Patricia E. Skinner - Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe

The Author(s) 2017

Patricia Skinner 1

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Keywords

Probably from a social point of view, a simple facial disfigurement is the worst disability of allthe quickly-suppressed flicker of revulsion is, I am certain, quite shattering.

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 stigmatizingworse, a disgusting condition.

The early Middle Ages have not fared well within this teleological framework of surgical and medical progress: it is telling that studies of later medieval medical and surgical texts have highlighted their rational nature, and through such apologetic the authors of these studies have revealed their own attachment to post-Enlightenment, scientific approaches to medicine.

This book seeks to address such omissions through examining social and medical responses to the disfigured face in early medieval Europe, arguing that head and facial injuries can offer a new contribution to the history of early medieval medicine, as well as offering a new route into exploring the language of violence and social interactions. In its early stages, the research underpinning the book was, it is fair to say, very much shaped by some of the assumptions outlined abovethat medieval people would view disfigurement with at best ambivalence and at worst disgust. Yet this assumption has never been effectively tested within previous historiography. Despite the prevalence of warfare and violence in early medieval society, and a veritable industry studying it (largely, if not exclusively, focusing on the later Middle Ages),

In terms of a social history of facial disfigurement, however, newer fields of medieval studies are highlighting the lives of hitherto unnoticed groups, and offering potential approaches to the topic. A growing body of work exploring medieval impairment and disability touches upon the sensory impairments resulting from political and judicial mutilations of the head and face, and studies of specific groups of people with physical impairments in the medieval past are increasingly being published.

Yet facial disfigurement remains a poorly-understood topic in medieval history, partly because it relates to all of these sub-fields of historical enquiry, and yet belongs wholly in none of them. Combining the insights of historians of disability, forensic archaeologists, scholars of literary and visual culture and the histories of premodern medical practice with a renewed interrogation of early medieval primary sources, it is possible to explore several key questions: The aims of this book are to document how acquired disfigurement is recorded across different geographical and chronological contexts; to examine how the genre of text affects the record of injury and responses to it; to determine the specific medical and health implications that such punishments had for the individual and her/his community; to compare the practical knowledge available in different locations across time to deal with the aftercare of such injury, and ask whether it was applied.

Geographically, the range of the study is wide: sources from Ireland, the Byzantine Empire and most (but regrettably not all) regions in between are mined for examples of disfigured men and women (whether actual, or imagined), and account is taken of regional and linguistic difference, the possibilities of transmission of disfiguring practices, and the potential medical care available at the point of injury. Chronologically, the study ranges from late antiquity (often as reported in early medieval sources) to the pivotal twelfth century. The latter functions as both end point for logistical reasons (the study had to stop somewhere) but also as a point when, besides the legal and intellectual revolution known to older scholarship as the twelfth-century Renaissance, the political landscape of Europe was becoming increasingly defined, and claims to authority (in particular the right to define social outsiders and inflict mutilating punishment) were being negotiated in light of western Europes increasing interactions with both Byzantine and Muslim neighbors. The impact on the physically impaired of the formation of the persecuting society has not yet been fully worked out, except in economic terms, but it seems that there was a heightened awareness, at the end of the period under discussion, of the messages encoded in damaged facial features. Insofar as the source itself was interested in such matters, an attempt is made, therefore, to explore the before and after of selected cases of acquired disfigurement, and to situate them in the broader social norms of early medieval societies.