T H E N E W M I D D L E a G E S Living with DISFIGUREMENT Early Medieval Europe

THE NEW MIDDLE AGES Living WITH DISFIGUREMENT in Early Medieval Europe Patricia Skinner The New Middle Ages Series Editor Bonnie Wheeler English & Medieval Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas, USA The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14239 Patricia Skinner Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe Patricia Skinner College of Arts and Humanities Swansea University Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, United Kingdom The New Middle Ages ISBN 978-1-349-95073-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54439-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54439-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959489 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statu- tory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © Malcolm Freeman / Alamy Stock Photo; released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For LHM and JP, and all campaigners for equality ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The academic profession, particularly in the UK, does not easily accommo- date the non-traditional career pattern. Institutions are wary of appointing people whose age profile, or career history, do not meet certain, unwrit- ten, criteria relating to a smooth and preferably continuous progress from doctoral study to first post and uninterrupted employment. It is a pleasure, therefore, to record my gratitude to the Wellcome Trust for the three-year fellowship (Grant number 097469) that enabled me to return to the profession after a five-year gap, and to the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University where I held most of it. So many people have sup- ported the writing of this book in different ways: at Swansea, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Roberta Magnani and other colleagues within the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research, and Elaine Canning, Nathan Roger and the staff of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities. I should also like to thank Peter Biller, John Henderson and Peregrine Horden, whose challenging questions helped me shape a better project; David H. Jones and colleagues at Exeter for welcoming a pre-modern specialist into their discussions on facial disfigurement in the past two centuries; James Partridge and Henrietta Spalding at Changing Faces, for their inspi- ration and guidance as the project progressed well beyond its original, medieval parameters; Suzannah Biernoff, Mark Bradley, Emily Cock, Luke Demaitre, Guy Geltner, Chris Mounsey, Kat Tracy, David Turner, Wendy Turner, Garthine Walker, Michelle Webb and Edward Wheatley for their insightful comments and interventions along the way; Elisabeth van Houts for her continuing friendship and support (and advice on the Normans); colleagues participating in the IMEMS seminar of Welsh universities; vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Elma Brenner and Ross MacFarlane at the Wellcome Library in London; Bonnie Wheeler for her generous comments and inclusion of the book in the wonderful New Middle Ages series; the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for their careful and engaging comments; Ryan Jenkins and Paloma Yannakakis at Palgrave US for their handling of the manuscript into an Open Access book (the first in the series, I understand!); and finally, my family, who have lent support in so many ways. CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Writing and Reading About Medieval Disfigurement 1 2 The Face, Honor and “Face” 41 3 Disfigurement, Authority and the Law 67 4 Stigma and Disfigurement: Putting on a Brave Face? 103 5 Defacing Women: The Gendering of Disfigurement 133 6 Ways of Seeing: Staring at and Representing Disfigurement 159 7 Paths to Rehabilitation? The Possibilities of Treatment 183 8 Conclusion: Taking the Long View on Medieval Disfigurement 213 ix x CONTENTS Appendix 1: Narrative and Archaeological Evidence for Disfigurement 221 Appendix 2: Disfigurement in Early Medieval Lawcodes 233 Bibliography 245 Index 273 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Writing and Reading About Medieval Disfigurement “Probably from a social point of view, a simple facial disfigurement is the worst disability of all—the quickly-suppressed flicker of revulsion is, I am certain, quite shattering.”1 This statement, made by a person reflecting on his own social challenges living as a muscular dystrophy sufferer in in the 1960s, expresses succinctly the horror that facial disfigurement holds for modern observers, and its perceived place in the spectrum of social disability. Whilst modern medicine has in the intervening five decades largely perfected the process of “improving” the appearance of the disfigured face through prosthetics, surgery, skin grafts and sophisticated cosmetics, the aesthetic and technical genius of some modern medical prosthetics units is often up against deep-rooted psychological damage in the subject, which finds its expression in dissatisfaction with the “new” facial features, and may even lead to outright rejection.2 The ingrained sense of disgust that facial damage is said to provoke in its victims and observers alike is even the subject of psychological studies, where the assumption that an impaired face will evoke such a response is taken as a given fact.3 William Ian Miller puts it succinctly: “There are few things that are more unnerving and disgust evoking than our partibility... severed hands, ears, heads, gouged eyes...Severability is unnerving no matter what part is being detached.”4 The high-profile, modern cases of individuals who have “fought back” from severe facial damage, whether through burns, acid attacks or mutila- tion, have gone some way toward challenging such attitudes; and as historians reflect on the centenary of the destruction and loss of life inflicted in World War I, the facial disfigurement of returning soldiers from two World © The Author(s) 2017 1 P. Skinner, Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54439-1_1 2 PATRICIA SKINNER Wars has featured in a number of research projects, interested not only in the human story of such men, but in the early attempts at surgical and prosthetic intervention.5 As Suzannah Biernoff comments, “being human is an aesthetic matter as well as a biological one.”6 All of this work, however, and the very few studies that have sought to trace the history of aesthetic or cosmetic surgery, start from the assumption that acquired facial disfigurement is and was, universally, a stigma- tizing—worse, a disgusting—condition.7 Reading early accounts such as Ward Muir’s The Happy Hospital, published in 1917, it is hard to avoid the sense of horror that accompanies the loss of facial features.8 The explosion of work in the 1960s on stigma, social identity theory and deviance in the social sciences, including the influential studies of Erving Goffman and Henry Tajfel but echoing the earlier work of Durkheim on anomie9 con- tributed toward reinforcing the apparent marginalization of the impaired or disfigured. Earlier generations of historians, whilst stimulated in their research questions by sociological and anthropological models, were rather too accepting of the assumptions underlying such studies, assumptions that they themselves might share. Thus physical difference, in all of its manifestations, was implicitly labeled as abnormal almost before the study began. The “impairment”—disfiguring injury—led to the “disability”—society’s response to the injured face.10 This owes much to the modern discourse within the history of medicine and surgery of the “progress” made in those fields, the ever-increasing ability of the profession to “fix” faces and bodies, and restore the individual to some kind of “normal” life. Thus both those with congenital conditions, such as cleft lip or palate,

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