Stigma Marking Skin in the Early Modern World
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Katherine Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France.
Craig Koslofsky is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of 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, and the coeditor of A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger.
<p>“The authors in this volume focus critically on postmodern analyses of race, class, and gender for early modern studies and the history of the body. As a result, <i>Stigma</i> highlights a fresh history of skin that does not center solely on racial identity of the time but instead illuminates the changing, rather than fixed, understandings of skin during the early modern era.”</p><p>—Andrew Kettler, author of <i>The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World</i></p>
<p>“<i>Stigma</i> offers stimulating reading in the expanding field of skin studies and is a beautifully produced point of reference for accomplished interdisciplinary early modern studies.”</p><p>—Karen J. Lloyd <i>Journal of Early Modern History</i></p>
The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world.
By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Europeans described Indigenous tattooing in North America, Thailand, and the Philippines by referring their readers to the tattoos Christian pilgrims received in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. When explaining the devil’s mark on witches, theologians claimed it was an inversion of holy marks such as those of baptism or divine stigmata. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Xiao Chen, Ana Fonseca Conboy, Peter Erickson, Claire Goldstein, Matthew S. Hopper, Katrina H. B. Keefer, Mordechay Lewy, Nicole Nyffenegger, Mairin Odle, and Allison Stedman.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Marking Skin: A Cutaneous Collection
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
Mairin Odle
2. Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes
Xiao Chen
3. Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification
Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper
Part II: Marks of Faith
4. Jerusalem Under the Skin: The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos
Mordechay Lewy
5. Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection
Allison Stedman
6. The Invisible Mark: Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy
Ana Fonseca Conboy
7. Rabies and Relics: Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe
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
Nicole Nyffenegger
9. Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe
Craig Koslofsky
10. Mouches Volantes: The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France
Claire Goldstein
Afterword
Cultural Inscriptions: Body Marking After 1800
Peter S. Erickson
List of Contributors
Index
A history of early modern skin marking from divine stigmata to slave branding.
examines skin marking in the early modern period from a global, interdisciplinary perspective.
includes the first English-language translation of a famous essay by Mordachai Lewy.
Volume editors are established and respected historians
Historians of the senses have laid the groundwork for a sensory turn in contemporary scholarship that has produced exciting work across the humanities and social sciences. Maintaining this historical basis for work on the senses, books published in Perspectives on Sensory History will examine the roles of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching in shaping how people have experienced, fashioned, and understood their worlds. They will explore the full social, political, geographical, technological, or cultural contexts of our senses of space, place, and displacement; ability and disability; affect and social interaction. And they’ll explore these situations across the globe—in both Western and non-Western regions—and in all time periods.
Perspectives on Sensory History welcomes historically informed and theoretically sophisticated scholarly studies that draw from disciplines such as art, archaeology, geography, media studies, and science and technology studies. In addition to specialized studies, the series will occasionally include accessible works that will be of interest to non-specialist readers. Finally, Perspectives on Sensory History will include edited collections of essays on a single topic that juxtapose critical perspectives or intervene in interesting ways.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Katherine Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France.
Craig Koslofsky is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of 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, and the coeditor of A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger.