Cover image for Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World Edited by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

Stigma

Marking Skin in the Early Modern World

Edited by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

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$119.95 | Hardcover Edition
ISBN: 978-0-271-09442-7

$29.95 | Paperback Edition
ISBN: 978-0-271-09443-4

Available as an e-book

294 pages
7" × 10"
11 color/40 b&w illustrations
2023

Perspectives on Sensory History

Stigma

Marking Skin in the Early Modern World

Edited by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

“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

 

  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Bio
  • Table of Contents
  • Sample Chapters
  • Subjects
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.

“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

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.

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

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Also of Interest

Also of interest book cover

The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris

Nicholas Hammond
Also of interest book cover

Objects of Vision

Making Sense of What We See

A. Joan Saab
Also of interest book cover

A Sensory History Manifesto

Mark M. Smith
Also of interest book cover

Brilliant Bodies

Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy

Timothy McCall

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