Description
Book SynopsisInvestigates 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.
Trade Review“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, Stigma 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.”
—Andrew Kettler,author of The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World
“Stigma offers stimulating reading in the expanding field of skin studies and is a beautifully produced point of reference for accomplished interdisciplinary early modern studies.”
—Karen J. Lloyd Journal of Early Modern History
Table of ContentsList 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
