Margins : A Journal of Literature and Culture
"From henceforth let no man trouble me":
Epidermal Testimonies of the Early Modern Outcast
Sonia Sahoo
Jadavpur University
Abstract: The present article charts out a narrative history of varied
forms of skin marking (ornamental/punitive, voluntary/involuntary) as a
form of cultural practice in Western Europe from the ancient to the early
modern times to trace its lingering association with deviant otherness. It
engages in a close historical reading of how skin marks intersected with
new identification practices in an emerging early modern bureaucratic state.
The paper argues that the processes of identifying, policing and the
simultaneous marginalizing of Renaissance outcasts such as witches, gypsies,
Jews, or Moors were both literally and metaphorically performed at the
level of the skin. The appeal to a concept of selected epidermal ‘surveillance’
markers such as distinctive skin colour (for Moors or gypsies), vestigial
horns and tails (for Jews), or supernumerary nipples (for witches) endowed
by ‘nature’ or supplied by culture such as brandings, or whipping scars (for
beggars, slaves, criminals, and vagrants) in the absence of such signs assumed
significance in the course of early modern Europe’s encounter with the
demonized other. To validate this hypothesis the paper focuses on the figure
of the vagrant beggar to see how administrative anxieties about the gap
between person (signifier) and paper (signified) were often played out on
the epidermis, the vagrant’s skin literally becoming the locus of a power
play of signs between the state and the outsider.
Keyw
or
ds: Skin, branding, tattoo, identity, sign, identification, marking.
eywor
ords:
Margins : A Journal of Literature and Culture Vol II (2012)
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And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my
wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
master shall bring him to the door, or unto the door
post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an
awl; and he shall serve him forever.
Exodus 21: 6
“Our sentence doesn’t sound harsh. The commandment
that the condemned man has broken is inscribed upon
his body with the Harrow. This man for example” - the
officer pointed to him - “will have inscribed upon his
body: ‘Honour thy Superior’!”
Kafka 2009: 79
There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies...It
engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its
subjects. It articulates them in a juridical corpus. It makes
its book out of them...through them, living beings are
“packed into a text,”... transformed into signifiers of rules
(a sort of “intextuation”), and on the other hand, the
reason or Logos of a society “becomes flesh” (an
incarnation).
Certeau 2011: 139-40.
I
In Ekkehard’s eleventh-century chronicles of the Saint Gall
monastery, the knight Ulrich, who was missing in battle and
pronounced dead, reappears four years later in his hometown as
a pauper. Though his supporters recognize his face and voice, yet
it takes the scar on his hand to convince his wife of the veracity
of her husband’s identity (Groebner 2007 : 98). Ulrich’s narrative
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is part of a literary tradition that conceives scars/ corporeal signs
as locational memory markers and the human skin as the site of
a very specific visualization contract, which if read with care and
precision provides unique, unclassified information about an
individual’s particular nature (Groebner 2007: 98). Following
Augustine ( City of God 22.19) medieval theologians
commenting on the physical resurrection of the dead on
Judgement Day were unanimous in their belief that despite the
physical reconstitution of the tortured and dismembered bodies
of martyrs, their scars would remain as visible symbols of their
worthy mortal lives. An unusually spectacular legal trial intrigued
the mid-sixteenth century French imagination and created a
sensation throughout Renaissance Europe. It involved the
celebrated case of the peasant impostor Arnaud du Tilh alias
Pansette who arrived at the provincial south-western French village
of Artigat at the foothills of the Pyrenees and assumed the
identity, property, and family of the absentee soldier-adventurer
Martin Guerre, charmed his way into the affections of Guerre’s
attractive wife Bertrande de Rols, and even fathered a child with
her. Arnaud was finally beheaded at Toulouse in 1560 when the
impotent and acerbic Guerre returned home after spending many
years abroad.
Of the one hundred and fifty people summoned to court,
more than thirty declared that the scar on the defendant’s forehead
and the three warts on his right hand were tangible proof for
their claim that the man standing the trial was the real Guerre.
Forty-five however stated that the real Martin had a scar beneath
the eyebrow, unlike the trickster. Guerre’s case is interesting in
the way it underscored the import of visible body markings
(though significantly a large group of the subpoenaed remained
undecided as to Guerre’s identity) as one of the most powerful
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images in early modern Europe for establishing factual proof
and producing visual authenticity even as it undermined any
dependence upon older informal modes of identification based
on associations and reminiscence.
For late medieval societies personal and criminal
identification had never posed a problem since a comprehensive
network of kinship ties and private acquaintances determined how
an individual was known in the collective memories and perceptions
of their neighbours. Lifetimes were spent in close association with
land and village, and commercial and social transactions were based
on mutual faith and trust. Guerre posed a problem of identification
precisely because he had been uprooted from the ‘known contexts
of field and family’ (Cole 2002: 7) for eight long years. Despite
its medieval setting Ulrich’s narrative too accrues relevance in a
new world order where identification techniques aimed at making
the body socially visible and culturally legible were acquiring a
rapid sense of urgency. Early modern personal identity documents
such as passports, letters of introduction, and certificates tried to
re-establish on paper the spatio-temporal relation between the
subject and his place of birth/occupation which had been disrupted
in recent times.
Caught in the disjunctive throes of massive socio-economic
changes – land enclosures, sheep-farming, crop failures, changing
modes of economic production, subsistence migration to larger
towns, demographic growth – early modern Europe experienced
a disruption of the feudal community networks and personal
connections on which identification had formerly relied. Such
changes affected a characteristic ‘disembedding’ (a phrase coined
by Anthony Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity, 1990)
of individuals and institutions tearing them away from their
traditional contexts and plunging them into new and unexpected
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systems of social relations. Knowledge about others became
gradually inaccessible in an anonymous, anomic urban world of
eroded class hierarchies, geographical mobility, where status
markers such as dialect, dress, conduct, behaviour, or manners
proved to be less than reliable.
These socio-economic changes were paralleled by the
increasing sixteenth-century bureaucratic imperative to register,
scrutinize, and control a peripatetic and populous society. As
nation-states developed systems of recording information about
its subjects (Higgs 2004) through citizen registration or
intelligence gathering, skin marking offered a rationale for
demarcating ‘undocumented’ populations singled out as unruly
and troublesome. The appetite for information constituted one
of the vital characteristics in the development of the nationstate “whose gaze looked inwards, over a firmly demarcated
national territory to be described, anatomized, and controlled”
(Voekel 1998: 1). In the early phase of criminal recordkeeping
before photography, inked fingerprinting, or biometric systems
had made their advent, the proof of one’s identity was intimately
linked to documentation and identification practices that were
premised on a system of somatic and semiotic equivalence between
body and its textual transcription within official documents, that
aimed at a utopian collapsing of the gap between man and paper.
Yet in reality visible signs seemed to lose potency in a world
where though what was committed to writing was immutable,
the person so described kept on changing.
Furthermore, the generation and authentication of
identification signs was only achieved through an unacknowledged
dependence upon techniques of reproduction. A sign validating
an object or a person acquired its legitimacy through its similarity
to other proxy signs of its kind. Sequentially produced signs
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became susceptible to being counterfeited, rendered even more
threatening because of the deviant uses to which they could be
put. Valentin Groebner cites a case from the second half of the
sixteenth-century where municipal guardians of the German
towns of Freiburg and Cologne found that the badges that had
been handed to the local poor in need of charity, to distinguish
them from non-resident ‘fake beggars,’ were being illegitimately
reproduced and discretely distributed by paupers (2007: 186).
The Infelzettel (Infidel Notes) preserved in the Bern
archives document the successful capture of the elusive body of
the sought after malefactor by closing the gap between person
(signifier) and paper (signified) and celebrating the authorities’
power of identification. When those sentenced and pilloried were
publicly displayed in fetters, they were required to wear pieces of
paper disclosing their names, crimes, and the verdicts passed.
This form of registration documented the successful
identification, representation, and punishment of perpetrators
for public viewing. The explanatory texts appended to their bodies
declared the physical punishment appropriate for the delinquent
(quartering, decapitating, or burning alive) though in practice
law enforcement was limited to pillorying. The Bern state council
stated that it had refrained from executing extreme penal measures
out of mercy and charity. The infidel notes were therefore used
to make public, penal measures that the authorities had decided
not to inflict, thus inscribing their own charitableness and power
over the bodies of law breakers (Groebner 2007: 91).
The Infelzettel documented a crude form of criminal
recordkeeping that was centred on the malefactor’s body,
remedying the problem of accessing, ordering, and disseminating
information in an era that lacked effective centralized
administration and compilation of crime statistics. Skin marks
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became a vital component (amongst other proliferating material
signs of culture such as stamps, seals, badges, and clothes) in the
administrative effort to generate and archive knowledge about
individuals, especially stigmatized groups such as criminals. As a
legal paradigm of identification and surveillance corporeal marks
were perceived to be the ineffaceable double of what had been
recorded about the individual on paper. Identification techniques
relying on the inherent permanence of the body, or skin technologies
harping on the inescapability of bodily marks were used to record
and track individualized identities, and create the impression of
stable selves in an era of shifting roles and elusive identities. They
were driven by the presumption that the empiricity of flesh encoded
a fixed, unitary identity that was continuous or identical with itself
throughout the subject’s existence (Pugliese 2012: 22).
However identification processes were also problematized
by the “aporetic logic” which demanded that identities “must be
iterable and reproducible, while also appearing unique in order
to maintain their identificatory function” (Pugliese 2012: 26).
Thus the distinctiveness of identity was implicated in the
simultaneous dissemination and decentering of that very identity.
Such anxieties about the gaps and instabilities in burgeoning
identification practices where the very tokens of authenticity
could become proof of deceit were often displaced onto members
of groups below the threshold of citizen’s rights, implicating
their bodies in systems of social identification and information
surveillance which marked them as others and closely regulated
their activities. Popular literature dealing with disguise, deception,
identity frauds, and covert identities incriminated the early
modern outcast as ciphers of relentless change and changeability.
The presence of the excluded and thus the non-identifiable
has been an accepted given in histories of identification through
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the ages. Medieval and early modern medical texts often viewed
women as possessing cold and moist natures which enabled them
to exercise the powers of pretense and disguise. Through humanist
educational treatises to moralist anti-cosmetic tracts female bodies
were considered unreadable and indescribable. Early modern
moralists such as Thomas Wright in Passions of the Mind in
General (1601) and Nicholas Coeffeteau in A Table of Humane
Passions (1621) emphasized the importance of blushing and
shaming as moral markers of an individual’s state of mind. In
assuming that women who cannot blush cannot experience shame
early modern philosophy appropriated skin signifiers to reinforce
emergent hierarchies of power, gender, and nation (Iyengar 2005:
103). Similarly early modern cosmetic culture underwrote
feminine duplicity, pride, and guile in its unsettling association
with the woman’s agency to self-create and self-define by
manipulating her own flesh. Domestic manuals, dramatic works,
anti-cosmetic invectives harped on the imagined moral deformity
of women who used cosmetics playing on the implicit association
between painted women and foreign others.1
Thus in the wake of colonial expansion women were joined
by non-Europeans who seemed singularly indistinguishable to
the white European eye. Religion was initially a marker of
difference in colonial areas outside Europe with faith being used
as a justification for conquest and enslavement. As indigenous
people converted to Christianity religion became less useful as a
means of differentiation and skin colour became more significant.
However such bodies, whether of women or Africans, were often
represented as sites of problematic signification, hermeneutic
difficulties, and corporeal ambiguity resisting incorporation into
a ‘regime of vision.’ Similarly early modern anxieties about the
‘unshaped other’ who through their alleged homogeneity and
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flexibility were able to elude identification often surfaced as
‘narratives of the visible signs of the invisible, of perpetual
transformations generating identities beyond recognition’
(Groebner 2007: 90).
II
Early modern topographies of deviance often engaged
socially vulnerable groups- gypsies, vagrants, Jews, witches,
beggars, slaves, Moors, New World aboriginals, and criminalswithin a socio-legal discourse that attached singular importance
to corporeal surfaces in the quest to establish identity, decipher
the truth, and induce punitive surveillance. Such groups were
constructed as unlawful possessors of confidential and potentially
sensitive information/knowledge that the state attempted to
access and interpret. Emerging disciplinary regimes in Europe
practised alacritous reading of the human epidermis for corpus
delicti (material evidence) in the form of distinguishing marks,
scars, or skin colour and wrote on it through branding, flogging,
scratching, and piercing that turned the marginalized body into
an open document/canvas/archive where ‘truth’ was exteriorized
and made fully visible. The skin was an effect of the inscriptions
on it, a palimpsest of past events.
Every body is marked by the history and specificity of
its existence. It is possible to construct a biography, a
history of the body, for each individual and social body.
This history would include not only the contingencies
that befall a body, impinging on it from the outside - a
history of the accidents, illnesses, misadventures that
mark the body and its functioning; such a history would
also have to include the ‘raw ingredients’ out of which
the body is produced - its internal conditions of
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possibility, the history of its particular tastes,
predilections, movements, habits, postures, gait and
comportment. (Grosz 1994: 142)
The texture and features of human skin are governed by
the passage of time, resisting cosmetic desires to govern or reverse
the process, yet once inscribed on the skin no marking can be
removed. Arresting the possibility of transformation in time and
space, scars and blemishes represent embodied memory, a signa
remomorativa of all the interventions and reconstructions to
which the skin has been subjected.2 Inscribed or intextuated skin
invokes both time and space, reminding the time of the event
when the mark was made and the place where it was made. Natural
(e.g. birthmarks, freckles, blemishes) and artificially acquired (e.g.
branding, scars from wounds, bruises etc.) corporeal signs offered
a compelling form of semiotic confirmation, the utopian space
where paper and body met and confirmed each other. As powerful
signifiers of restraint, degradation, and criminality epidermal
markings were steadily appropriated into a discourse representing
the coincidence of bureaucratic law and the ‘invisible’ deviant body.
Corporeal signifiers acquired increasing relevance in the
late medieval reception of Roman law during the course of
transition from older procedures of furnishing evidence through
oaths to new forms of establishing truth through material, visible
evidence. The ongoing conceptual shift regarding the relevance
of bodily marks as probative signs was marked by the fourteenthcentury Treatise on Scars, attributed to the Florentine jurist
Bartolus de Sassoferrato, which gave a precise account of the
classification of scars, defining them in terms of their visibility
and permanence. In Germany the Bamberg criminal code of 1495
explicitly warned judges to pay close attention to visual clues,
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corporeal signa in apprehending malefactors. The correspondence
between social marginality and a system of deliberately inflicted
skin marks has been a close one in Western Europe. Entrenched
in relations of power and their permanence, marked skin has
been put to use from ancient times for stigmatizing and
identifying the marginalized by dominant groups.
Archaeological evidence indicates that tattooing and
scarification were practised by the Mayan, Aztec, and Toltec
cultures for religious and shamanic purposes. The word ‘tattoo’
did not make its appearance in the English language until Captain
James Cook imported it (from Tahitian tatau derived from ta
meaning to strike or knock) after a journey to the Pacific Islands
in the eighteenth-century (Hewitt 1997: 68). However branding
of slaves, barbarians, prisoners of war, and convicted criminals
with stigmata (referring to the prick or mark of a pointed
instrument) to indicate permanent ownership, punishment, and
social exclusion was a widespread practice in the ancient Western
world. It was an effective, low-cost form of identification valued
for its visibility and irreversibility (Cole 2002: 7). It is possible
that the Greeks may have become aware of marking practices
from their neighbours in the north, for instance the Thracians,
in what is now modern day Bulgaria and western Turkey.
Alternatively they may also have been influenced by the Persians
for the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus noted that the
Persian emperor Xerxes tattooed his slaves and Greek prisoners
of war.
From 500 B.C. delinquents or runaway Greek slaves were
marked with descriptions of their crimes tattooed on their
foreheads like the slave who was marked with the words: kateche
me, pheugo (stop me, I’m a runaway) (Connor 2004: 87). More
often they were branded with the marks of their own condition
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or signs denoting their owner, as the character D for doulos,
meaning slave (Connor 2004: 75). Plutarch relates that Athenians
tattooed their Samian prisoners with a representation of the ship
or samaina, while Athenian prisoners were reciprocally tattooed
with their symbol of the owl. As a state control mechanism, the
practice of branding runaway slaves with the letter F denoting
fugitivus, or robbers, gladiators, and miners was continued by
the Romans. The military writer Flavius Vegetius described how
soldiers were inscribed with permanent dots on the skin indicating
the name or the numbers of their military units so that they
could be easily identified if they tried to desert (Gay and
Whittington 2002: 24). The Goths, Lombards, and Visigoths
were reputed to have used décalvation or baldening to mark
convicts (Cole 2002: 7). The general reservation regarding
ornamental marking in Western cultures may have been due to
the stigma and savagery attached to the kinds of lawless and
rootless social groups who were originally marked. Early modern
European and American courts often recommended branding
or mutilation of convicts, and the colonial East Jersey codes of
1668 and 1675 mandated that the letter ‘T’ be branded on the
hand for burglary and an ‘R’ on the forehead for a second offense
(Cole 2002: 7).
The Western classical ideal of smooth, immaculate skin as
a marker of moral/spiritual purity, civility, and beauty was
furthered by the coming of Christianity which strictly forbade
any permanent marking of the body as a signifier of sin, revealed
in the story of Cain who was marked in punishment for slaying
his brother Abel. The Old Testament book of Leviticus (19:28)
tabooed self-mutilation and body adornment through the
injunction –Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the
dead, nor imprint any marks upon you – (though anatomical
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dissections were routinely performed at the University of
Alexandria in the third-century B.C.). In 324 B.C. towards the
end of the Roman Empire, Constantine I, the first Christian
emperor decreed (in the Codex Theodosianus) that criminals
should not be marked on the face but on the arms or calves
instead in order to preserve the divine prototype upon which it
had been modelled. Though tattooing was banned at the Second
Council of Nicaea in 787 A.D. by Pope Hadrian I, a
discontinuous history of body-marking grounded in religious
practice has persisted till today. Thus many medieval crusaders
and early modern European pilgrims returned from Jerusalem,
Loreto, and Santiago de Compostela tattooed with souvenir
Christian symbols (mahdesi) metaphorically modelled after the
wounds of Christ (stigmata) referring back to St. Paul’s letter to
the Galatians – From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I
bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus (6:17) – a tradition
still followed by Coptic, Abyssinian, Armenian, Syrian, and
Russian pilgrims. Religions such as Christianity and Islam also
encourage and accept scarification (process of deliberately cutting
the skin to produce scars) as an honourable practice.
When European explorers and missionaries encountered
tattooing, piercing, and branding among Native Americans and
Africans they applied the same prejudicial stereotypes embedded
in Western thinking about marked bodies in general. For natives
whether in America, or Congo such ornamental practices were
considered positive signs of group solidarity, status identification,
and were commemorative of acts of bravery, or served ritualistic
and religious purposes. Africans brought to the colonies as slaves
often bore scarification marks of royalty, social rank, or servitude.
It is not coincidental that as a verb the word ‘race’ (raza< Latin
radere ‘scrape’) meant to mark or cut the skin in an ornamental
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way, for bodily markings were intimately tied up with racial and
class difference in the early modern period. As a site of inscription
skin was constituted through markings that denoted sexuality,
age, race, and individual history. In Sylva Sylvarum, or A natural
history in ten centuries (1627) Francis Bacon commented on
the bodily modifications of foreign peoples,
The Turks have a black powder, made of a mineral called
alcohole, which, with a fine pencil, they lay under their
eye-lids, so as to colour them black, whereby the white
of the eye is set off whiter. With the same powder they
colour also the hairs of their eye-lids, and their eyebrows, which they draw into arches. . . . The Chinese,
who are olive-coloured, paint their cheeks scarlet. . . .
Generally barbarous people, that go naked, do not only
paint themselves, but they pounce and raise their skin,
so that the painting cannot be taken out, and make it
into works. (Bacon 2007: 1)
In 1652, John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis , a
compendium of body modification practices from around the
world linked race and bodily marking more directly than did
Bacon. Race is a form of cultural knowledge about perceived
phenotypical differences, skin colour being one of the most
common markers of differentiation. As theories of race emerged
the word complexion – from Latin con (with or together) and
plectare (to plait or twine) – too came to denote the natural
colour, tone, texture, or outward appearance of skin rather than
the Galenic combination of humours (blood, black bile, phlegm,
and yellow bile) in the body and an individual’s resulting inner
temperament. Early modern conceptions of skin colour as a
congenital and immutable category departed from the medieval
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notion that skin tone was determined by climate, place, and
astrological constellations.
The prominence given to the colours red, black, white, and
yellow in humoural theory granted signifying value to the hue of
the skin. It is not entirely fortuitous that Noah’s disobedient
second son Ham (Cham) whose black skin was taken to be a
physical indicator of his inherited curse, became closely associated
with Africa only in the fifteenth-century (Benjamin Braude as
cited in Groebner 2007: 133). This connection would
subsequently be used to justify a system of enslavement that came
to focus on Africans as the ‘sons of Ham’. For by this time
complexion and the close correspondence between individuating
body marks and moral character was gradually hardening into a
crude plea for racial, class, and gender prejudices justifiable
through an appeal to ‘nature’, directed at ‘swarthy’ Moors, tattooed
Gypsies, tailed Jews, or witches with hidden teats setting a
precedent for the foundational role that exteriority has played in
Western European identity formations.3
III
From classical times skin has been used as a civic signifier,
an indicator of class status, helping to distinguish between citizen
and non-citizen, freed men and slaves, Christian European and
pagan other. Marking unconsenting marginal bodies was a means
of advertising state power and conferring social identities towards
creating a finely graded civic order. As a cultural practice marking
was not only a status degradation ritual, but also an identifying
and patrolling strategy that aimed at the production of legible
‘informatized’ subjects for a growing documentary state. The
intensifying awareness and manipulation of skin became therefore
a crucial practice in signification regimes that were intent on the
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shaming, stigmatization, discipline, and control of the
undesirables. The fact that branding and scarification practices
were initially applied to cattle and horses to indicate ownership4
signalled the symbolic annihilation of personhood and
consequent dehumanization epitomized in the permanent
marking of criminal status. State authorities often used the liminal
body to construct proto-sociological categories of deviant groups
through physically demarcating them from dominant groups.
Early modern cultural discourses thus narrativized ‘undesirables’
as members of criminal subcultures (such as the witches’ coven,
rogue underworlds, beggars’ and gypsy bands) setting them apart
from ordinary offenders. The discursive and iconographic
‘invention’ of such ostracized ‘target’ groups was expressly a part
of early modern Europe’s civilizing project.
The act of scanning the marginal body for signifying marks,
are predicated on unequal relations of power, representing the
state’s exercise of invasive power and control over the nonnormative body. This section of the paper thus attempts a close
historicised engagement of such bodies within bio-regimes that
reduced them to the status of mere objects and mined their
corporeal surfaces. The witch-craze that swept Western and
Central Europe between the 1480s and 1720s was fostered by
the paranoia of deceptive outward appearances and the unsettling
prospect of one’s innocent and harmless neighbour turning out
to be a recruit in Satan’s army. The desperate search for a reliable
means of identifying witches took the form of stripping, shaving,
and pricking them with long pins (bodkins shaped like an ice
pick) to discover the Devil’s mark in the assumption that the
Devil claimed the allegiance and service of his initiate by raking
his claw across their flesh. The Devil’s seal or sigillum as a symbol
of the satanic contract usually resembled a birthmark, blemish,
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or blotch on the skin (Robbins 1963: 547). The mark assumed
to be insensitive to pain and invulnerable to bleeding was
concealed under the hair on the head, armpits, breasts, or in the
genitalia to elude detection and were used as corporeal proof of
the witch’s diabolic connections. Popular belief also alleged that
after the nocturnal initiation rites the Devil gave the witch a
personal demon to advise her on her acts of sorcery. In return
the witch suckled these ‘familiar spirits’ who usually took the
shape of a cat, dog, toad, mouse, or bird, on her own blood. Any
little swelling or skin lesions whether on the head, under the
arms, or in the genitals, was considered a supernumerary nipple
(witches’ marks) to nurse a demon (Robbins 1963: 547).5
In a continuation of the early Christian tradition of Jewish
demonic filiation- traceable to the Gospel of St. John- Ye are of
your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do (8:44)
- early modern culture figured Jews to have Satanic corporeal traits
such as unclean skin, dark complexion, concealed cranial horns,
and prehensile tails. Just as the peculiar colouration of Jewish skin
was traceable to Satan’s flawed complexion- red, black, or deathly
pale, likewise their diseased and scabrous skin was believed to derive
from Judas’s blemished skin (in France and Germany freckles are
traditionally called ‘Judas’s crap’). Even modern scientists located
the skin ailments and peculiar complexion of the Jews to their
miscegenation with Africans. By the seventeenth-century it was
believed that such contagious scabs (called Plica polonica in Western
Europe) could be cured through the application of Christian blood.
In symbolic terms however, the unclean skin and complexion of
Jews were symptomatic of a moral and spiritual turpitude,
analogous to dirt- the universal sign of disorder (Livak 2010: 91).
The association of Jews with the colour yellow, such as the
wearing of stigmatizing yellow badges6 reflected back on the sickly
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yellow tint of their complexion, as it did at their own cultural
horror of the marked, cut, or mottled skin that went against the
grain of careful Jewish self-prescriptions in the Old Testament
book of Leviticus7 regarding the regulation of leprosy. The figure
of the Jew was part of a growing visual regime that disciplined,
determined, and controlled the normative body features and
epidermal surfaces in order to establish the standardized or ideal
body, much as Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic ‘Vitruvian Man’
established a template for perfect (read as white Caucasian male)
corporeal symmetry.
As the imputed father to the Jews, Satan’s missing genitalia
was symbolically suggested in the physical image of Jewish
circumcision (Genesis 17: 10-14) which may be one reason why
in the early modern Christian imagination the image of the Jew
occasionally drew on the figure of the Moor. Though not
mandated by the Koran, as an essential Islamic rite circumcision
(khitan) was analogous to Brit Milah, the Jewish mutilation rite
performed on the eighth day after the child’s birth. The Moor’s
skin colour and facial features were similarly supposed to have
derived from the Devil, though associations between the Jew and
the African was to become fully entrenched only in the nineteenthcentury (Livak 2010:90). In early modern England ‘Moor’
functioned as a catch-all term that stood alternatively for many
categories- Muslims, Native Americans, Jews, Indians to describe
the ethnically, culturally, and religiously ‘strange’ (Lim 1998: 108).
Texts such as Hakluyts’s Principal Navigations (1589-1600)
and Leo Africanus’s A Geographical History of Africa (1600)
heightened a sense of the Moor’s ‘outsider’ status through a stress
on exotic cultural and physiological differences.
The complexities of religious identity and nationformation in Counter-Reformation Europe combined to make
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Moors and Jews the source of a deep biopolitical anxiety about
imposture, cultural invasion, and phenotypical ‘passing.’ In Spain
the stress on blood-purity led the Catholic Church to issue
certificates of limpieza de sangre (blood purification) which
marked out ‘social boundaries of belonging, heritage, and
genealogy’ (Rana 2011: 35) based (though not exclusively) on
outward signs, skin colour, and physical characteristics. The
problem of religious dissimulation became a significant one
especially in the context of the Spanish Reconquista and the
Iberian Inquisition when the ideology of cultural cleansing led
to mass Jewish and Moorish (often forced) conversions to
Christianity. Concerns about the covert activities of the so-called
crypto-Jews (Marranos/Conversos) and the crypto-Moors
(Moriscos)-who were believed to adhere in secret to their former
religious affiliations-emerged through the exclusionary racial logic
of epidermal darkening or through a reliance on corporeal
markers of religious identity such as the absence of the foreskin,
to give substance to suspicions that were not easily confirmed by
visible characteristics. Thus despite the lack of visible racial
differences Moors were deliberately associated with darker skin
tones than Spanish Catholics (Rana 2011: 36).
At the end of the sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal
were also prime markets for a thriving Transatlantic black slave
trade, with Seville, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Valencia being the main
centres. As an institution slavery brought into close proximity
people who had been socially and geographically distant,
threatening assumptions about static identities in a new world
of exchange and confrontation. The urgent need to fix identities
amidst flux and intermixture made skin colour a vital, portable,
and easily identifiable social marker which everyone carried on
their faces and bodies ruling out the possibility of imposture
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47
and dissimulation (Blackburn 1997: 14).8 Sixteenth-century
Spanish registers confirm that the practice of branding slaves’
faces and hands with scars and tattoos was widespread. Slaves
were also branded for resistance to authority. The Barbados Code
of 1688 endorsed the branding of slaves with a hot iron as
punishment though from 1684 colonial regulations were forcing
all slave masters to brand their slaves with their owner’s initials
to maintain law and order. Whipping was especially common in
Virginia and other southern colonies to punish slaves and slave
revolts. Female offenders were forced to wear alphabets (the ‘scarlet
letter’) symbolizing their crimes on their clothing.
With the expansion of European empires branding as a
marking and controlling strategy was extended to colonial subjects
as well. In Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in
South Asia, Clare Anderson gives a detailed account of penal
tattooing (godna) which marked the name, crime, date of the
sentence, and the division of the sentencing court on the forehead
of convicted life-offenders and perjurers. British authorities seized
upon limited evidence of penal marking in pre-colonial India as a
justification for creating godna (which interestingly was originally
used by Hindu women as a means of ornamenting faces and left a
blue ineffaceable mark on the skin) as a unique kind of punishment
and public exposure (Anderson 2004: 18).9 Anderson sees godna
playing an important role in the penal management and surveillance
of ‘criminalized’ peripatetic social groups, and displaced ethnic
communities such as petty traders, sadhus, fakirs, eunuchs, thugs,
artisan communities such as musicians, dancers, singers, and
puppeteers, or pastoral groups and nomadic tribes such as Sabars,
Chharas, Bhils and those of the North West Provinces (NWP).
The time-honoured European link between vagrancy and
potential criminality, which provided the rationale behind the
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repressive Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 in colonial India,
can also be traced to coercive early modern state legislations and
papal edicts targeted against the perceived delinquency of mobile
liminal groups such as beggars, vagabonds, and Gypsies. The
ethnic diaspora of Roma and Sinti known collectively as the
Gypsies, who arrived in Europe in about 1300 A.D. forced
westward due to the expansion of Islam, were identified by
physical signs of their otherness- tawny skin (which was variously
attributed to the application of walnut juice and to their supposed
origins in Egypt) pierced ears, and exotic facial tattoos.10 Just
eleven years after their first recorded appearance in England the
‘Egyptians Act’ of 1530 was passed by Henry VIII which banned
the Romanies from England and a stringent measure passed under
Edward VI in 1547 (1 Edw. VI. c. 3) stated that Gypsies should
be branded with a V on their breast and enslaved for two years, if
they escaped and were recaptured they were to be branded with
an S and enslaved for life. Punishment for pursuing a nomadic
lifestyle and speaking Romany also included flogging, mutilation,
and whipping.
The appeal to a concept of selected distinguishing
epidermal signs (such as skin colour, horns, tails, supernumerary
nipples) endowed by ‘nature’ or supplied by culture in the absence
of such markers (brandings, whipping scars) assumed significance
in the course of Renaissance Europe’s encounter with the
demonized other. The process of identification and categorization
is based on reciprocity of perspectives, or to a negotiation of
relations between individual volition and external perception.
Early modern analyses of marginal identity presupposed a vantage
point from which a beholder asserted the validity of his
classification of collective traits against the will of the bearer.
Within such a rubric skin marks came to be conceptualized as
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49
visible corporeal representations of the outsider’s congenital and
immutable individual ‘nature’ (rationalized as a person’s limited
ability to change his identity).
IV
Fictions of transformation, narratives of disguise and
mistaken identities focussing on the marginalized throw light on
how identification was being conceived in contemporary times.
Early modern identity (deriving from medieval identitas/
idemptitas) referred not to uniqueness (which was denoted by
the New Latin term ipseitas) but to a set of collectively used
signs (such as name, physical description, insignia, seals, coats of
arms) whose specific combination enabled identification. The
signs representing a person’s individuality gained their authenticity
through their resemblance to other similar signs. An individual’s
re-doublings and duplications of his identity through serially
produced material signs (e.g. badges) call to mind how the new
age of technical (re)production was marked by the ever-widening
rupture between flesh/word, body/image, substance/sign, and
presence/absence. New systems of identification thus had little
to do with the bearer’s body but were rendered genuine through
the mark of the sovereign (royal seals, sealing stamps) or the
authority issuing it (the clerk’s signature or the scribe’s colophon).
Furthermore a sign validated a person if it was indistinguishable
from signs found on other persons of the same group, as for
instance in pilgrims returning with religious tattoos from the
same place of pilgrimage.
Early modern narratives of identification were poised
uneasily between an older traditional ‘somatic’ system centred on
real corporeal presence (where the body of a person authenticated
his identity) and a new reformed ‘semiotic’ system based on
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represented presence. While the reciprocity and
complementariness between flesh and word, signifier and signified,
was an accepted given in Catholic philosophy, Protestantism drove
a wedge between these concepts, placing greater emphasis upon
the immateriality of the word. Consequently the marginalized
body and the semiotic system organized around it became charged
sites through which early modern culture played out its anxieties
of a body that was neither flesh nor figure, but a problematic
dialectic between the two.
Within an emerging information state in a displacement of
the anxieties of new identification techniques, marginal bodies were
staged and read as polysemous, false, and unreliable signifiers
(through their deceitful ability to simulate appearances, and engage
in complex role-playing) serving to rationalize fears about semiotic
destabilization as the dangers of impersonation and counterfeiting.
Symbolizing the vexed relationship between soma/sign their elusive
bodies occupied the interstitial space between attempts at corporeal
violation and textual interpretation. Thus in the history of emerging
identification practices, the body remained uncomfortably poised
between an older corporeal method of identification and a new
semiotic one, aiming if only in theory at an exact translation of
body marks into textual notations, something that continues to
haunt even late modern identity regimes.
Early modern texts dealing with the discovery of and
engagement with the racial other have showed how anxieties of
English identity were frequently imposed onto external others
especially in the New World. However scholars have rightly shown
that constructions of an imagined European/English national
identity were also very often worked out in opposition to internal
others such as the Irish (Stafford 2004), the exoticized gypsy
(Colmeiro 2002) or the rogue (Beier 1985). In the tradition set
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51
by such works the last section of this paper examines a form of
corporeal semiotics that was centred on the demonized figure of
the sturdy beggar/vagabond within the particular socio-literary
context of Tudor and Stuart England. The vagrant was supposed
to feign disease, bodily mutilation, assume names, and fictitious
backgrounds, or forge identity documents in order to evade work,
prey upon public sympathy, and escape policing. In an era of
unprecedented size and mobility of population, multiplicity of
criminal jurisdictions (Westminster, Southwark, Middlesex, and
the City) and the absence of a centralized law-enforcing and
peace-keeping agency the identification, isolation, and controlling
of deviance proved to be an impracticable task. Amidst fears of
the menace such wandering and masterless men (comprised of
demobilized soldiers, runaway apprentices, servants, or contractual
labourers) posed to society, the state engaged in an extensive
programme of ‘penal semiotics’ marking the vagrant’s body with
officially certified visual signs that indicated his enduring status
as an unlicensed counterfeiter.
Attempts at both somatic and semiotic policing positioned
the vagrant body as a problematic signifier mediating uneasily
between the critical categories of word and flesh, bodily violence
and rhetorical figuration. Thus the Edwardian statute of 1547
(1 Edward VI, c.3) authorized the branding of convicted vagrants
‘with an hot iron in the breast the mark of V’ (C.H. Williams ed.,
English Historical Documents, vol. 5. p. 1030, quoted in Carroll
1996: 43). James I revived branding in the Act of 1604 (1 James
I, c.7) which attempted to discourage habitual offenders by stating
that they be ‘branded in the left shoulder with a hot burning iron
of the breadth of an English shilling, with a great Roman ‘R’
upon the iron’ (Carroll 1996: 43). The branded letter was so
thoroughly burned and stamped upon the skin and flesh that it
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remained as a permanent marker of the vagabond’s criminal status.
At the Middlesex Sessions between 1572 and 1575 forty-four
vagabonds were branded and presumably secured to the back of
a cart and flogged until their backs were bloody.
Apart from branding the state also endorsed whipping as
a means of writing on the skin. In 1531 Henry VIII proclaimed
that guilty beggars and vagrants would be ‘stripped naked, from
the privey partes of their bodies upward...and being so naked, to
be bounden, and sharpely beaten and skourged’ (Carroll 1996:
43). If the beggar was arrested within a short time, he risked the
same punishment unless it was evident through ‘the tokens on
his body, that he hath ben al redy skourged or beaten, they shall
then suffer him to depart without other harme, with a billet
signed by them, mencioninge where, and what time he was beaten’
(Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds, 143-44,
quoted in Carroll 1996: 43-44). Other forms of bodily marking
included burning “through the gristle of the right eare, with an
hot iron of the compasse of an inch about, as a manifestation of
his wicked life” (Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles,
1.310, quoted in Carroll 1996: 44).
Carroll maintains that such punishments eliminated “the
constant need to uncover and ‘read’ the sturdy beggar’s body so as
to reveal his fraudulence, it also ensures that the vagrant can never
escape his or her status, and thus preserves the very condition that
it purports to control and suppress” (Carroll 1996: 43). Marking
thus rehearsed and legitimated the dominant culture’s discursive
power over the marginalized body, setting it down as state property.
Furthermore disciplinary marking tried to convert intractable flesh
into intelligible semiotics through a conversion of scars and wounds
into explicit words. The vagabond’s scarred body marked the
normative and theoretical collapse of the antagonistic relationship
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53
between corporeality and textuality - between theories of
representation and claims to material, ‘real presence’ on the other.
In the new age of technical (re)presentation imitation was
no longer considered a matter of forgery or deceitful duplication
(contrafarre) but rather the real or lifelike copy (contrefatt) of
an object, person, or picture. In portraiture al naturale (from the
life) stood for the absence of the depicted, referring to the
technique of duplication, to the gap between a painting and the
absent body it depicted and that each subsequent copy preserved
(Groebner 2007: 38). Thus Tintoretto was commissioned in 1579
to produce portraits al naturale of Emperor Sigismund who had
died in 1437 and of the first Margrave of Mantua who had
passed away in 1444 (Groebner 2007: 38). Painters such as Jacopo
de Barbari and Albrecht Dürer took pride in their counterfeiting
skills and practiced skilled reproduction through transfers to other
media (Groebner 2007: 188). The question of reproductive
techniques generating originals, duplicates, or forgeries was
entirely a matter of context. The vagrant-impostor surfaced in
just such a world where the issue of reproducing the authentic
was presenting itself in a new way (Groebner 2007: 187), and
where doublings of the self on paper, wax, lead, or parchment
constituted the proof of identity. From William Browne’s Britannia’s
Pastorals (1613), Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), I Henry IV
(1597) to popular literature such as Robert Greene’s series of conycatching pamphlets, Thomas Dekker’s The Belman of London
(1608) and O Per Se O (1612) harped on the dangers of semiotic
confusion in a contingent world where dress or deportment was
no longer a reliable guarantee of social class and status.
John Awdeley in The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561)
reports how some vagabonds “will go commonly well apparelled,
without any weapon, and in place where they meet together, as at
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their hostelries or other places, they will bear the port of right
good gentlemen, and some are the more trusted” (Awdeley, in
Kinney 1990: 95). Through a reliance on the discrepancy between
signifier and signified, the rogue manipulated his own appearance
through feigned illness, bodily mutilation, deceptive clothing, or
transformed sex to pass off as a destitute beggar or respectable
citizen, representing mastery over the codes of civil society. The
cover illustration of an early rogue pamphlet by Robert Copland
entitled The Highway to the Spital-House (1535) depicted a beggar
in formless clothing, floating on the page with literally no
foundation to secure him in contrast to the firmly grounded figures
of the author and the porter. The image served to underscore the
beggar’s mobile and unstable identity. Similarly in Thomas Harman’s
pamphlet A Caveat for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called
Vagabonds (1566) Nicholas Jennings, the counterfeit crank, figures
as a false signifier, bearing no lasting meaning. Harman displays
skill in reading through the crank’s performance as he relates
Jenning’s explanation of his own appearance
‘Ah, good master, I fell down on the backside here in the
foul lane hard by the waterside, and there I lay almost
all night, and have bled almost all the blood out in my
body.’ It rained that morning very fast, and while I was
thus talking with him, an honest poor woman that dwelt
thereby, brought him a fair linen cloth and bid him wipe
his face therewith, and, there being a tub standing full
of rainwater, offered to give him some in a dish that he
might make himself clean. He refuseth the same. ‘Why
dost thou so?’ quoth I. ‘Ah, sir,’ saith he, ‘if I should
wash myself, I should fall to bleeding afresh again, and
then I should not stop myself.’ These words made me
the more to suspect him.
(Harman in Carroll: 1996: 129-30)
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The story of Jennings is paired with a woodcut titled
Nicholas Jennings in Two Roles depicting on the right-hand side
the false Jennings, a man in gauze and rags with bent posture and
bare arms, on the left is pictured the real Jennings, in formal
gentlemanly attire, standing fully erect (Pories in Relihan 1996:
36). The accompanying verse underscores the hazards of serial
(re)production and the limits of human perception.
These two pictures lively set out
One body and soul. God send him more grace!
This monstrous dissembler, a crank all about
Uncomely coveting, of each to embrace
Money or wares, as he made his race;
And sometime a mariner, and a serving-man,
Or else an artificer, as he would feign then.
Such shifts he used, being well tried,
Abandoning labour, till he was espied.
(Harman in Carroll 1996: 80)
Civil authorities attempted to read the vagrant through
self-imposed social significations, supplying signifieds for an
unruly signifier that remained otherwise inscrutable, violently
wresting meaning from bodily marks and putting an end to his
multivalent identity as body and sign, making his meaning
immobile and forever inviolable. However the attempt to make
the vagrant conform to an ordered, patriarchal system of
signification often met with continual interpretive postponement.
In the war of social signification the beggar’s mutilated bodytext figured as ‘hermeneutic surplus’ continually a step ahead of
state efforts to decipher it. Corporeal signs are inherently unstable
in their potential to transcend a single cultural meaning. The
rupture between state regulation and practice opened up spaces
where the simulating (which is dependant according to Jean
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Baudrillard[1983] on absence, threatening the difference between
true/false, real/imaginary) vagabond could demonstrate a
subversive understanding of the cultural codes of punishment.
In The Ship of Fools (1509) Alexander Barclay describes lusty
beggars who
(R)ay their legges and armis over with blood
With levis and plasters though they be hole and sounde
Some halt as cripils, their legge falsely up bounde...
(Barclay in Carroll 1996: 48-49)
Robert Copland in The Highway to the Spital-House
(1536) says of them:
By day on stilts or stooping on crutches
And so dissimule as false loitering flowches,
With bloody clouts all about their leg,
And plasters on their skin when they go beg.
Some counterfeit lepry, and other some
Put soap in their mouth to make it scum...
(Copland in Carroll 1996: 40)
In O per se O Dekker too details the way in which beggars
inflicted wounds and ulcers on themselves:
They take Crow-foote, Sperewort, and Salt, and bruising
these together, they lay them vpon the place of the body
which they desire to make sore: the skinne by this meanes
being fretted, they first clappe a linen cloath, till it sticke
fast, which plucked off, the raw flesh hath Rats-bane
throwne upon it, to make it looke ugly: and then cast
ouer that a cloath, which they doe so often, that in the
end in this hurt they feele no paine, neyther desire they
to haue it healed...
(Dekker in Pugliatti 2003: 103)
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Such attempts to rewrite the body (through removing/
fading inflicted marks or feigning wounds and sores to gain public
sympathy) as a signifier of perverse will enacted a moment of
agency and defiance of the patriarchal imposition of meaning.
More importantly in such cases the vagrant’s body acted as a
false signifier, resisting representation, deliberately manipulating
the relationship between corporeal signa and the referents to which
they pointed. A conversation between a philosopher and a beggar,
taken form a book published in 1596 by Fabio Glissenti an Italian
writer, has the beggar describing his disguising and makeup:
I carry about me, under the hobnail, some dyings, with
which I smear my face according as the time and occasion
require...This is cummin powder, that makes the skin
yellowish; this is soot mixed with white lead that makes
it palish. A whole egg is good to feign an ulcer: broken
on a bandage it looks like pus. Resin smoke makes my
flesh livid, and unguent of white lead smeared on the
livid flesh gives credit to the fact that you have been
beaten, or that you have fallen on the ground, which
people believe has happened to me out of my utter
weakness.
(Glissenti in Pugliatti 2003: 103)
Deliberately inflicted marks or self-mutilations, I argue, may
have acted as complex tools of semiotic manipulation which harped
on the unreliability of the body. By constructing the body through
re-signification the vagrant resisted the state’s claims to gain access
to his body and establish corporeal presence. One typical example
of such a rogue was the Abraham Man (popularly called Poor Tom
of Bedlam) a lunatic beggar who had escaped or been released from
Bedlam Hospital. Though they were licensed to beg yet in the early
modern period Poor Tom was often understood as a stereotype of
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the con-man skilled in grotesque makeup. He was described to be
one who “walketh bare-armed, and bare-legged, and feigneth himself
mad, and carryeth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it”
(Awdeley in Kinney 1990: 91). According to some writers he wore a
metal plate around his arm with an inscription identifying Bedlam
Hospital.Yet his greatest trait was his penchant for real and pretended
self-mutilation (in Hogarth’s image of Bedlam, Tom appears to have
stabbed himself on the chest). In King Lear Shakespeare gives a
memorable portrait of this bleeding and exposed figure:
My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars who with roaring voices
Strike in their numbed and mortified arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,
And with this horrible object from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers
Enforce their charity.
(II.iii,.9-20)
V
It is interesting to mark how despite the ‘tattoo renaissance’
since the 1950s which made body modification/scarification
(such as piercing, tanning among others) a part of mainstream
fashion (adopted by celebrity entertainers, athletes, or white-collar
employees), its basic association with marginality, difference,
criminality, and the perverse remains as a continuing legacy of
earlier times. Yet within the historical perspective traced above it
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is possible to locate a link between the vagrant’s manipulation of
his own body and the predilection of contemporary working
and military classes, prostitutes, or convicts to involuntarily mark
their bodies which reverse the centuries old phenomenon of
involuntary state inscription of socially diseased bodies. While
institutionalized marking can be understood as a rejection of
the skin’s constant flux in the attempt to create a permanent and
patrolled identity, however conscious self-marking of already
inscribed skin or fading of marks suggests that the skin is not a
static but a malleable and fluid surface always open to being
inscribed and re-inscribed.
Voluntary marking enacts a re-appropriation of the body
as property and an assertion of ownership, control, and agency.
Self-inflicted tattooing, body-piercing, and laceration or the
aesthetic of displaying body fluids which should normally be
kept inside (blood, spit, and vomit) rehearse an alternative
narrative of rebellion that tenuously links the fate of sixteenthcentury vagabond-beggars with twentieth-century prison inmates,
bikers, gays, or punk artists (such as the Sex Pistols) who challenge
hegemony and achieve disengagement, autonomy, and establish
subcultural identity. In its ekphrastic mediation of both the visual
and the textual the mark on the flesh accrues enduring relevance
through the ages in its twinned encoding of the cultural memory
of violence and resistance.
Notes
1
In A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women
(1616) Thomas Tuke compared women who used cosmetics to
‘barbarous people, which delight in painting their skinne,’ and further
located the origins of cosmetics in a mythical past, associated with
primitive non-Europeans. Likewise Hannah Woolley in The
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Gentlewoman’s Companion; or, A Guide to the female sex (1673)
likened the current fashion of applying beauty spots or patches on
the face to that of the Indians who were accustomed to ‘print the
volume of their bodies all over with Apes, Monkies, and other beasts.’
2
Medieval medical handbooks distinguished amongst various kinds
of corporeal signs- i) signs inherent in the material properties of the
individual body, such as age, gender, and complexion; ii) signs of the sex
res non naturales, including food, sleep, and movement that affect the
body; iii) temporal signs classified as signa demonstrativa with reference
to present conditions, signa prognostica with reference to future ones,
and signa remomorativa with reference to past conditions. Scars were
cited to be a classic example of the last category (Groebner, 102).
3
This tradition became widespread in the eighteenth-century
following Christoph Meiners’ polygenist theories (1785) which linked
differences in external appearances to differences in moral values. He
propagated notions of unaesthetic African physical appearance and thus
claimed European superiority over African cultures.
4
Patricia Seed in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s
Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (1995) affirms how
Englishmen occupying the New World marked their possession of
the New World by affixing their own powerful symbols of ownershiphouses, fences, grazing animals, and gardens-upon the landscape.
5
The 1597 Aberdeen witch trials in Scotland refer to one
Meriorie Mutche who was accused of being ‘ane manifest wiche; in
taikin therof, [her accuser] schew thy mark vnder thy left lug, in thy
crag, and ane prein being input therin, be the Laird of Essilmonthe,
thow culd nocht feill the same’ (Robbins 1963: 548). In Russia persons
proved to be witches were branded with a red hot iron in the shape of
a cross to warn other people and nullify the witch’s power.
6
This practice can be first traced to Baghdad’s Caliph alMutawakkil in the ninth-century, and introduced in Christian Europe
following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which ruled that Jews
and Muslims must be discernable through their dress.
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7
The Psalms of Solomon (2: 6) in the Old Testament attest to
Pompey’s branding of Jewish prisoners and there are references in the
Apocryphal third book of Maccabees (2: 29-30) to Ptolemy IV
Philopator who tried to force pagan brands on Alexandrian Jews.
8
Valentin Groebner recounts that the Florentine register‘Registro delle schiavie’- containing 357 entries documenting the
Mediterranean Christian slave trade between the years 1366 and 1397
provides detailed physical descriptions especially skin marks appearing
on faces and hands of slaves. In an entry dating to July 1366, Cristina
was described to be around eighteen years of age, of Tartar origin,
having olive skin, a large nose, thick lips, a scar on the right side of
the forehead and on the right index finger, a black tooth, some
pockmarks on the face, and a pierced left ear. The purchaser indicated
that Cristina had been bought for fifty florins (108). One Georgius
from Russia, thirteen years old was said to have a black spot on his
forehead and cross-shaped tattoos on his hands (Groebner 2007: 110).
9
The first colonial regulation on godna passed in 1797 in the
Bengal Presidency ‘stated that the purpose of such immediately visible
marks was the easy recapture of escaped convicts’ (Anderson 2004: 18).
10
In book 7 of the De inventione rerum (1521) the Italian
humanist Polydore Vergil claimed that the Gypsies owed their origin to
the Assyrians, on the analogy that Gypsy facial tattoos were a legacy of
the ancient Assyrian worship of the goddess Atargattis, during which
votaries ‘would carve signs in the joints of their hands and neck. It is
for this reason that all Syrians bear these marks... and go about with
markings and tattoos. From this one can clearly gather that they [Gypsies]
are Assyrians’ (quoted in Groebner 2007: 144-145).
Works cited
Anderson, Clare. Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism
in South Asia. Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, UK:
Berg, 2004. Print.
Awdeley, John. “The Fraternity of Vagabonds,” in Rogues, Vagabonds,
and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart
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Rogue Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Print.
Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon: Sylva Sylvarum. London:
M. Jones, Paternoster Row, 1815. Google eBook. Digitized
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