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century” (online database), 71 Rushforth, Brett, 229 Sagard, Gabriel, 85, 118n2 Sainct Eustache, martyr (Baro), 149, 150, 152 Sainte-Beuve, Jacques de, 178–79, 187 Saint Hubert Abbey, 170, 178, 181–83 Saint Hubert cut, 181–85, 188, 189–90 Saint Hubert healers, 185–87 Saint Peter Receiving the Keys (Fayet), 176, 177 saints as protagonists, 150–53, 157 Sales, François de, Saint, 126, 127–31 Sandoval, Alonso, 227–28 Sandys, George, 92–93 Satan, 146–47 scarification, 2, 61, 226–28 Scarry, Elaine, 210 scars, 200, 201, 202, 208–15 See also Coriolanus (Shakespeare) Scheurl, Christoph, 224 Schmidt, Frantz, 224 Scorel, Jan van, 89 Sebu (Philippines), 42–43 Secotan, 27 seduction, 239, 244 Semk, Christopher, 148, 155 Seusenius, Martinus, 89, 92 Sevarite people, 228–29 Shakespeare, William, 9–10, 11, 199 See also Coriolanus (Shakespeare) Shenouda III (pope of Alexandria), 98 Shimon, Rabbi, 86, 119n11 Shoplifting Act, 230–31 shoulder, branding on, 220, 221, 222–23 Shulchan Aruch, 86 Sketch of Taiwan (Taiwan jilue) (Lin), 41 skin aesthetics of, 262–63 color, 11–12, 15n26, 40–41 ethics of, 261–62 European understanding of, 1 publications regarding, 5–6 redefinition of, 260–61 status of, 259 study of, 260 slavery. See enslavement slave ships, 69, 75–78 Sleep of Endymion, The (Girodet), 262 Slisansky, Laurentius, 94, 102, 112 Sluhovsky, Moshe, 125 Small Sea Travel Diaries (Pihai jiyou) (Yu), 41–42 Smith, John, 23

Index Snelgrave, William, 69 social illegibility, 229 social legibility, 227–30 socially marginalized people, tattoos and, 44 social standing, tattoos representing, 48 Somme rural, ou le grand coustumier général de practique civil et canon (Bouteiller), 221 Souvan, Francis, 116 Spanish language, 45 Spanish people, 45–46 Spectator (magazine), 250 Speed, John, 26 Star of Bethlehem, tattoo of, 104, 108, 112 status, tattoos representing, 47, 48 Stedman, Allison, 7, 124, 264 Steere, Joseph Beal, 51–52 Stewart, Susan, 243–44 stigma, 3–4, 86, 87 stigmata Catholic belief regarding, 7 defined, 3, 86, 124 effects of, 128–29 imagination and, 125–27 mechanical explanations for, 125–26 mechanical imagination and, 131–34 mental and emotional coalescence of, 135–36 mystical imagination and, 127–31 overview of, 137, 264 research regarding, 125 rise of, 137, 264 statistics regarding, 124–25 Stigmates (Courcelles), 125 Stone of Unction, tattoo of, 106, 112, 113 Strafbuch (Frankfurt), 224 Struys, Jan, 56n50 Stuart Restoration, 244 Stubbe, Ratge, 95, 104–5 Stubbes, Philipp, 222 Suire, Eric, 125 superstition, 163–65, 179 Surius, Laurentius, 153 Swift, Jonathan, 231 Synodal Ordinances of the Diocese of Grenoble, 179 taille, ritual of, 181–83, 187 See also cut, of Saint Hubert Taiwan, 10–11, 37–38, 39, 45–46, 47 Taiwanese, Indigenous. See Indigenous Taiwanese tattoos in Africa, 2 communication and, 20 denunciation of, 258

281

in ancient Greece, 7–8, 86 historic function of, 33n12 hybrid forms of, 3 illustration of, 24, 27, 29, 52, 53, 90, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116 interpretation of, 22 as literacy, 23 modernism of, 258 mystery regarding, 10–11 narratives of, 201, 210 oral performance or interpretation of, 34n17 overview of, 4, 11, 86 photo of, 98 piercing instruments for, 96 portrait of, 110, 111 power versus personal choice regarding, 8–9 prohibitions regarding, 86–87, 118n10 publications regarding, 5 punishment for, 118–19n11 research regarding, 85 risks regarding, 95 seasons for, 96, 97 side effects from, 102–3 terms for, 27–28 viewpoints regarding, 20 See also branding; pilgrimage tattoos templates, tattoo, 97–101 Temple, William, 230–31 Teng, Emma, 42, 51 Terry, Edward, 90 Tertullian, 161n52 Tetherington, Elizabeth, 233 Thévenot, Jean de, 94, 96, 102 Thiers, Jean-Baptiste, 164–65, 167, 171, 179–80, 185, 187–88 Thistlewood, Thomas, 60 Thomas Aquinas, 164 Three Magi, tattoo of, 112 Three Sermons (Augustine), 145 Tilh, Arnaud du, 227 touch, 22, 28, 141n51, 182, 186, 221, 257, 260 Torossian, Dikran, 101 Torossian, Kevork, 100 Townshend, William, 71 tragedies, Neo-Aristotelian rules regarding, 148 translation, cross-cultural encounters as, 22 Traske, John, 223 Trauth, Nina, 109 Treatise on Superstition (Thiers), 187 Treatise on the Love of God (de Sales), 126, 127 Troilo, Franz von, 94–95, 102, 112 Turks, skin markings of, 91 Tyger (English ship), 19 Tyson, Thomas, 64–65

282

Index

Urban II (pope), 87 Vagabond Act, 222 Vairasse, Denis, 228–29 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 133–34, 141n42, 141n43 Vauchez, André, 125 Venus, 247 Le véritable saint Genest (Rotrou), 149, 155–57 Verniero di Montepeloso, Pietro, 93 Veronica, Saint, 100–101 via dolorosa (Way of Sorrows), tattoo of, 106–8, 112, 113 Viéville, Lecerf de la, 246 Vincent, Christian, 239–41 “Virginia: A Vocabulary with severall Phrases of Speech in Virginia,” 32 Volney, Constantin François, 92, 102 Wailing Wall, tattoo image of, 116 Warnier, Jean-Pierre, 59 Wars of Religion, 137 water, within baptism, 144 Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa), tattoo of, 106–8, 112, 113 wealth, tattoos representing, 47, 48 Weekly Jamaica Courant, 71 Wengrow, David, 63 West, Brian, 65 West Africa, 2, 68, 227 West-Central Africa, 2 Western Wall, tattoo image of, 116 White, John, 19, 21, 23, 24, 29 White, Richard, 23 Winterstein, H., 104, 105 witches, devil’s mark on, 5

women Algonquian, 23, 24 Arab, 90–91 distinguishing marks of, 30 illustration of, 24, 50, 52, 90, 240 Indigenous Taiwanese, 40 Indigenous tattooing of, 50–51, 52 as ladies-in-waiting, 44 photo of, 93 pregnancies of, 134, 141n42 Secotan, 27 tattooing on, 23 woodblocks (as tattoo templates), 95–97, 100, 101, 103, 113, 115 World War II, 97 wounds defined, 200, 202 narratives of, 201, 205, 208–15 pain implication regarding, 210 reading of, 201 significance of, 200 tongues and, 205 See also Coriolanus (Shakespeare) Wright, David, 56n50 Xia Zhifang, 46, 48 Yue people, 43 Yu Yonghe, 41–42 Zaugg, Roberto, 68 Zhou Zhongxuan, 49, 56n50 Zola, Emile, 248 Zou Tao, 47