So why was the same punishment not inflicted upon Septimina? Why target her face? Remembering that the case is being reported by a clerical author, Septimina's guilt was on three counts: first, she plotted against the king (as Droctulf had), but in addition she confessed to killing her husband *and* taking another sexual partner *and* contemplating and using witchcraft. Note the emphasis on magic to get what she wants—at no point is Septimina presented as a violent woman, just a scheming witch. Gregory's language is blunt: "[she acted] out of love for Droctulf and to join with him like a prostitute/*ob amorem Droctulfi ipsumque secum scorto miscere*."39 Here Septimina as woman trumps Septimina as traitor, and her main asset, her face, is targeted for punishment. Thereafter she was sent to work in penal servitude in an all-female space, the *genitio* or *gynaeceo*, where cloth was made, but her role was even more menial, grinding the corn for the workers' food. Why she was not simply executed for her many crimes is open to question: perhaps her former position as a trusted nurse earned her some mercy. It remains to ask, however, why this high-profile couple was packed off (*deducitur*) to rural estates to work, rather than being exhibited for public ridicule, as other plotters were. The answer may simply lie in their former positions: advertising that members of the royal household could be disloyal might not have been wise. These are named figures, whereas those who had been let out "to be ridiculed" are not even named by Gregory—they were, literally, nonentities.

#### Defacing Women

Miller notes that women are barely present in Norbert Elias's account of the progress from medieval barbarism to a civilized society, "except as early guardians of the civilized style."40 This would seem to set up women as a separate group, detached from, and possibly immune to, the violence exchanged between men. Early medieval narrative sources, in particular the work of Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and Einhard in the ninth, rapidly disprove that idea.   Gregory, for instance, reports the punishment of the would-be assassins of Childbert II, two clerics with poisoned daggers, sent by Queen Fredegund. Confessing to their crime, their hands, ears and noses were cut off and they were put to death, but she emerges unscathed from the episode.42 A little later, Einhard reports that a group of conspirators against Charlemagne were exiled, some having their eyes put out first. Einhard attributes the plots against the king, if not the punishments, which after all could be entirely justified by contemporary standards, to "the cruelty of Queen Fastrada," rather than to the king himself.43 The Bible provided plenty of examples of cruel or scheming women as models for medieval writers, and undue female influence on rulers was a common *topos* of the chronicles. Blinding as a punishment and political tool was certainly not unheard-of in Carolingian Francia, but a woman's hold over him was squarely blamed for Charles deviating from his usual "kindness and gentleness." Of course Fastrada had a hard act to follow in Charlemagne's deceased wife Hildegard, and what Einhard sees as cruelty might actually simply be the reality of being part of a large and complex family in which she was the stepmother to his existing children, as well as mother to two daughters by Charles.

Peter Damian drew a contrast, in his story of Ardericus, between the kindness of a natural mother and the hard-heartedness of a stepmother. As Pauline Stafford reminds us, early medieval mothers, particularly royal ones, fought to ensure their own children succeeded to power, and in fact the dynamics visible in Gregory's story of Septimina adhere to this model.44 Septimina was, after all, nurse to the king's existing children, and her accuser in the treason case was Faileuba, the king's concubine, who had recently given birth. Faileuba's new baby was thus a direct competitor to Septimina's charges. Disrupting their upbringing, however temporarily, was at least one way for Faileuba to create space for her own child at court, and ultimately secure her own position.

When a mother did not live up to this early medieval maternal ideal, she might be the object of particular disapproval. Such was the case of Empress Irene of Byzantium, who acted as regent for her son Constantine from 780 until he came of age c. 790, but ruled alone after removing him from power and having him blinded in 797. Steven Runciman's rather picturesque assessment of her conveys the ambivalence of modern scholars to her actions: "In these days of Women's Liberation... whether she was, in her methods and her achievements, an ornament to the movement, is a matter of opinion." Linda Garland states that Irene had "manipulated events and personalities to this conclusion."45 Even the contemporary chronicler Theophanes, understood as something of an apologist for the empress because of her support for icon-worship, describes the blinding as "cruel and grievous" and intended (unlike other political blindings) to kill the young emperor. Whether it succeeded is unclear.46 Either way, Irene's blinding of her son actually differs from some other instances not because she was his mother, but because her actions could not be justified: Constantine was not a usurper, after all, even if his attempt to rule alone could be interpreted as disrespectful to his mother. Yet Theophanes, in an earlier passage, sets Constantine up as an equally cruel ruler who, in putting down a plot by the Caesar Nicephoros (whom he blinded), also had the tongues of his four paternal uncles cut out. "God avenged this unjust deed" when Irene blinded Constantine in turn.47 Irene managed to stay in power for a further five years before being deposed in 802 and exiled to Lesbos. Notably, as in the cases of other empresses already discussed, she was neither mutilated nor blinded: despite having been called *basileus/emperor* on at least one coin issue, it was unnecessary to incapacitate her further.

Irene's actions expressed her power at its height. Much later, Abbot Guibert of Nogent interprets another apparently unjust action by a woman as an "exhibition of power" as well, when he discusses (but does not name) Alais, the mother of Count John of Soissons. She is reported as having ordered the tongue and eyes of a certain deacon to be cut out, but suffered divine punishment with paralysis and the loss of her own ability to speak. More horribly, the treatment that she received involved the cutting of her own tongue, which in fact hastened her death. This story needs to be set in context: Guibert, as Anna Sapir Abulafia has demonstrated, considered John and his family heretics, particularly close to the Jews of Soissons, and so his portrayal of Alais effectively martyring a servant of the church represents an [un]edifying tale.48 It is notable, however, that he credits the dowager countess with the ability to exhibit her power—perhaps this, too, was the sign of a family out of control. Yet we have relatively few examples of female "cruelty" to set alongside the innumerable episodes that involve men giving the orders.

#### Women, Honor and Face

Despite the occurrence of women apparently fighting back or inflicting disfiguring injuries on others, it is difficult to categorize their actions as engaging fully with the "honor culture" of medieval society. To characterize it as such ignores the fact that women did not, as a general rule, enjoy the "rough equality" (a striking echo of Eileen Power's famous statement) characteristic of honor-based social relationships.49 Rather, they formed part of the group that Miller has termed "those not deemed good enough to play" the honor game.50 Although he more likely was thinking in class rather than gender terms, Miller's comment is suggestive—women did not in general participate in the reciprocal rituals of defending honor through direct or indirect violence. As we have seen, female violence was regarded as aberrant, absurd. If women sought redress at all, it was in the courts, and even there they might not achieve their goals. Battered Welsh wives, for example, if their husbands had not drawn blood, might find themselves condemned for bringing the case; they were expected to be submissive, particularly to their husbands, and to know their place in the hierarchy, and challenging their husband in public disrupted this framework.51 The vulnerability of women, as we have already seen, came from the fact that their faces were, to a certain extent, symbolic of their bodily integrity. A woman or girl with a damaged face was immediately suspect, and her shame reflected upon her family and community. In targeting the physical face of a woman, whose beauty has already been noted as a cause for concern, those carrying out assaults were well aware that the resultant bruises, scars or permanent disfigurement would be interpreted by viewers as having a deeper, more damaging meaning for the victim's social status *and* for the standing of her menfolk.

Women's position, therefore, is much more explicable if we instead conceptualize their medieval society as governed by a "face culture," concerned with preserving the dignity of fathers, brothers, husbands *and* sons within their social class, and careful not to demean themselves or their families by having sexual relationships outside of marriage or with lower-status men. Motherhood afforded them some authority, as Peter Damian's letter and numerous studies on medieval mothering illustrate,52 but only over their children, and when sons were grown men they might assume the role of their mother's protector after the death of her husband. This, as Constantine and Irene found, was a relationship fraught with problems.

Licit and illicit sexual relations are central to this scheme of female agency, since it is a focus not only of legislation that prescribes the dreadful mutilation of a guilty woman's face, but also of legislation, such as that in Wales, about when a husband was permitted to beat his wife (adultery being one instance).  Such provisions persisted into the later Middle Ages: a cuckolded husband in the kingdom of Cyprus could kill his adulterous wife and her lover with impunity, but was forbidden to kill one and spare the other (the law here cites an earlier ruling of King Aimery, ruler of Cyprus from 1194 and Jerusalem from 1197 till his death in 1205).53 Either way, the legal material assumes that knowledge of the adulterous relationship will become public, and this is where the mutilation of the physical face (of the woman) intersects with the preservation of the metaphorical face (of the man).

Medieval marriages, like their ancient precursors, were highly hierarchical: the husband had total dominion over his wife, and she was expected to show him submission and obedience. The influence of the Church mitigated this somewhat by demanding mutual respect. Hence an admonition issued in Charlemagne's name after 801 reinforces the wife's duty to obey: she should be "subject to her husband in all honesty and chastity, keeping herself away from fornication, favors and selfishness, as those who [indulge in] these are repugnant to God." Husbands, in return, were ordered to love their wives, and not speak dishonorably to them.54 The hierarchy of marriage demanded that the wife obey her husband and care for *his* reputation—his "face"—as studiously as her own (recall the Welsh law about a wife who disrespected her husband's "beard" and could be legitimately beaten for doing so).55 This explains why legal texts often condemn marriages between socially unequal partners where the woman is of higher social status than her husband (but not vice versa), for such marriages challenged the norm of male domination. If a wife showed a lack of deference, or betrayed her husband, or was even suspected of doing so, she committed a face-threatening act. Let us remind ourselves again of Cnut's law: an adulterous woman, he says, shall become "a public disgrace" and lose her nose and ears.56 But the publicity of the case, and the supposed intervention of royal justice and/or the local bishop who was to "judge sternly" if her attempt at exculpation failed, clearly had the potential not only to disgrace the woman herself, but also her husband, whose position as cuckold would have been exposed by any proceedings. The fact that he was to receive all that his wife owned seems to be related to the compensation culture that accompanied other laws. There is, predictably enough, a doublestandard at work here, for previous clauses of the code, dealing with male adulterers, fornicators, rapists and men committing incest, are punished by compensation and fines (in contrast to earlier Byzantine law on the same topics).57 Not only did she lose her own reputation and status, but she damaged her husband's reputation and standing as well (although we have to wait till the later Middle Ages to engage with the figure of the "cuckold", so prominent and so targeted in early modern culture).58 And this, I suggest, is why her own, physical, face was seen as a legitimate target for punishment.

What responses might a facially-mutilated woman expect from her community?  I have noted above how mutilation of the nose, or even its complete removal, was an Old Testament penalty against loose women that found its way into multiple legal codes. In Byzantium, we should note, it was threatened for sexual misdemeanors by women and men, and for incestuous as well as adulterous relationships, and in Sicily it was targeted at women who pimped their daughters. In Spain, the penalty occurs in Jewish rabbinic responsa on the adulterous wife, where the purpose of such a mutilation was set out plainly—it was to deprive the woman of the beauty with which she had wooed her lover.59 So beauty here was a threat, and needed to be made ugly to neutralize its danger. Thus Septimina's punishment—as reported above by Gregory—addressed not (or not just) her treasonous act but also her sexual history. It therefore went beyond the penalty imposed upon Droctulf (who is not, we might note, ever referred to as a fornicator). Similarly, although Cnut's laws demand that an adulterous wife be deprived of her property—a financial compensation for her husband's loss of face—they also demand the physical mutilation of the woman herself. William Ian Miller comments that here "the idea of compensation has lost out completely to ideas of punition... The point is to render her so physically repulsive that she will have sexual virtue foisted upon her and leave her so poor that no one will be inclined to overlook the disfigurement for the benefits of her property."60 Returning to Eustace's two daughters, the unevenness of Ralph's retaliation signaled the complete closing-off of their futures as wives, but the nose-cutting was also calculated as an insult to their father, who had failed to protect them. Here, then, there *is* a sense that destroyed beauty might well elicit disgust from a potential sexual partner, magnifying the value of taking a gendered approach to disfigurement.

Early legislators clearly had no problem with including facial mutilation of women in their laws dealing with sexual transgression. The mere threat of such extreme treatment was intended to terrify women into submission. What about other types of crime?  A much later case, however, suggests that women taken for other crimes might expect to be treated in the same way as men. An infamous, and to my knowledge unique, case features in the court records in England in the thirteenth century. In the Shropshire Eyre of 1203 we find the following case:

[Following the death of a woman slain at Lilleshall, Alice Crithecreche and others were taken for her death]. And Alice, at once after the death, fled to the county of Stafford with some of the chattels of the slain, so it is said, and was taken in that county and brought back into Shropshire and there, as the king's serjeant and many knights and lawful men of the county testify, in their presence she said, that at night she heard a tumult in the house of the slain; whereupon she came to the door and looked in, and saw through the middle of the doorway four men in the house, and they came out and caught her, and threatened to kill her unless she would conceal them; and so they gave her half the pelf that she had. And when she came before the justices in Eyre she denied all this. Therefore she has deserved death, but by way of dispensation let her eyes be torn out. The others are not suspected, therefore let them be under pledges.61

This case, which to my mind ranks as one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in the medieval record,62 seems to indicate that once convicted of criminality, gender had little bearing on the punishment meted out. Alice's crime, it seems, was the fact that she had fled and recanted her "confession" to being involved, and we should note that none of the four men she mentions appear to have been apprehended, nor are they named. Alice's eyes, therefore, were symbolic of much more than her apparently involuntary (if we believe her original account) entanglement with this case. They were to be taken as a means of enforcing the authority of the court, whose real targets, the violent thieves, had evaded its reach. In effect, this is yet another mutilation-by-proxy: she is the only "hostage" the court has, and so she is condemned to punishment for the much more serious actions of others. Her permanent blindness would stigmatize her for the remainder of her life, assuming she survived the procedure, but perhaps the written record (which after all took the trouble to include her account), and associated oral narratives, would elicit sympathy from her community rather than disapprobation.

Cases such as this (and the Eyre cases explored above in Chapter 3) underline the fact that in later medieval Europe, the incidence of records of extreme bodily and facial mutilations appears to have increased exponentially. Note here I that focus on the record—Valentin Groebner, too, highlights the increase in documentation of violence, but attributes it to a change in culture in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries, with more monitoring and recording of behavior.63 At the same time, however, he demonstrates that the association of damaged face with loss of status maintained its hold on medieval writers such as Albertus Magnus, and cites reports of attacks on women's faces, often targeting the nose.64

#### Behind Closed Doors

All of the cases used thus far have featured violence done to women's faces in public arenas, whether as judicial punishments or as incidents of interpersonal violence recorded to make a moral or other point. But some of the early medieval lawcodes we have considered assumed that women remained within, or at least close to, their homes. Thus anyone entering a woman's home to injure her also challenged the authority of her menfolk: a law of King Liutprand of the Lombards addresses deliberately setting fire to another man's house in the same clause as penalizing rape.65 Lombard society, of course, was one where the *mundium*, the legal protection of women by men, held sway more strongly than perhaps any other region of Europe. Thus her menfolk might demand compensation, but she was forbidden from taking direct action. The home, though, was not always a safe haven. Houses were accidentally or deliberately set alight in times of war (as the graphic detail on the Bayeux Tapestry of a woman fleeing her burning house with her child, complete with caption "Here a house is burnt," illustrates). Accidents with fire or sharp implements could happen within and out of doors. Such incidents do not make it into the early medieval record, although the evidence of later coroners' rolls underlines what a dangerous place a home could be for women and their children.

And the home was also the setting for domestic violence, the likely ubiquity of which is largely concealed from view unless it reached an extreme whereby the woman herself, or members of her wider family, took action through the courts. Citing work by Sara Butler, Lizabeth Johnson argues that in later medieval England, at least, spousal violence barely registered in the plentiful court records and coroners' rolls, and that even if it did, two-thirds of the cases were actually homicides.66 As Hannah Skoda has pointed out, using French examples, "domestic violence operates at the interface of the public and the private."67 Of course the face, unless covered with a veil or other wrapping (and clearly covering of the head and hair was pretty ubiquitous among married women), was itself the most public site of injury: one could attempt to conceal the violence done, but this was rather more difficult than covering up wounds or bruises to the torso. Yet the disfigurement of women by their own family members, so ubiquitous among modern cases in the media, hardly figures in the medieval evidence. Medieval authors, after all, had a stake in upholding the ideal of the male protector: this is why Peter Damian's story of transgression by an ungrateful son has such value, in demonstrating where the limits lay.  In fact hitting any woman in the face—even the unnamed target of Duke Amato's rape—seems to cross a line that is rarely explicitly mentioned. Was the sustained attack on this girl meant to reduce her to a state similar to a whore, or does Gregory (who as we have seen does not flinch from describing the mutilation of guilty women) include this detail to indicate just how wrong Amato's act was from start to finish? Would we even have had the story if the duke himself had not dropped dead at the end of it?

#### Conclusions

Gender history draws much of its energy from the analysis of the historically unequal relationships between men and women, and certainly the cases of actual disfigurement discussed here seem to argue for a double-standard at work, not only in the ways in which sexual activity was regulated, but in the way that women's faces were targeted as a means of marginalizing them and taking them out of the social arena. There is unevenness in the apparent "extra" element in the way that the appearance of women's faces is altered as well as or instead of the penalties and disfigurements meted out to men. Septimina's is burnt, Eustace's daughters lose their noses *as well as* their eyes, exceeding the blinding handed down to Ralph's son. Theodoric's daughter is mutilated on mere suspicion. In all three cases, the women and girls are marked visibly, whether or not also impaired physically. I have argued elsewhere, and continue to maintain, that the key to understanding women's faces as sites of violence is to be found in the honor networks in which their menfolk participate. As Jurgen Frembgen has pointed out in the case of nose-cutting in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, "'honor' and 'shame' are encoded in body morphology."68 Discussing modern cases in Pakistan, Frembgen describes the men's mutilation of wives or daughters as a reciprocal act within the code of honor. Yet the women in these cases are not "rough equals" either, despite Islamic law offering more protection of wives than westerners might in fact imagine; the honor being satisfied here is male honor, restoring the man's place within the male community by "imprint[ing] his power on the surface of her body."69 This is a useful way of understanding medieval violence against women's faces too: it is striking that the law of King Cnut on adulterous wives, threatening their mutilation, does nothing to penalize the male partner in the adultery. Instead, II Cnut 50 simply orders that anyone committing adultery is to pay compensation for it in proportion to the deed.70 Men, then, enjoyed a right to a "proportional" punishment: the punishment threatened for female adulterers, on the other hand, as almost all the cases of violence against women's faces in the evidence, was an entirely disproportionate response born out of the need to maintain "face" and masculinity.

### Notes

F. Beyerle and R. Buchner, *MGH LL nat. Germ*., III.2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1954), 90; *Pactus Legis Salicae*, XIII (gang rape by three men), ed. K. Eckhardt, *MGH LL nat. Germ*., IV.1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1962) 58 ; *Lex Salica*, XIV, ed. K. Eckhardt, *MGH LL nat. Germ.*, IV.2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1959), 52; *Leges Langobardorum*, Liutprand 72, ed. F. Bluhme in *MGH LL*, IV, ed. G. H. Pertz (Hannover: Hahn, 1868), 136.

War II France: Shani d'Cruze and Louise A. Jackson, *Women, Crime and Justice in England since 1660* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 129; Alison M. Moore, "History, memory and trauma in photography of the *tondues*: visuality of the Vichy past through the silent image of women," *Gender and History*, 17 (2005), 657–681.

commercial revolution: Guibert of Nogent, St Anselm and the Jews of northern France," in *Church and City, 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke*, ed. D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23–40, at 28.

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# Ways of Seeing: Staring at and Representing Disfigurement

Vision lies at the heart of all medieval responses to disfigurement and difference: modern campaigners for facial equality argue that whilst the *visual impact* of a different face might be unavoidable, a *negative response* is almost always conditioned by socialization, that is, prejudice is learned, not inborn. A child growing up with visibly-different parents may realize that difference quite early in life, but will not make value judgments until it witnesses the responses of peers and/or *their* parents. In medieval culture, the assumption that a disfigured or scarred face might be seen and cause shame underpins the compensation demanded of the perpetrator of the injury (payments which, as we have seen, might continue long after the actual injury itself). The flipside, the exhibition of the judiciallymarked, did not work without an audience to understand the meaning of such marking. Yet the potential for sympathy, rather than derision, from onlookers suggests that the meaning of such marking was far from stable. It clearly motivated some rulers, for example, to disfigure and then seclude their "treacherous" subjects. The visible bramble scratch on the face singled out Helmstan as a cattle rustler, a branded face marked the repeat Lombard thief, noseless hostages were a sign of Cnut's ruthlessness. But difference might also attract attention because of attempts to conceal it: Notker the Stammerer tells the strange tale of a young man who, ashamed of his red hair and lacking a cap to cover it, attended Mass balancing one of his boots on top of his head. The bishop, annoyed at the lack of respect inherent in not removing headgear in church (and this is Notker's point

© The Author(s) 2017 159 P. Skinner, *Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe*, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54439-1\_6

in telling the bizarre story, it seems), seized the boot and cried "Lo and behold all you people, this fool is red-headed!"1.

"Vision forces us to face the ugly and horrific," according to Miller.2 He continues, "In a harsher age there would be little or no guilt on the observer's part for the emotions [of disgust] that the stigmatized elicit; in ours there is."3 And Notker's story does seem to bear him out on this: the bishop had no qualms whatsoever in singling out and ridiculing a member of his congregation whose only offence seems to have been his poverty. "Ridicule" is the word that most often stalks examples of disfigurement: a beaten-up man in the Lombard laws was rendered open to it, conspirators in Gregory of Tours were freed in order to be exposed to it, and Aldevrandus, discussed in Chapter 4, was also laughed at for his appearance. In this chapter, however, I want to explore in more detail the broader assumption inherent in Miller's statement—that seeing a disfigured person evoked disgust in medieval viewers *and* that they felt no shame in being disgusted. I will use the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson on staring to broaden out the possibilities for visual contacts between those with disfigured faces and those without. "Staring," she says, "is an ocular response to what we don't expect to see...[it] is an interrogative gesture that asks what's going on and demands the story."4 Although Garland-Thomson, like Miller, draws a contrast between premodern village societies, in which a person "knew everyone they saw," and the sprawling, impersonal world in which most are strangers, she nevertheless opens up interesting analytical possibilities for the medievalist by restoring to the "staree"—the object of stares—a voice and opinion based on the testimonies of modern people with visible differences.5 Another point that she makes is that "We don't usually stare at people we know, but instead when unfamiliar people take us by surprise."6 Herein lies the first quandary for a person with a disfigurement: if the stranger was an object of curiosity, how much more would a stranger with facial difference be the object of questions, suspicion or even downright hostility? Although we do not have such spectacular cases of misrecognition as exist in early modern archives, the very fact of a face being changed by disfigurement potentially limited mobility, physical and social.7 At the same time, we have already met the perceived shame inherent in a disfigurement being noticed. Miller weaves the subject of the stare into his description of medieval honor culture: honor, he comments, "governed... how long you could look at someone or even dare to look at him at all."8 The male pronoun is suggestive here.

The subject of looking and staring has engaged theorists of visual culture for some decades, and their work on viewers of pictures and film has been influential in the burgeoning field of disability studies. In this chapter, however, we shall leave the pictorial till later, and firstly explore written accounts. Garland-Thomson's work provides a rich range of possibilities for interrogating medieval texts. As many medieval narratives of disfigurement, and indeed the legal material, often highlight the unexpected in their accounts or additions, and often demand a story be told to justify the inclusion of that material, they may indeed reveal the gaze of authors or protagonists stunned into staring—physical or textual—by what *they* did not expect to see.

What, though, is "textual staring"? Alongside narratives of actual, eyewitness accounts by the author, two of which are included at some length in the present chapter, I define "textual" staring as a broader spectrum of accounts, where the writer might not be present as an eyewitness, but where the narrative is sufficiently extended to suggest that the author, or reader, or both, are expected to share some pleasure in consuming the scene being described. A possible analogy to this is the modern French literary device of *chosisme*, the detailed, almost tortured description of events, people and particularly the objects they owned as if through a camera lens. The major difference between this and the textual staring I propose, however, is that *chosisme* detached these objects and made them tell the story, whilst the scrutiny visible in the medieval texts is packed with details to heighten emotional response to the actors. As we read extended accounts, whether shocked or curiously fascinated, our focus on the text is itself a stare that verges on the uncontrolled.9 The account might verge on the prurient (lengthy accounts of the torture of saints have been accused of this), or display an apparent relish in the gory detail that might not be expected of the author.10 These are textual prostheses—additions, enhancements, unnecessary to the basic account but deployed all the same. Most of our reporters were, after all, highly-skilled rhetoricians.  And all writers have a purpose to their texts beyond the simple report: to draw a lesson about bodily vanity compared with cleanliness of soul. Accounts in lawcodes of the extraction of bone shards from a wounded head, with highly-ritualized means for measuring their size, also generate a vivid, performative scene: the reader is invited to look at the bone, to imagine the test in metal receptacles, to judge the outcome themselves, but also to *remember*. But we do not *see* these injuries directly. Like all the other cases in this study, they are mediated for us, and earlier readers, by their presentation, repeated for a secondary visual consumption in the written record. But what is the reader to make of such accounts? Are they designed to give pleasure even as they shock or horrify us? As William Ian Miller has commented, "Pain and pleasure have such an unseemly relationship, each never quite knowing how to keep neatly to itself."12

The stare, however, that visual engagement with something that has captured attention for its unexpected qualities, is differentiated by Garland-Thomson from the gaze. The latter—that "oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim"—has been used to explore the increasingly unequal relationship between doctors and their patients (Foucault's "clinical gaze") and has also been posited as a gendered phenomenon, with the female body its object and the male viewer in the position of power.13 Gender theory, however, is not simply confined to the oppositional categories of male and female, but also encompasses other situations of unequal power relations. According to Miller, "Deformity and ugliness... are disordering... they force us to look and notice."14 This somewhat complicates the binary between viewer/powerful and viewed/ powerless, as the glance turns to full-on stare that is difficult to resist. James Partridge, in his personal account of becoming and being disfigured, states bluntly, "Staring can simply be accepted as part of the disfigurement package: changing faces is partly to do with getting used to being an object of scrutiny wherever you go."15 In fact, once we start to look, we find a lot of staring going on in medieval texts. Gerald of Wales, for example, reflecting on the scar below the nose just above the upper lip with which a certain Erchembald was born, supports this unlikely story of a "miracle of nature" by saying, "I myself saw Erchembald's son, whose name was Stephen, *and there is no doubt that he had the same mark.* A chance accident had become a natural defect."16 Gerald's report, and that of Orderic Vitalis about Walchelin, discussed earlier, suggest not so much disgust as wonder, a phenomenon that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson posits as the reason for the uncontrolled staring which, she suggests, "opens up toward new knowledge."17

In a stimulating article utilizing evidence from medical texts, in particular Henri de Mondeville's surgical manual of the thirteenth century, Luke Demaitre proposes that facial difference became a real issue for medical practitioners from this period onwards, when they were faced with "a sharper perception of superficial features, which was no doubt enhanced by the proximity of town life," and concomitantly a demand from urban elites (aristocratic and mercantile) for assistance in remedying conditions that would not have concerned country folk: red or pale skin, sun- or windburn, dark or ugly complexion, an excess or lack of hair or beard.18 The next chapter will expand on the earlier types of treatment that might have been available for rather more serious disfigurements, but Demaitre's study centers on two issues. The first was the widening-out of a wealthy class able to pay doctors for cosmetic and other enhancements to their appearance, previously the preserve of a very narrow elite. The second, and pertinent to the current discussion, is the idea that town life, with its crowds, public spaces and frequent need to interact with others, led to "changes in sensitivity" about personal appearance. Clearly the conditions that are described here are some way along the spectrum from the disfigurements and injuries that have attracted our attention so far. Whilst largely accepting the economic factor Demaitre posits—there is little doubt that the link between material prosperity and "worried well" is not simply a modern phenomenon—I am troubled by the chronology he proposes.19 After all, as we have seen, appearances in public assemblies, and proximity to observers, had been features of early medieval legislation regarding facial appearance, and translating Apuleius's *Herbarium* into Anglo-Saxon surely suggests that curing "uncouth blisters that sit on a man's *neb*" was not simply an intellectual exercise.20 The change he identifies, however, relates as much to the increasing intensity of texts dealing with the surface of the body, as the rising and concentrated populations of towns. Moreover, the apparent triviality of some of the conditions he discusses suggests that people were scrutinizing *themselves* a lot more closely, a point that we shall return to.

#### Case Study: Byzantine Staring

This raises the question of how much staring was going on. Can we access the stare or the gaze in the medieval evidence? I want to use two Byzantine authors, Michael Psellos (d. c. 1078) and Anna Komnena (d. 1153), whose texts contain multiple examples of blindings and mutilation, to explore how their descriptions evoke a visual image in the reader's mind, and whether it is possible that any of the episodes were reported by eyewitnesses. Psellos is in fact a useful barometer, reflecting on the right and wrong times to use blinding and disfigurement, and his extended description of nose-cutting as a practice of the "Scythians," not of cultured, Byzantine society, reflects the theme of facial violence as done by Others.21 Many of the examples he describes, however, evoke sympathy for the victims, most apparently in an extended episode in which he is a direct eyewitness.22 The scene is the downfall of Emperor Michael V and the *nobilissimos* Constantine (brother of John Orphanotrophos), who sought refuge from the mob in the Studite monastery. Following them in, along with a baying mob, Psellos is greeted by the sight of the two fugitives hanging on for dear life to the altar, and he comments at length on how this pitiable sight moved him to tears rather than the anger he had felt at the men. At the same time, the threat from the mob outside remained, and Psellos builds the tension by adding: "I was fascinated by the drama of the thing."23 The standoff in the church continues until a new officer comes with orders to remove the fugitives, promising that they will not be harmed. When they refuse, the sanctuary of the church is breached (illegally, as Psellos notes), and the crowd and officers drag the two fugitives outside "like wild beasts," heedless of their cries of anguish. Having set the story up as a drama, Psellos now switches the action back to the palace, where the fate of Michael and Constantine is being discussed. Finally, it is agreed that they present too much of a danger to be allowed to remain unscathed, but that killing them would be equally risky. A party of men is therefore sent to the monastery with orders to put out the fugitives' eyes, provided that this is done outside the church. Back at the church, of course, the victims are already outside and awaiting their fate, so the newcomers sharpen the branding-iron and prepare to do the deed. At this point "The emperor [Michael]... moaned and wailed aloud and... begged for help. He humbly called on God, raised hands in supplication to Heaven, to the Church, to anything he could think of." By contrast, his uncle remained silent,

braced himself for the trial and... faced suffering bravely....Seeing the executioners all ready for their work, he at once offered himself as the first victim and calmly approached them. They waited with hands athirst for his blood. As there was no clear space between himself and the mob... the Nobilissimus quietly looked round for the man to whom the miserable job had been entrusted. "You there," he said, "please make the people stand back. Then you will see how bravely I bear my calamity!"

When the executioner tried to tie him down, to prevent movement at the time of blinding, he said, "Look here, if you see me budge, *nail* me down!" With these words he lay flat on his back on the ground... His eyes were then gouged, one after the other.24 Meanwhile the emperor, seeing in the other's torment the fate that was about to overtake him, too, lived through Constantine's anguish in himself, beating his hands together, smiting his face, and bellowing in agony. The Nobilissimus, his eyes gouged out, stood up from the ground and leaned for support on one of his most intimate friends... With Michael it was different, for when the executioner saw him flinch away and lower himself to base entreaty, he bound him securely. He held him down with considerable force, to stop the violent twitching when he was undergoing his punishment. After his eyes, too, had been blinded, the insolence of the mob, so marked before, died away, and with it their rage (*θράσος*) against these men. They left them to rest there...

Psellos's extended treatment of this blinding is occasioned by the fact that he was there throughout—he literally gives us a blow-by-blow account of the "drama" that he was fascinated by, as if compelled to continue watching.25 Although ostensibly in a position of power as he watches the scene unfold, he is in fact rendered powerless and in tears by the anguish of the two victims. But there are other gazes at work here: the crowd pushing and struggling to be "the first witness of their punishment," Constantine's cool and direct address to the commander of the blinding party, the terrified Michael, watching his companion's mutilation and unable to mirror the older man's bravery, and finally the executioner, seeing the flinching man and forced to bind him securely in order to do his job (blinding, not killing) properly.

Anna Komnena's descriptions of the blindings and mutilations during her father's rise to power and his emperorship are both consistent in conveying the horror of such actions and yet curiously full of detail, providing for her readers a spectacle of punishment. Unswervingly loyal to her father's memory, she presents him as a man who "thought capture was punishment enough for an enemy," willing at times to threaten and even to simulate blindings as part of elaborate ruses to flush out traitors, but distanced (in her text at least) from those occasions when it was actually carried out.26 For example the rebel Basilacius, captured by Alexius when he was still acting as Domestic of the *scholae*, was taken away *by the emperor's men* (my emphasis) to "some place called Chlempina, and near the spring of water there [they] put out his eyes (*τους οφθαλμούς αυτού εξορύττουσιν*). Ever since then to this day it has been called 'the spring of Basilacius.'"27 The topographic detail calls to mind ritual sites of martyrdom, and may even convey ambivalence about the act itself. Anna is less convincing when she tries to remove her father from involvement in the blinding of the rebel Nicephorus Diogenes: Alexius spreads a rumor that Nicephorus had been secretly blinded, in order to dash his supporters' hopes. But then "certain men" blinded him and another conspirator anyway, and Anna remarks coyly that, "I have been unable so far to discover anything for certain" about whether Alexius ordered or consented to this.28 As we shall see, however, she does give Nicephorus's story a happy ending, retired and apparently reconciled to his lack of sight.29 A third blinding, of her husband's father Bryennius, is referred to only obliquely; she refers the reader to her husband's own history for the details, but repeatedly absolves Alexius of involvement.30

If Anna's Alexius was reluctant to blind, his repeated use of threat, rumor and simulation suggests nevertheless that—to Anna at least—resort to such tactics could be justified in times of war.31 Anna's lengthy account of the feigned "blinding" of Roussel, early in her book, is graphic in its detail but also remarkably similar to Psellos's earlier set-piece account:

The man was stretched out on the ground, the executioner brought the branding-iron (*σíδηρον*) near to his face, and Roussel howled and groaned; he was like a roaring lion. To all appearances he was being blinded. But in fact, the apparent victim had been ordered to shout and bawl; the executioner who seemed to be gouging out his eyes (*εξορúττων* again) was told to glare horribly at the prostrate Roussel and act like a raving madman – in other words, to simulate the punishment. So he was blinded (*απετυϕλοûτο*), but not in reality, and the people clapped their hands and noisily spread the news all over the city that Roussel had lost his eyes (*την τοû Ουρσελíου τúφλωσιν*).32

Note again the fact that this punishment is being carried out with an audience looking on—there would have been no point in pretending to blind Roussel in secret or private, since the object of the exercise is to convince the crowds of Alexius's authority. So convincing is the pantomime that even Alexius's cousin is fooled:

[Dokeianos saw Roussel], "wearing the bandages, apparently blinded (*τα της τυφλώσεως σúμβολα φέροντα*, literally, "bearing the signs of blinding"), and being led by the hand. He...accused my father of cruelty...[Alexius] took [Dokeianos] to a little room and there uncovered Roussel's head and disclosed his eyes, fiercely blazing. Dokeianos was astonished at the sight; the miracle filled him with wonder and amazement. Again and again he put his hands on Roussel's eyes... When he did learn of his cousin's humane treatment of the man and with his humanity his artifice, he was overcome with joy.33

Both accounts are so vivid that it is tempting to suggest they might even have been a favorite story of Anna's father. The description of the fake blinding builds atmosphere with its attention to both visual and auditory cues—the glowing hot iron, the glaring executioner, the roaring, bawling victim and the raving perpetrator, all contributing to imagining the scene. (Sounds had also featured heavily in Psellos's account, too—textual staring is clearly a multisensory experience.)34 Yet Anna's literary skills derived as much from her reading and education as her imagination: the "big reveal" in front of Dokeianos owes more to hagiography than history—the removal of bandages, the "miracle" filling him with wonder, and the repeated physical touching of Roussel as evidence that yes, his eyes were indeed still intact. In both passages, the reader is immersed in an imbricated series of scenes and actions, all designed to impress with the guile of Alexius in the service of mercy. Witnessing the apparent horror of blinding, we are doubly relieved and impressed—as Dokeianos is—to find it has not taken place at all. But the sheer *fear* of blinding is convincingly displayed in both real and fake situations.

Anna is not done with us yet, however. She inserts her *own* gaze into the text when she recounts the humiliation of the rebel Michael Anemas and his brothers. Having been shaved completely, and their beards cut off, the rebels were mounted sideways on oxen, dressed in sackcloth, and "crowned" with entrails before being driven through the palace courtyard to their blinding. Attention was called to this spectacle by criers walking ahead, singing parodic songs (an inversion of the praises of the emperors), and

People of all ages hurried to see the show; we too, the princesses, came out for the same purpose secretly...35.

As Michael gestures toward the palace that he would rather be dismembered and beheaded, however, Anna is overcome with pity and begs her mother, the empress, to intercede, thereby saving Michael's sight. The elaborate visual and auditory spectacle laid on for the "people" is not meant to be witnessed by the princesses—hence their secrecy in coming out to watch. Whether Anna's memory of the event and her part in it is credible, it is clear that she wants the reader to see the spectacle through her younger eyes, and to be as distressed as she was by Michael's pleading gaze.36 (Again, there is a strong parallel with Michael Psellos's own feelings of pity for the victims.) The parading of a traitor through the Agora is repeated soon afterwards in another case, but Alexius only "pretended he wished to blind Gregory," settling instead for his hair and beard to be "shaved to the skin" before displaying him.37 The public parading of enemies and criminals, of course, was nothing new: there are plenty of earlier examples (including the exhibition of the antipope Pope John XVI),38 and so when the educated Anna was looking for inspiration for her reports, it is not unlikely that she found examples to imitate.

Such set-piece narratives are not just part of Byzantine writing in the twelfth century, however: Orderic Vitalis similarly ramps up the tension in his account of King Henry I of England's condemnation of Luke of La Barre, found guilty of spreading scurrilous songs about the king, to blinding. Here, others spring to Luke's defense, but to no avail. Luke, who "knew that he was condemned to everlasting darkness in this life" and chose instead to die, then

struggled desperately to injure himself as the officers pinioned him. Finally, beating his head like a madman on the walls and stones as they held him, he perished miserably, greatly mourned by all who knew his valour and merry jests.39

The two accounts differ in their outcome: Henry I's failure to be merciful toward Luke of La Barre (and to two knights captured and blinded at the same time) leads to all three being memorialized by Orderic, Luke himself preferring suicide, and the king being presented as unjustly harsh (though Orderic never says so directly). Michael, on the other hand, is spared by Alexius Comnenus on the special pleading of his wife and daughter. For Anna, in fact, her father was almost uniformly merciful when it came to blinding and mutilation: regardless of accuracy (and she admits at one point that she will be accused of favoring her father) her text makes it clear that these are things Others do—the Norman leader Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond are seen cruelly mutilating to extort money, and blinding or threatening to blind their opponents; she also reports on Alexius and his brother being faced with a plot to "get rid of them by gouging out their eyes on a trumped-up charge;" and, by far the most bizarre, the blinding inflicted on the Sultan of Iconium, Malik-Shah, by the Turks working for his brother, Mas'ud:

As the instrument normally used for the purpose was lacking, the candelabrum given to Malik-Shah by the emperor took its place—the diffuser of light had become the instrument of darkness and blinding. However, he could still see a small ray of light and when he arrived at Iconium, led by the hand of some guide, he confided this fact to his nurse and she told his wife. In this way the story reached the ears of Mas'ud himself.40

Malik-Shah is swiftly eliminated by strangling on his brother's orders.

The Byzantine texts, in fact, mirror a wider development visible in narrative sources in the eleventh, and particularly the twelfth century, that increasingly associates disfigurement and mutilation with injustice or the actions of strangers and enemies. Just as being disfigured risked marginalizing a person, so *inflicting* disfigurement came to be a sign of alterity. It is notable that the examples of deliberate blinding in Abbot Guibert of Nogent's autobiography are carried out by Bishop Gaudry of Laon's "African man" and by Alais, mother of John of Soissons, already discussed.41 And Guibert notes that the vicious mutilations of eyes and feet that accompanied a dispute between Godfrey of Namur and Enguerrand of Boves left a visible legacy, "as is plainly apparent today to anyone visiting the county of Porcien."42 Was Guibert staring as intensely as his Byzantine contemporaries? He certainly noticed facial difference: reporting the murder of Gérard of Quierzy, he notes that Gérard had only one eye to turn round on his assailant, and he discusses at length the murder of Bishop Gaudry, the mutilation of his body, and the means used to recognize him (a scar on his neck) when his face was so badly disfigured.43

Like Orderic Vitalis, Guibert also recounts stories of disfigurement linked to the supernatural, although the facial injury visible in Guibert's tale of a "benign and simple" monastic novice is somewhat more prosaic than Orderic's story of Walchelin. The novice was pursued by the devil while answering the call of nature and injured his forehead against the privy door: the devil was able to injure his body, Guibert comments, but powerless against the monk's purity of soul.44

### Depicting Disfigurement: Iconographic Challenges.

Medieval texts describe, and allow readers to stare figuratively at, the scenes of disfigurement and mutilation they recount. The ubiquity of modern images of people with disfigurements, across the internet and print culture, in collections such as Wellcome Images, as well as in specifically-commissioned projects such as that sponsored by the *Saving Faces* charity, allows for staring and contemplation at one remove from the reality of scarred flesh or missing facial features.45 Yet in early medieval iconography the actual *appearance* of people is rarely explored in detail. Even depictions of prominent figures, such as those depicted in the bible of the Carolingian Emperor Charles the Bald at S. Paolo fuori le Mure in Rome, or the series of portraits of early Lombard rulers (including the Franks Pippin the Short, Louis the Pious and Lothar I, and Princes Arechis and Adelchis of the Lombards) on the eleventh-century *Codex Legum Langobardorum* at the abbey of Cava near Salerno in Italy, are all facially alike, presented bearded, redcheeked, furrow-browed in seriousness and, of course, unblemished. Paul Edward Dutton in fact comments specifically on the "fusion" of identities present in the richly decorated bible, with the Charles medallion perhaps representing Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or intentionally fusing both men with the biblical King David.46 The German abbess Herrad of Landsberg's famous series of portraits of her fellow nuns in her twelfth-century text the *Garden of Delights*, similarly, presents a largely undifferentiated series of faces, for all that the sisters are labeled with names to identify them.47 This reluctance to depict reality is matched by the sheer reticence of medieval iconography before about 1250 to engage with the disfigured face. Mutilated or impaired bodies do occasionally feature in medieval images, especially of the blind and the lame, complete with crutches or other mobility aids. But the maimed face remains elusive. Why? Willibald Sauerländer suggests that:

...from the time of Charlemagne (r. as emperor 800–814) to the days of Dante (1265–1321) we encounter not a single portrait in the modern sense... Like nature, the natural face was considered unworthy of transmission to posterity. The soul would be raised to heaven...but flesh and bones... would turn to dust and ashes, and thus the earthly faces of mortals were not remembered in portraiture.48

We have met this sentiment before, in Thietmar's remarks about his own face. He tells us what it looks like, but dismisses his appearance as unimportant compared to the purity of his soul. Early medieval iconography, seemingly, has little to contribute to our knowledge of how people really appeared, in their depictions of the uninjured or the afflicted. Andre Grabar and Carl Nordenfalk offer some explanations: after the achievements of late Roman portraiture, Merovingian art, they suggest, reflected the iconoclastic distaste for depictions of the human figure altogether; paintings of the Carolingian period, by contrast, focused on the pedagogical theme of Christ's life on earth. The Charles the Bald bible, with its illustrative material, simply reflects and extends the concern of medieval clerical writers to situate their accounts within a Christian, biblical framework of understanding. Only occasionally do we meet anything approaching a "portrait," such as that of the priestly donor in the ninth-century decoration of the church of S. Benedetto Malles near Bolzano, Italy. Even donor portraits have their problems, not least in examples of twelfthcentury "retrospective" paintings and depictions of much earlier donors, a parallel of this period's intense interest in re-asserting claims to property through the editing and outright creation of early donation charters into cartularies.49 Otherwise, the theme of painting and book illumination was entirely religious and generic. There are depictions of those healed by Christ, so we do have some impairments illustrated in rudimentary ways, but the only really distorted facial features are those of devils in hell.50

Images were not totally without meaning of course—even the generic, stern-faced king-portraits in the Cava manuscript were designed to convey authority alongside the legal material copied there, whilst the internal unity of Herrad's community was emphasized by its iconographic uniformity. And the power of images was certainly expressed when people took the trouble to destroy or obliterate them, as occurred during the two waves of iconoclasm—the destruction of holy images—in the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries This, though, was not the same as the defacing of ruler portraits: the iconoclasts expressed opposition to a belief in the power of images as intercessors with God, whilst removing the faces of ruler portraits was a targeted attack on items associated with the deposed or disgraced ruler. Yet it is notable that the faces *were* removed, rather than disfigured: all memory of that person was to be erased. Thus when Empress Zoe was exiled and had her hair cut, the portrait of her in Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, was also removed. When she was restored, so was her portrait.51

The stained glass windows at Canterbury cathedral, depicting some of the miracles of Thomas Becket, include the episode of the blinding, castration and subsequent restoration of Ailward of Westoning. Yet, despite one of the panels showing the actual moment of the attack, the artists clearly decided not to portray Ailward after the deed, instead halting at precisely the moment he is looking up at his assailants, bearing down on him with a sharpened implement.52 Again, just as in textual accounts, the viewer is left to visualize for him- or herself the aftermath of the mutilation.

### Seeing, Looking and Selfhood

Clearly, being deprived of sight by violence was a terrifying ordeal, and it excited the curiosity and pity of those who wrote about it. Moreover, as the story of Malik-Shah illustrates, the process of blinding could be botched, leaving partial sight, and there was always the risk that gouging too far could compromise the intended "mercy" of preserving the life of the victim.53 Yet Garland-Thomson remarks that the "ocularcentric" modern world underestimates "the advantages of blindness, such as being able to navigate without artificial light or engaging fully with other senses such as touch and smell."54 This sentiment is nicely illustrated by two stories recounted by Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century. One concerns a prisoner at Chateauroux whose eyes had been put out. "From long familiarity with them [he] had committed to memory all the passageways of the castle and even the steps which led up to the towers," and used this knowledge to take hostage the son of the castellan.55 Here the rehabilitative intention in the blinding clearly had not had any effect. The castellan of Radnor castle, by contrast, having impiously spent the night with his dogs in the church of St Afon and awoken to find himself blind and his dogs mad, initially "passed his days in tedium and distress," before making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and dying in battle there, so ending his life "with honor."56 This apparent rehabilitation, of course, is in response to a supernatural event, but as we shall see there are cases of blinding victims who are portrayed as overcoming their pain and sightlessness to pursue other avenues to fulfillment.

The textual staring apparent in some of the extracts presented here highlights the power of sight and the intensity of the stare or gaze. Eyes are, after all, not only able to take in the world, but are also the key to communication with others. As Miller points out, if eyes can give offence by staring for too long, they can also ward off with a glare: "they tell the intruder to back off."57 This, though, assumes that the person being stared at was capable of returning the look, and this was by no means universally the case in medieval society. In particular, tropes of modesty surrounding women demanded that they kept their eyes cast down before men.58

We have already noted that blocking a woman's or girl's way (*wegworin*) attracted a penalty in Frankish and Lombard laws.59 But what was at stake here? This group of laws has usually been treated as one of a set that envisages, and prohibits, the intrusion of men into the inviolable space occupied by a woman's body.60 Whilst some laws explore this intrusion literally—violating the spatial boundary by touching the hand, arm or breast, bursting into a house and illegally cutting a woman's hair, abducting her, engaging in sex—way-blocking, it seems to me, operates somewhat differently, and is inextricably bound up with ways of seeing and looking. Several possibilities offer themselves: blocking a woman's way was an inherently threatening act even without touch;61 blocking a woman's way forced her off a path or road and caused physical discomfort if it involved treading in mud or dirt (assuming that the track itself was recognizably drier or smoother than its edges); or blocking a woman's way involved engineering bumping into her, thereby bringing about a moment of illicit physical contiguity. But this last scenario assumes that *she is not looking where she is going*, that is, that her gaze is a modest one, directed to the ground, not to what lies ahead of her. Did the woman who *was* looking where she was going indirectly challenge men to get in her way? Such is the double standard still employed in asking women to modify their behavior to avoid unwanted male attention.62

Much of the early medieval material on representations of disfigurement feature reports of those who were staring at the facially-different person, but what about the man or woman in the mirror? To what extent was staring at oneself even possible in the early Middle Ages? Demaitre's point about townsmen and women becoming more self-conscious of their looks suggests that another phenomenon was taking place. The "discovery of the individual" in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, longargued by historians from Colin Morris onwards, may not only have included a heightened awareness of social, religious or even racial difference, but also a more constant scrutiny of one's own looks.63 Certainly we have plenty of later medieval examples not only of iconography featuring mirrors, but also extant examples of mirrors themselves, which had made the transition from polished metal to worked glass in western Europe by the twelfth century.64 Since the latter would have been a luxury item (the technology of glassmaking being jealously guarded by the artisans of Venice and regulated by the city authorities), part of the veritable boom in consumer goods in medieval towns, there may be a very strong correlation between the chronology of mirror consumption in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the demand for cosmetics and cures identified by Demaitre. Yet this is clearly an elite phenomenon, and whilst evidence survives for the use of mirrors before 1200 (particularly in Muslim Spain), the kind of self-scrutiny portrayed in later medieval texts and iconography does not appear to have been a feature of early medieval culture. It might be objected that anyone could look at himself or herself in a pool of still water, that mirrors were not necessary for an individual to realize he or she looked different. This is certainly true, but if the overwhelming message preached in the churches was of the ephemerality of the flesh and a criticism of vanity, then looking at oneself, facially whole or not, may have been a less obsessive pastime than it is in modern culture. Moreover, the quality of metal and early glass mirrors possibly distorted the reflection so much that there was really little purpose in looking.

We have met textual staring as a phenomenon, encouraging the reader to contemplate and become involved with vivid scenes of other people's suffering. And texts functioned too as a way to encourage readers, particularly those in power, to consider their own behaviors, the so-called "mirrors-for-princes" literature.65 Mirror metaphors, in fact, were utilized early by church fathers to express the idea of divine wisdom—if Man was made in God's image, then a perfect life would represent a perfect mirror of God.66

And if this were true, then fleshly deformity of any kind *did not matter*. After all, the doctrine of heavenly resurrection promised a new start, free of impairments.67 This, I believe, is why so many of the narrative accounts of disfigurements and mutilations focus on the *process* of disfigurement rather than its result, and do so often at some length, involving the reader in a shared spectacle. Stories of disfigurement and mutilation recounted by medieval authors, bound up as they often are with ideas of morality and justice, are making of disfigured people's faces a mirror of broader *mores* and acceptable or illicit actions. Returning to William Ian Miller's point with which we started, I suggest that any disgust that onlookers felt was centered around the cruelty of disfigurement, not its results. They are commenting on extremes of behavior, working out at what point it is morally wrong to inflict a permanent scar. Legislators are doing the same thing, and claiming the authority to engage in similar actions, but here the textual stare is often about how the victim is affected by an illegal injury, hence the detailed scrutiny and description of pieces of bone, effusions of blood and lasting impairments. A changed face—even a temporarily changed face—signals a breakdown in social relations. A permanently changed face might require the intervention of the saint if it was unjustifiably changed by the excess force of a powerful perpetrator. If Henry I ever stopped to stare at those whom he had ordered blinded, did he feel any remorse for his actions? Perhaps not, but his order to blind is held up to the reader as one of many examples *not* to follow. One of the main horrors of disfiguring acts in the early Middle Ages, we might suggest, was the fact that many *were* so permanent, not amenable to any kind of rehabilitative treatment. Yet ambivalence remained: a disfigured face could be a lesson in humility and ultimate salvation. Medical treatment, then, risked going against God's will (hagiography certainly underlines this). But the early medieval period was not entirely without recourse to care and rehabilitation, as the next chapter will illustrate.

#### Notes

impostors: from Martin Guerre to Sommersby," *Hayes Robinson Lecture Series*, 1 (Egham: Royal Holloway University of London, 1997). The transition between community-based recognition and state-controlled documentation is traced by Valentin Groebner, *Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe* (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

*and Islam: Sacred Texts, Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis*, ed. Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 93–122; Candida Moss, "Heavenly healing: eschatological cleansing and the resurrection of the dead in the holy church," *Journal of the American Academy of Religion*, 79 (2011): 991–1017. Caroline Walker Bynum, *The Resurrection of the Body* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 116, highlights that the mosaic of the Last Judgment at Torcello Cathedral near Venice depicts only the blessed rising whole, whilst the damned "are shown in a state of fragmentation that is a symbolic expression of their sins."

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# Paths to Rehabilitation? The Possibilities of Treatment

As previous chapters have established, heads and faces might be deliberately targeted in cases of injury; marking of the head and face formed part and parcel of many legal sanctions against thieves, traitors and sexually transgressive men and women, but almost all early medieval lawcodes penalized similar interpersonal violence. Facial and head wounds opened a person to stigma and ridicule, and honor was bound up in facial appearance, women's faces were a site of particular meaning, and episodes of mutilation and disfigurement were sometimes written up as if staring at the process and its aftermath, even if the author were not there to witness the actual deed. Whilst clerics argued that the flesh was less important than the spirit in the life to come, fleshly considerations were still important to social status among the secular elite in this life. It is relatively safe to assume, therefore, that if anything *could* be done to improve the appearance of an injured or disfigured face, recourse might be had to the appropriate persons. Otherwise, as we have seen, the main option was to conceal the injury as far as possible. This chapter, therefore, will explore the possibilities, in some specific cases of head and facial injury, for treatment and/or rehabilitation. Before doing so, however, it is important to try and establish the nature of medical and surgical knowledge in early medieval Europe, in order to provide a broader context for the few cases that have survived in the evidence.

This chapter began life at the Leeds International Medieval Congresses in 2013 and 2014, where it benefited from the insights of varied audiences.

# Looking for Early Medieval Surgery: A Needle in a Haystack?

The early Middle Ages have not been considered a high point of medical knowledge or practice, nor does this chapter claim to offer a wholesale or comprehensive revision of existing scholarship. What is at issue here is the limiting force of older views such as Stanley Rubin's comment at a colloquium in 1986 that practitioners in Anglo-Saxon England "learnt their skills on a trial and error basis," and that "Their practice was an amalgam of empirical herbal techniques, Classical precedent and philosophy, ritual incantations with a very strong superstitious overlay, plus a very basic form of faith healing. *Yet even among all this worthless matter a whisper of rational expertise can be determined*" [my emphasis].1 Sean McGlynn, too, seems to accept older views of medical expertise in the early Middle Ages when he comments that "the lack of medicinal knowledge and good practice could make even a minor wound potentially dangerous."2 Peregrine Horden is less judgmental at least, but comments that our knowledge of medical practice pre-1200 is "all mutability," that is, there is no overarching scheme to mirror later scholastic medicine, but early medieval medicine "is, to some extent, ancient medicine (e.g. Dioscurides) continued by other means."3 The major problem dogging the study of early medieval medicine, however, is hindsight—all of these authors know what happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when ancient texts and "rationality" were restored to Western medical practice after a long hiatus. But whilst the period c.400–c.1100 in Western Europe clearly did see a comparative dip in scholarly activity around medical knowledge, this does not mean that medical practice was therefore in some way "inferior."4

An example of such ancient knowledge was excerpted and collected, and is visible in three *receptaria* preserved in the monastic archives of St Gall and Bamberg. Published by Julius Jörimann in 1925, two (which I shall term *St Gall A* and *B*) are preserved (one incompletely) in *Codex Sangallensis* 44, a ninth-century collection written in Carolingian miniscule, and the third in Bamberg, dating to the tenth century and written in fine book hand. The Bamberg codex shares some common material with the earlier part (i.e. before the section with the recipe books) of the *Codex Sangallensis*. 5 Jörimann suggests that these collections contain remedies for the use not of a "professional" doctor, but a monk with medical skills who could apply the recipes to his brethren in the cloister.6 His comment again reveals the explicit devaluing of practitioners vs. professionals in early medical history, but if these collections were indeed for actual use, the inclusion, in two out of the three, of gynecological recipes suggests that the copying and excerpting were not entirely shaped by likely patients.

What is interesting about the texts, however, is the apparent concern for personal appearance that emerges from them. Arranged in a head-totoe order, *St Gall A* contains remedies for stains (*maculas*) in the eyes, head injuries and injured noses (*nares vulnerosas*), lesions near the eyes and nose and pustules. *St Gall B*, whilst incomplete, adds remedies for scurf, lice and fleas in the hair, eyes that have been hit/injured (*ad percussum oculum*) and chapped lips and face in the winter. Bamberg addresses baldness, alopecia and scurf, and has a recipe to remove stains on the face. There are parallels here with the Anglo-Saxon leech books, which Rubin long ago suggested demonstrated a high concern for personal appearance.7 These medical texts, at the very least, *theorized* what to do to improve facial appearance: there are numerous remedies found in the Anglo-Saxon *Leechbook* for pustules, ulcers and blotches on the face, as well as for loss of hair. Perhaps most surprising of all is a surgical procedure for the correction of disfigurement caused by a hare lip:

For hare lip: pound mastic very small, add the white of an egg and mingle as thou dust vermilion, cut with a knife the false edges of the lip, sew fast with silk, then smear without and within the salve, ere the silk rot. If it draw together, arrange it with the hand; anoint again soon.8

That the copyist of the *Leechbook* included surgery such as this may be linked to the likelihood that any such operation would have been carried out on an infant or young child. A risky action, perhaps, but if it succeeded, it might assist the child to attain full social adulthood, particularly if it also ameliorated any speech impairment caused by the condition.9 Throughout the book our attention has been drawn to the fact that the writers of early medieval narratives and law codes cared about, observed and imputed meaning to facial appearance. Whether or not the *Leechbooks* and continental medical texts represent evidence of medical practice is rather less important than the fact that they correspond, in their ideas about the face, with other sources. Gariopontus' revolutionary head-to-toe *Passionarius* was known in England by the end of the eleventh century, and extracts were also copied into the Old English translation of the *Peri Didaxeon*. 10 Despite the obvious scholarly interest in such texts, we should not discount the possibility that some remedies and procedures were actually tried out.11 Early medieval *non-medical* sources, such narrative texts, laws and archaeology, after all, point to a rather more sophisticated medical and surgical—environment than has previously been credited in the early medieval period.

Medicine and surgery have been understood and studied as almost separate areas of care. Surgery had a long history, from antiquity,12 of being viewed as a separate, practical—and subject—branch of medicine. The distinction seems to have disappeared in early medieval Western Europe, judging by examples to be discussed below, but persisted in areas of Muslim rule, where the inheritance of antiquity was far more direct. The difference between the two fields is expressed most clearly in texts such as that of the Egyptian physician Ibn Ridwan (d.1068), who commented:

I divide the teaching of medicine into two parts: one is theory, which is to be studied either from the books of Hippocrates or those of Galen… The other is practice, by which I mean the study of bone-setting, the restoration of dislocations, incision, suturing, cautery, lancing, eye remedies and all other manual procedures.13

Put simply then, surgery was conceived as the care of the external body, a response to trauma, wounding, or the visible lesions caused by disease. The knowledge required to do this effectively might vary between practitioners, and there were certainly, in the Muslim world, texts instructing the surgeon, but the overarching framework for understanding early medieval surgery in Western Europe before c.1200 is as a practical skill, rather than a theorized vocation. The description of surgical procedure on view in *Bald's Leechbook*, for example, does not link it in any way to the general health of the person being operated on. But this text is exceptional in many ways, both in terms of its content and the level of scrutiny it has received from historians.14 In fact, early medieval European medical texts more usually feature lists of remedies, rather than the surgical procedures that are included in Bald. Rubin concedes that "even in Anglo-Saxon times there was some form of medical education."15 And as we shall see, the early medieval doctor was expected to be a general practitioner of sorts, skilled in all aspects rather than specializing in one.

The distinction between medicine and surgery resurfaced in Europe and was reinforced during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The advent of "rational" surgery, evident in western writers such as Theoderic of Bologna, confined surgical intervention to a last resort after diet, regime and medicines had been tried.16 The invisibility of early medieval surgeons in Western Europe, then, stems from the fact that documented specialism in a field only became common after 1100. Again, this has led to relative neglect, until relatively recently, on the part of historians, in tracing earlier evidence of surgical practice.17 Yet the early Middle Ages in Western Europe are not devoid of surgical texts, and Horden's own work has demonstrated that looking for information in other types of early medieval sources can produce quite startling insights into the sophistication of care and cure at this time, extending even to "alternative" therapies such as the use of music.18

Even if we do not have early medieval references to "professional" surgeons, therefore, the existence of such a group of skilled practitioners should not be dismissed as fanciful. Clare Pilsworth's work on the apparent prestige of medical experts in Lombard Italy suggests that competent practitioners existed long before the advent of the "rational" surgical profession in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and at the very least were viewed as respected members of their local communities.19 Moreover, the definition of a medical profession, commonly thought to be a phenomenon of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, needs to be reconsidered in the light of numerous examples of paid doctors earlier on, and the evidence, albeit slim, of regulation and of doctors being encouraged to indemnify themselves against accusations of malpractice. The early Welsh poem, the *Prophecy of Britain*, famously declares of the battle between Britons and Saxons, "no fee for the doctor will come of their deeds." Rhetorical flourish or evidence of potentially redundant battlefield surgeons?20 We shall return to this issue.

As Horden, Banham and others have demonstrated, the copying and excerpting of medical texts continued throughout the early middle ages,21 but the relative paucity of material, in comparison with the intensity of activity in the twelfth century,22 is revealing: it is unlikely that text survival is a reliable indicator of the levels of competency or the distribution of practical competence. Ideas about wound care, on the other hand, occur frequently in non-medical texts: a rich source to mine is the abundance of legal codes from early medieval Europe, which list in some detail the penalties to be imposed for various injuries to the body.23 Whilst the severity of the wound, and its care, might be determined by bleeding—several early medieval laws draw a distinction between a wound that could or could not be staunched,24—the laws are primarily concerned with the compensation payable for injury, and this financial penalty might also include calling for a doctor,25 or offering the victim some kind of sick maintenance.26 The clear overlap between versions of the same code, and between codes intended for different ethnic groups, prevent any sense of where such assistance might be more common, but all assume the existence of paid doctors (*medici*) to attend to injuries and/or to testify to their severity. This legal function mirrors Pilsworth's findings about the status of Lombard doctors. The esteem in which medics were held in this period is also possibly illustrated by the elevation of one, Deroldus, to the bishopric of Amiens in 929.27

#### Healing in Action?

At the same time as providing evidence of the existence of such trusted figures, the source material is frustratingly reticent about describing treatment practices. We are certainly not lacking in references to serious and superficial head and facial wounds (one has only to read Gregory of Tours' accounts of the endemic violence in Merovingian Francia)28 but their concern, as we have seen, is less with the medical after-effects than with the responses that such wounds might elicit. A rare reference to medical treatment in Gregory in fact indicates that not all care was designed with beneficial effects in mind. Describing the arrest and downfall of Count Leudast of Tours, whose earlier mutilation was discussed above, Gregory reports that Queen Fredegund's men struck him on the head, cutting away most of his hair and scalp, and that he broke his leg in the process of fleeing his assailants. King Chilperic ordered that he receive medical attention (*ut studeretur a medicis*) until his wounds were cured, and then be put to lingering torture. When his wounds began to fester, Leudast was put to death on the orders of the queen. Gregory, whose own hostile relationship with Leudast was longstanding, expresses satisfaction at the death.29 Exploring the medical aspect of this account, however, the idea that a victim should be rendered fit enough to undergo further bodily punishment (Miller's "keep him alive for scoffing"?) does not appear to have caused any moral qualms on Gregory's part, and we do not know what the doctors implicated in this process thought of their orders.30 Presumably fear of the king and queen prevented protest, but the fact that only the wounds inflicted by the torturers are described as festering signals some competence of care at least, even if the ethics of the doctors' actions were questionable.

We see doctors in action in early ninth-century narrative accounts from Francia as well. When a fragile wooden arcade collapsed on Emperor Louis the Pious and his attendants in 817, the king's bruised chest, injury to the back of his right ear and injury to his groin from a piece of flying wood were quickly dealt with "through the diligence of his physicians (*medicorum*)" and he was able to go hunting less than three weeks later.31 Louis's eponymous son, Louis the German, also met with misfortune, falling from a second storey; not giving his physicians (*medici*) enough time to heal him, however, he then had to have rotting flesh cut out from his (unspecified) wounds and remain laid up at Aachen.32 "Rotting flesh" may serve as a catch-all term for any type of infection, but this passage is valuable for confirming that "the same *medici*" had to deal with the surgical intervention—it is tempting to surmise that if the distinction between medical and surgical practice was not manifest at the level of court physicians, the same was also true lower down the social scale.33 The sources are silent, however, on the care received by King Louis IV of Francia on his deathbed in 954 after a fall from a horse. Flodoard reports that he was gravely injured, and lay sick at Rheims for a long time, afflicted by "elephantiasis," before dying. Given that this term was used by ancient physicians and their medieval heirs as a term for leprosy or skin lesions in the early Middle Ages, however, one wonders whether Louis' fall was a result of an existing illness, rather than its cause.34

Leaving the court environment, physicians become rather more elusive (except in stock tales about their inability to provide a cure in hagiographic texts, which were all-too-often utilized by earlier historians of medicine as evidence of the "ignorance" of medieval medicine).35 We have already seen that early medieval lawcodes contained detailed clauses about injuries to the head and face.36 When looking specifically for medical practice in the laws, it is striking just how many references to medical practice and medics there are. These can be broken down into earlier regulation of medical practice, and the evidence for doctors being called in to treat illegally-inflicted wounds and/or attest to their severity.

Book XI of the seventh-century Visigothic lawcode, for example, has no less than eight clauses relating to physicians and their practice, including bleeding and the removal of cataracts from eyes (for which the reward is high: 5 *solidi*.) The laws assume that a medic will be called to treat the sick and wounded, recognize those who pass on their knowledge to others, and offers protection to the doctor whose patient dies.37 Elsewhere in the code, wounds requiring compensation are categorized as slight, drawing blood or down to the bone.38 This code has of course been recognized as one of the most "Roman" of lawcodes, and the regulation of physicians echoes—but does not reproduce, textually, Book 13 of the Theodosian lawcode. (The latter regulates the appointment of doctors and their exemption from municipal and public office, rather than their practice as such.)39 At a most basic level, even if the Visigothic kingdom was not teeming with doctors, it is clear that the rhetoric of royal authority in the lawcodes was thought to be enhanced by encouraging their practice and, crucially, the training of future generations. The flourishing intellectual and medical culture of Al-Andalus, then, may have benefited from and built on pre-existing foundations of practice.

Almost contemporary Lombard law, whilst it does not regulate medics in quite the same way, nevertheless reiterates, from Rothari's edict in 643 to Liutprand's recension in the early eighth century, that "He who causes injuries should seek the doctor (*Qui plagas fecerit, ipse querat medicus* [*sic*])." Moreover, the assailant is charged to pay the doctor's fees and tip "as will be decided by learned men (*per doctos homines arbitratum fuerit*)."40 "Learned men" might suggest either those versed in the law or previous cases, or may hint at other doctors being called in to give their opinion on the injury itself before costs of care were calculated. A striking element in these laws is the fact that the doctor is assumed to be called for injuries to slaves or semi-free (and the fee and tip excluded from the compensation amounts quoted), but is not mentioned in the list of compensations for injuries to freemen. Why should this be? One possibility is that medical care here is being expressed as an additional cost in the restoration of an asset, that is, the slave or semi-free peasant, to working order.

Both codes indicate, therefore, that doctors were thought to be available, and assume that *medici* would be able to treat wounds, that is, undertake the work that would later be left to surgeons.41 The clauses considered so far are less explicit (with the exception of the clause on cataract removal) about the treatments they offered. For more detail we have to turn to the laws of the Alemans. Although the attribution of this code in different manuscripts to an unidentified King Clothar (II – 613–628, III – 657–673 or IV – 717–719) or to Duke Lantfrid (709–730) makes precise dating of the laws difficult (their modern editor plumps for early eighth century),42 their medical content is quite striking. Law 57 [59] is worth drawing attention to for its detailed, gradated description of head injury and to the role of the doctor in providing care and subsequent testimony:

 1. If anyone out of anger hits another, called "pulislac" by the Alemans, let him compensate with one solidus. (*Si quis alium per iram percusserit, quod Alemanni "pulislac" dicunt, cum uno solido componat*).43

A very similarly-structured list is included in the *Lex Frisionum*, Title XXII, compiled nearly a century later. This, though, has some important differences. It envisages that head injuries could cause impairment:

Clearly, the detailed clauses on head injury share much with the Alemannic model, but the Frisian laws are silent on the care of doctors until some later additions relating to injuries to the stomach (the "judgment of Wulemar," 1 and 2). As we have seen from the Lombard material, however, the presence or absence of references to medics may not be determined by their relative accessibility in a particular region. The *Lex Baiwariorum*, for instance, repeats clauses about wounding, but the need to call a doctor— "ut propter hoc medicum inquirat"—is only mentioned as a measure of the compensation to be paid.47

Slightly later in date, the regulation of medical practice also appears in the Welsh laws, with the role of the court doctor outlined in some detail.48 Dating anywhere between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the laws outlining the duties of the king's physician (*meddyg*) provide some striking points of comparison with earlier laws. The court physician is supported by the king and queen in return for treating members of the court free of charge, except for the three "dangerous wounds"—a blow to the head reaching the brain, a blow to the body reaching the bowels and a broken arm or leg. For treating these, the medic can charge set fees, which are outlined in the laws. Further treatments, such as bleeding, applying herbs to swellings and applying "medication with red ointment" are also given set charges.49 What was this precious "red ointment"? Cule says it is a mistranslation of a treatment for a major blood vessel: if so, it would represent a substantial fee.50 We shall return to this issue.

Rather like the Visigothic laws, Welsh law advises the physician to take assurances from his patients' families before undertaking treatment, in order to avoid repercussions if the patient dies. And like the Alemannic codes, the doctor—and here we may be moving beyond simply the court physician—is also involved in disputes following serious injury. Again, the assumption is that the doctor should keep any extracted bone from a skull injury, so that if there is a dispute about its size (indicating seriousness of injury), he can "take a brass bowl, and let him set his elbow on the ground with his hand above the bowl, and if its sound is heard, 4d, and if it is not heard there is no right to anything."51 The physician's fees are also repeated, although there is a difference of two and a half pence per day between the food for the court physician and any other person!

The similarities between Welsh and earlier continental laws on these issues have not gone unnoticed. Although Thomas Glyn Watkin's extensive survey of Welsh legal history identified some possible lines of transmission (he notes, for example, that the Theodosian code was known in Britain, despite postdating the Roman withdrawal), they have remained brief comments in footnotes. Yet, medieval Wales was a cosmopolitan place, and had links not only with other Celtic regions such as Ireland and Brittany (all three sharing specific legal terminology relating to honorprice, as we have seen), but also with England and Francia, particularly the court of Gwynedd's links with that of Charles the Bald.52 The medical motifs visible in Welsh law might simply derive from a shared, Indo-European past that valued ritual (the clang of a bone in a metal receptacle) and had taboos (blood reaching the ground, polluting the kingdom). But I wonder whether they are in fact more valuable in demonstrating the earlier, oral stratum of the law as well, one receptive to the idea of speciallyappointed medical men, and aware that some wounds, and illnesses, just could not be cured? How far did shared medical ideas travel, particularly but not exclusively relating to head injuries? This is where the question of "red ointment"/"major blood vessel" comes in again, for the serious wound to a vein is included in Bavarian laws requiring the presence of the doctor. Does legal medicine represent medicine on the ground? I suggest that the ubiquity of references to doctors in some texts, their absence in others, and the occasional glimpse into practice argues against seeing these simply as textual reproductions.

#### Medical Language

Letters, too, offer a rich seam of what might be best-termed quasi-medical information and the use of medical metaphors. Like their Biblical models, these tend to contrast earthly healing with spiritual rewards, but are nevertheless useful for exploring recurring themes. Charlemagne's biographer Einhard reflects on whether the "wound" of his wife's death will ever heal over to a scar with the medicine of consolation.53 In Gerbert of Aurillac's letters, among others, there is ample evidence of medical terminology being utilized in a metaphorical sense to persuade erring members of the church to have a care for their spiritual health. For example, in a letter to Thibaud, Bishop of Amiens in 976, he rebukes the bishop for refusing to attend synods, and says that "The reverend 'physicians,' well acquainted with your ailments... and that pseudo-archbishop who... infected you as if by certain contagion, agreed upon the dishonor as far as you are concerned... the judgment of Pope Benedict VII found you incurable."54 A letter written for Bishop Dietrich of Metz in 984 condemning Duke Charles for his betrayal includes: "you pour forth the disease of your utterly wicked heart...  A wandering monk, too, was to be given "honeyed doses, according to the manner of a good physician lest, when the bitter antidotes are administered, the patient... should begin to tremble for his safety."55 In terms of his own medical practice, as we have seen, Gerbert drew a line between knowledge, of which he had plenty,56 and practical remedies, which he was reluctant to put into effect.57

Slightly later, Fulbert of Chartres (c. 970–c.1030) envisages a more robust, "surgical" intervention to bring Bishop Hubert of Angers, whom he had excommunicated, to penitence. In his letter to the bishop, Fulbert refers to "the scalpel of prudence (*falce discretionis*)" cutting away Hubert's sins, before launching into a lengthy series of medical metaphors for treating the now open "wounds."58 Metaphorical, certainly, but hinting at some very simple wound management open to those less well-educated than Fulbert and his circle: cutting away bad flesh, cauterizing but then applying emollients to the wound before adding honey, whose antiseptic qualities both protected and healed.59 A letter of 1031 of Ebbo, schoolmaster at Worms cathedral, also exemplifies the common use of medical terminology, but illustrates the division, already met in Thietmar, between the relative unimportance of the body when compared with the soul: "For as it says in proverbs, a friend out of duty disagrees with the doctor, for whilst [the doctor] can heal the scars of the body, so [the friend] if he wishes well can cure the sicknesses of the soul."60

Although medieval letters were written with an eye to demonstrating the writer's erudition and learning as well as conveying information and maintaining social relations, it is clear that their mainly clerical authors combined Classical allusions, biblical *topoi* and familiar home remedies to articulate their spiritual lessons. They are very comfortable with medical language; Orderic Vitalis, for example, terms the evangelist Luke the *spiritualis archiatros* or chief doctor of souls, and opined that, "A wise physician treats a sick man with a mild medicine, for fear that if he goads the sick man with the pain of too drastic a remedy he may kill instead of curing him."61 Here he is again referring to the care of souls, but he is also informative on some of the medical care for the body available in his own day, good and bad. His famous portrait of Ralph, the "Ill-Tonsured," is of a skilled medic who had "spent much of his time out of the study in the battle-field," (and so by implication was ill-suited to be a monk, hence his nickname?) and could treat victims of disease and accident. Operating as Ralph was during the latter part of the eleventh century and early twelfth, Orderic's text is valuable evidence that the split between medic and surgeon had not yet occurred. By contrast, the personal physician of King Henry I of France, he reports, was called "Blockhead" (*Surdus*—literally "Deaf"). Although he prescribed the ailing king a medicine, Henry died after drinking water: presumably the attack on the doctor was for lack of care or close observation, rather than the prescription itself.62

Self-care of sorts features in the twelfth-century *Life* of St Ulrich of Zell (d. 1093). It recounts how the prior gave himself a severe headache though his long, nocturnal vigils and his continuous work writing (*per longas vigilias noctium, per scribendi laborem continuum, gravissimum capitis dolorem incurrebat*). Not realizing this was a divine test, he decides to self-treat, washing his head "several times" with wormwood (*aliquoties caput lavit absinthio*). But he accidently pierced his eye with the stick (*festuca*) with which he was applying the remedy, and could not get it out. For six months he wept copious tears (*guttatim effluxit*) from the eye, but recognized that this temporary lack of external light and vision was a test to make him see the inner light more clearly (*non est. contristatus pro exterioris luminis detrimento: quia quanto carnalis visus obscurior, tanto mentis acies ad contemplandum superni luminis claritatem fuerat perspicacior*).63

#### Case Study: Serious Head Injury in Battle

All of this tangential evidence suggests that basic remedies were known and doctors were available (for a fee), and that many of their procedures, whilst clearly empirical, were not entirely without skill and knowledge. Removing bone from skull injuries, for example, was clearly understood to relieve pressure on the brain and may have been a widespread practice, whether or not the *dura mater* had been punctured. Whilst thirteenthcentury surgical manuals such as that of Theoderic of Bologna (c. 1267) urged haste in dealing with bone fragments, they were clearly not introducing a new method of treatment.64 Indeed, a clause in the midthirteenth-century Assizes of the Kingdom of Cyprus explicitly criticizes any doctor who did *not* know how to undertake this procedure competently: "should the doctor not have known how to open the wound, but treated it in such a way that the fractured bones came into contact with the brain," resulting in the patient's death, the doctor was liable to pay compensation.65

Whilst surgical texts might be lacking from the early medieval period, surgical knowledge clearly was not. Archaeological evidence from early medieval sites reinforces the evidence of competent surgery, and demonstrates that even serious head wounds were survivable, and that some must have been treated. Two warrior burials recently found in central Italy showed severe, but partly healed, head traumas.66 Had these men received care from a surgeon? Certainly there would have been a need to remove splinters of skull, and in a case from the cemetery of the deserted medieval village at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, there was some evidence of additional trepanation.67 This individual, dating from the tenth/eleventh century, is particularly exciting, as the location of the cemetery suggests that there was access to medical care in a relatively rural setting. Caution is required here, however, for the trepanation process can be interpreted as a religious ritual as well as one with a curative aim. Yet a sample of Anglo-Saxon cases studied by Parker suggests that, pagan or Christian, the procedure had been carried out with a medical aim as well as or rather than a ritualistic one, and there was a high success rate, evidenced by the partial healing evident in many of the skulls. Parker does not, however, speculate as to the reasons for the trepanning: blunt force injury and the need to access impacted bones is not mentioned at all.68 Exploring the later world of the crusade surgeon, Piers Mitchell cites a survey of cemetery evidence dating from the sixth to eighth centuries in Germany, in which approximately thirty of the deceased had cranial fractures and three-quarters of these had healed, again indicating survival.69 As Mitchell comments, further work on archaeological sites can only expand the sample of remains to inform our knowledge of the survivability of head injuries, whether sustained in warfare or through rather more mundane accidents. Blunt force cranial injury, of course, is not quite facial disfigurement. Nor does it all have to be the result of interpersonal violence (although it is often reported as such). Falls, and items falling on the head, could produce equally serious breakage of the skull.

More likely causes of disfigurement were assaults with bladed weapons: we have already met one or two of these. Literary sources portray survivors, such as Wulf Wonreding in Beowulf, who, though injured by a "keen wound" from a sword to his head through his helmet, was nevertheless "bound up" and recovered from it.70 Bernard Bachrach, basing his discussion on Rabanus Maurus's ninth-century text *De Procinctu Miliciae*, suggests that infantry soldiers were trained to jab short swords and cause puncture injuries, first at the head and face of the enemy, then at other parts of his body. This, he argues, was a more effective means of disabling and killing than using a slashing motion with the sword, which risked hitting only bone and shield and possibly one's own comrades.71 Yet Rabanus drew heavily on the fifth-century Roman author Vegetius's *De Re Militari*, which may explain his emphasis on Roman-style short swords. Slashing injuries in early medieval skeletal remains attest to longer weapons in individual combat. Archaeological studies seem to concur that the "primary target on the body" in close combat was the head which, if the individual was lacking or had lost his helmet, was the least protected part of his body,72 and remains quite commonly display blunt-weapon injury to the skull (such as might have been made by staves or spear shafts) alongside blade injuries. The potential for bruising and superficial cuts and lacerations, however, was greater than is revealed by the archaeological evidence, which mainly picks up the blows that hit home to the bone in a fatal, or near-fatal manner.73 Earlier sources rarely describe these in much detail,74 but the literary and rhetorical skills of later poetry make much of such glancing blows, emphasizing the dangers of hand-to-hand combat. Robert of Courcy was wounded and lost his right eye in battle.75 Another type of head wound that shows up in the evidence is a direct hit by a projectile, whether an arrow in the face, often the eye area, or missiles such as stones either thrown from above or shot by machine.76 Arrow wounds were particularly difficult to treat, and those recorded in the written evidence were usually fatal, compounded, in many cases, by the difficulty of removing an arrowhead that might be barbed or poisoned.77 Richard of Acerra's arrow wound through both cheeks, discussed above and apparently successfully treated by a "medicus" and two female assistants, seems an entirely exceptional case when compared with the many full-frontal arrow strikes documented in the evidence. Richer son of Engenulf of Laigle was fatally wounded just beneath the eye by an arrow shot by "a certain beardless boy."78 Hugh, earl of Shrewsbury, despite being "clad in iron from the top of his head to the souls of his feet," was hit in the right eye by an arrow that penetrated his brain and killed him when fighting pirates from the Orkneys, "so that he fell mortally wounded into the sea."79

# Blinding, Disfigurement and Aftercare: Living with <sup>a</sup> Changed Face

If the theatre of warfare seems an obvious place to look for medics at work, the many examples of judicial mutilations and other blindings scattered throughout this book also demand attention as potential theatres of surgery. If the idea was to inflict a lasting punishment, the person needed to heal sufficiently to act as a living example to others. Branding was its own form of cautery, but were cut wounds—ears, noses and lips—also cauterized, as some of the metaphorical material explored above envisages? Limited evidence of the use of cautery has emerged from an eighthtenth-century grave in Pisa, but the report authors' speculation as to why it was used relies upon evidence from medical texts that were unknown in the West at this date.80

Blinding could be carried out without recourse to extraction of the eyes, but most of the examples do seem to involve heated brands or spiked implements, and as we have seen, care was needed to ensure these did not penetrate beyond the eye sockets and kill the unfortunate victim, even if the eyes were "discrete and as such neatly and discretely extractable" in Miller's words.81 But what happened next? In the extended scene recounted by Psellos, the two victims are "left to rest" after their ordeal, but presumably they might seek assistance to deal with the pain and bleeding. Anna Komnena relates that the blinded rebel Nicephorus Diogenes was "frantic with pain" after his ordeal.82 The most detailed account of possibly medical intervention, however, occurs in a hagiographical context. I alluded above to the case of Ailward of Westoning, pictured in the Canterbury cathedral Becket windows as the victim of an unjust blinding and castration, and cured by the saint. In two narrative text versions of the miracle, some form of aftercare treatment with an emollient, wax and bandages wrapped around the victim's eye sockets is mentioned. William of Canterbury reports that Ailward had a vision of St Thomas ten days after the blinding, and feeling his left eye itching (*pruriente sinistro oculo*) he scratched at the wax and emollient that had been applied to eliminate the pus (*scalpens ungue ceram summovit et malagma quod appositum fuerat ad purulentias extrahendas*).83 Does this add veracity to the miracle story by introducing a "realistic" medical detail, or was this apparent "sealing" of the sockets a standard practice once eyeballs were removed? Benedict of Peterborough's slightly later account adds the detail that Ailward's eyes were bandaged (as he wonders whether his vision will come true once the bandage is removed), but confuses the issue too. Whilst William separates out the wax and the emollient, Benedict combines them into "waxy emollient (*malagma cereum*)" and adds that it had been applied "either to extract the pus from the empty sockets or to close the lids themselves (*quod sive ad extrahendas orbium vacuorum purulentias seu ad ipsa cilia claudenda fuerat appositum*)."84 Certainly there is other limited evidence of bandaging being applied after blinding (in Anna Komnena's accounts), but whether this was to assist in healing, or simply an aesthetic choice to cover the wounds is never stated.

Focusing on the aesthetic demands a brief consideration of cosmetic aids. Demaitre has noted that the later Middle Ages saw an upsurge in medical texts dealing with apparently minor skin conditions and lesions. Remedies for ulcers and pimples on the face feature in the fourth-century *Herbarium* of Pseudo-Apuleius, translated into Anglo-Saxon in England in the tenth, and in Bald's *Leechbook*, but they were intended to heal such conditions, not conceal them.85 There is no consideration in this text of concealing or reducing scarring, for example. The rising concern with appearance may, however, be indicated by the numerical increase in such recipes, from three in the Apuleius to nineteen in the *Leechbook*. Specific concern with cosmetic appearance seems to have been focused on women: the twelfth-century *De Ornatu Mulierum* (On Women's Cosmetics), produced in Salerno in the twelfth century, starts with a series of recipes about hair (both conditioning and colouring, and depilation) before moving on to the face. Adorning the face, the text points out, "embellishes even ugly women (*deformes mulieres palliat*)."86 There follow recipes for diminishing blotches and freckles, whitening the complexion, curing scabies and attending to sunburn, but again, dealing with the after-effects of disfiguring conditions or scars is not considered explicitly.87 It seems that concealing facial scars with preparations was not, yet, a technique to "pass."

Modern surgical care packages for disfigured people address not only the physical challenges their acquired disfigurement presents, but also the psychological trauma of waking with a new face (a trauma that, arguably, is repeated several times if surgery takes place in stages). To what extent is there any evidence of emotional or psychological support in the early Middle Ages? From the preceding discussion, it seems that in the early Middle Ages the circumstances of the disfiguring injury strongly shaped responses toward it, a phenomenon that arguably persists today. Military heroes (even unlikely ones like Bishop Michael of Regensburg, discussed above) or unjustly or illegally injured people (mutilated hostages) evoked some pity or sympathy and even—in the case of Genoese archers—financial support. Those who brought their disfigurement upon themselves, however, including not only criminals (like Septimina and Droctulf) but also irresponsible youths (Young Charles), seem to have been given rather shorter shrift. Ailward, according to Benedict's account, spent a day in Bedford sitting against the wall of a house "without any favor of humanity being shown towards him (*nullo sibi collato humanitiatis beneficio*)." Here the pathos of the broken man and his accompanying young daughter is designed of course to evoke even more pity before the miraculous intervention of Thomas.

Many cases feature those who were already socially visible elites, whose fate might usefully serve as an object lesson in humility. But their changed circumstances could also bring new opportunities. This is at least the tenor of Anna Komnena's report of the blinded Nicephorus, mentioned earlier. After withdrawing to his estates (wealth clearly cushioned the blow of his fall from favor), Anna recounts that he "found satisfaction... devoting all his energies to the study of ancient literature, read to him by others. Deprived of his own sight, he used the eyes of strangers for reading... Later he...even studied the celebrated geometry (an unprecedented feat) by getting a philosopher he had met to prepare the figures in relief. By touching these with his hands he acquired knowledge of all the geometrical theorems and figures. Thus he rivaled Didymus... I myself have seen the man and marveled at him..."88 Anna's text is a classic example of the "triumphing over adversity" model, yet her account also objectifies Nicephorus, particularly that last sentence that sets him up almost as an exhibit to be visited and "seen."89

No doubt Nicephorus's already high status and obvious wealth (he retired to his estates) cushioned the blow of his sightlessness, as well as persuading Anna to visit him. Lower-status victims of disfigurement were in a much more vulnerable position, and living with their condition required that they promote a fascinating back-story to make it into the written records at all. Walchelin the badly-burnt priest is a case in point, emphasizing the supernatural origin of his wounds (and thus again inviting wonder, not rejection). Ailward's initial day of dejection in Bedford, albeit a hagiographical tool to evoke pity in the reader, probably reflects far more accurately the social norm of living with an acquired disfigurement if one were only a peasant farmer. Yet another hagiographic text featured an alternative outcome. The eleventh-century *Life* of the sixth-century St Cadog of Wales features a "rustic" who dared to look through a spyhole to the tombs of Cadog's disciples in a Scottish monastery, despite the warnings of the custodian priests that Cadog would punish him for his presumption: "Go," they say, "and may St Cadog make a sign of his revenge appear on you [*Vade, et faciat sanctus Cadocus quatinus signum ultionis appareat in te*]." Peering through the opening, the peasant's eye immediately "burst, and hung down his face suspended on the optic nerve [*crepuit, et per neruum octicum facie tenus depependit*]." Far from being defeated by this punishment, he subsequently "traveled from place to place throughout the province of *Lintheamina*, covering his broken eye. And many people gave him alms, in order that he should show them the torn apart eyeball. And from this more and more of his countrymen learnt to fear God, and reverently worship him through his saint [*Giravit equidem itidem rusticus de loco ad locum per totam provinciam Lintheamine, erutum oculum tegens. Plures mercedem ei largiebantur, ut eis diuulsum ocelli orbiculum ostenderet. Exin magis ac magis compatriote discebant Deum metuere, et cum sancto suo reverenter glorificare*]."90

For the rustic, his impairment represented an opportunity, and whilst at first sight his wandering and seeking alms mirrors that of the blinded priest Wipert, discussed earlier, his showman-like action in concealing and then revealing his eyeball seems to represent social elevation of a kind rather than humiliating punishment. For those already in socially-elevated positions, however, death was indeed written up as preferable to disfigurement or impairment (Emperor Michael, Luke of La Barre), but we cannot discount the idea that faith supported the survivors in ways that the texts just do not make explicit. (This, after all, was the purpose of hagiographic tales of exceptional cures.) Were people with disfigurements reminded that their humility or humiliation on earth would be rewarded in heaven, and did this help at all with the day-to-day battle of living with disfigurement? In the concluding chapter, the continuities and changes across time will be briefly considered as a starting point for more work on the history of disfigurement.

# Notes

Traditions\_in\_the\_Eleventh\_and\_Twelfth\_Centuries\_ [Accessed 21 August 2012]. On the OE Peri Didaxeon (British Library, Harley MS 6258 B, ff 55v-66v), see L. Sanborn, "Anglo-Saxon medical practices and the *Peri Didaxeon*," *Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa*, 55 (1985): 7–13.

4 and 5. See more generally Michael McVaugh's influential study, *The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages* (Firenze: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).

this is more likely to mean a swelling, due to injury or rupture of the *dura mater*, rather than literally a spilling of cerebral matter.

medieval period of course: Michel Foucault, *The History of Sexuality, III: the Care of the Self* (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 55, quotes Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, 64.8, outlining much the same scalpel and soothing procedure.

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# Conclusion: Taking the Long View on Medieval Disfigurement

Working on a project that explores the representation of and responses to acquired facial disfigurement in early medieval Europe, I have been struck by the sheer number of instances recorded in medieval evidence. The disruption of the facial features—by far the most visible of sites—resonates with medieval observers; it is threatened as a corporal punishment in legal sources, but penalized if inflicted by anyone other than the king; it features in folkloric tales, often as a warning against transgressive behavior; it is commented upon, often at length, to draw moral lessons. But almost all of this evidence comes from the pens of those observing or imagining facial disfigurement: like many apparently marginal groups in medieval society, the voices of disfigured people themselves are very seldom heard. Yet the patient acceptance of disfigurement or difference is also held up in medieval religious and secular texts as a sign of sanctity or humility before God. The medieval examples offer an opportunity to explore the ambivalence surrounding disfigurement, and try to draw out some questions regarding continuities in the history of people with disfigurements over centuries. Irina Metzler has raised the question as to whether the face-to-face society of the Middle Ages had any concept of disability, and asks whether individuals could have had a "disabled identity."1 In the present study, the social stigma associated with acquiring a visible facial injury in the early Middle Ages only seems to become an "identity" in legal records of the thirteenth century, when claiming to be a "maimed man"—a status that presumably needed to be permanent—enabled plaintiffs to avoid trial by physical combat. It is certainly the case that the number of examples of recorded

© The Author(s) 2017 213 P. Skinner, *Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe*, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54439-1\_8

disfigurement increases as we move from the sixth century to the twelfth, and narrative accounts from the latter part of our period do appear to have focused in greater detail on facial appearance than earlier writers. But the exhaustive lists of personal injuries to the head and face contained in early medieval lawcodes suggest that overall levels of concern about facial appearance remained pretty constant in these centuries. The major change—in evidential terms at least—came about with the explosion of medical writings rediscovered in the twelfth century, and a concomitant and well-documented trend toward identification and classification precipitated by Western Europe's engagement (including violence) with the Muslim world.

A substantial proportion of the instances of disfigurement recorded occurs in prescriptive material, and this needs to be acknowledged: the project of recording how people lived with disfigurement relies primarily on actual cases where we know the disfigurement happened. Yet this study has only been able to turn up two or three cases for the entire period where some form of first-person reflection takes place—Wipert, Thietmar, and Walchelin—all three quite late, and all three drawing specific lessons from their different appearance. The first question for further work on disfigurement is thus the nature of the records: at what point will these change from mainly looking *at* people with disfigurements, to a mixture of observations and accounts of the lived experience of looking different? Is the autobiographical account of becoming and being disfigured confined to the most recent century, or are clues to living with disfigurement embedded in earlier letters, diaries and narratives? The early medieval sample privileges reports of deliberate disfigurement over accounts of accidental injury, and focuses almost entirely on when the appearance of male, elite figures, from the lay or clerical sphere, was temporarily or permanently altered. Many lived with their disfigurement afterwards, but it is striking just how many facial injuries were associated with the word "ridicule," and how this specific term persists in sources across our entire period.2 In a medieval culture that valued honor *and* face, being laughed at, or being the object of not-so-amusing comments, was just as much an injury as physical damage.

What is missing, quite strikingly, is any expression of disgust: here, modern theorists have introduced a concept that is largely absent from the medieval sources. William Ian Miller may relate modern disgust responses to earlier periods, but the "barbarically loathsome" actions of a few were presented with horror expressed at the *actions*, not their results.3 Authors might express horror and pity, and share with the reader the spectacle of certain acts of mutilation at somewhat greater length than was entirely necessary (my "textual staring"), but they do not describe the aftermath as "disgusting." There was a spectrum associated with the aftermath too: a disfigurement *without* associated impairment and one *with* impairment (of sight, hearing or speech) were classified differently in some of the early laws, and perhaps ridicule shaded into sympathy for the latter category. This distinction has also been made in historiographical practice: only impairment makes it into histories of disability or medical practice, whilst "simple" disfigurement is largely unnoticed and lacks sustained attention from scholars.

Yet, inflicting a deliberate disfigurement was a highly political act, and this study has brought out the significance of mutilation-by-proxy, the attacking of dependents as a means of symbolizing the loss of control or status of the person meant to protect them, be it a king, or a father or—in the specific case of women—a husband. Of course, reports of such attacks still focus our attention on the intended target: the dependents are, often, unfortunate collateral damage (and those mutilated very young were the most damaged of all, facing a lifetime of marginalization). But even the proxies need to be significant in some way—there was no point mutilating a peasant tenant if you wanted to insult the king. One might in fact interpret the threatened mutilation of adulterous women in several lawcodes as a warning to their husbands about the potential shame *they* could suffer at having failed to assert adequate control and protection over their wives, even if this is not explicitly stated in the clauses themselves. Work on medieval violence has picked up on the fact that wives and dependents might be caught up in the downfall of their menfolk or leaders, and toward the twelfth century we certainly see more instances of deliberate mutilations as weapons of humiliation. Whether this is a product of the increase in available written evidence is unclear: the further escalation in the severity of facial violence in the thirteenth century, noted at the start of this study, suggests that this is not simply a matter of the multiplication of texts, but represents a shift away from killing to wounding as a means of settling scores. A question for future research, therefore, might focus on when reports begin of more "ordinary" people with acquired disfigurement (such as some of those documented in the Eyre courts), and explore the reasons for this change.

The stories that disfigurement generated for the early medieval, largely clerical, writers who recorded such incidents seem to fit within something of a predetermined set of parameters drawn from the Bible. And, for many of our writers, the piteous spectacle of those mutilated, or about to be, was an opportunity for others to provide charity, or intervene to plead mercy. It is never stated outright, but disfigurement was, to the elite community we can hear and read about, akin to social death. In some cases the power of a disfigured person's family could shield them from the worst assumptions about their condition, but such protection only lasted as long as they lived; it is interesting that we have a couple of cases of *damnatio memoriae*, whereby later authors, commenting on the same set of circumstances, draw much more robustly negative conclusions about whose fault the disfigurement was (the cases of Young Charles and the Saxon pirate raids of 994 are good examples).