STIGMA, Marking Skin in the Early Modern World .Edited by Katherine Dauge- Roth and Craig Koslofsky (original) (raw)

"Sacred Skin: The Religious Significance of Medieval Scars," Signs and Society 10:1 (2022): 17-47

While numerous studies have addressed medieval wounds, few scholars have critically examined the religious role of scars in medieval Europe. This article incorporates theological writings, hagiography (saints' biographies), chivalric romances, and the visual arts to assess the semiotic significance of medieval scars. This article uses Roland Barthes's notion of semanticization as an organizing principle. As Barthes has shown, the process of meaningmaking is contingent upon its social context. Indeed, semanticization allows the conventionality of signs to operate. This article explores how Western medieval Christianity, with its repository of values and symbolism, enabled scars to function as signs. The religious context undergirding medieval scars allowed them to transcend from traces of accidental bodily markings to portals to rich theological significance. A fifteenth-century manuscript illustration for Le Roman de la violette (The romance of the violet, ca. 1227-29) conflates three narrative scenes (fig. 1). On the right side, Lady Euriant instructs her servant. In the middle scene, Sir Liziart has conspired with the servant to spy on Euriant. On the left side, Euriant takes her bath, unaware that she is being watched. The viewer can perceive the birthmark on her breast, which is the shape and color of a violet, hence the story's title. In the context of the story, Euriant is betrothed to the knight Gérard. However, Liziart falls in love with Euriant and tries to seduce her. When Euriant resists his advances, he hatches a plan. Liziart gets Euriant's servant to enable his access to Euriant's chamber. When spying on her in the bath, he notices the birthmark on her breast. He uses this knowledge to his advantage, suggesting to Gérard that he knows about the birthmark because he has deflowered Euriant.

Marked Bodies: Skin as a Communicative Entity in Late Antique Hagiography.

Veleia, 40, 2023

This article analyses the communicative function of the skin. Taking late antique Christian hagiographic texts as a point of departure, the aim is to illustrate the creation of speech codes in Christian communities in the Sassanid Empire and their expression in the hagiographic literature. It focuses on the presence or absence of marks on the skin and, by analysing these references and comparing them, the paper examines how Christian communities in late antiquity constructed systems of meaning around the skin and used them to articulate their religious identity in relation to other religious communities. The Speech Codes Theory developed by Greg Philipsen is of relevance here, helping to elucidate how Christian communities in the Sassanid Empire, embedded in an agonistic socio-cultural, political, legal, and religious context where Zoroastrianism occupied the hegemonic spheres, developed a constellation of specific meanings around the skin that enabled a continuous process of creating, negotiating and defining a message of religious affiliation.

Body Marks in Jewish Sources: From Biblical to Post-Talmudic Times

Review of Rabbinic Judaism, 2018

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the role of marks – signs and scripts – that Jews imprinted on their bodies during the course of two millennia. Although a Biblical prohibition exists against tattooing (Lev. 19:28), there were Jews who wrote the Lord’s name on their body, probably with ink. Ezekiel 9:4-6 is discussed, and then Cain’s Mark (Gen. 4:15), where the apotropaic character of the mark (or letter) is clear. Isaiah 44:5 is analyzed, and compared to Exodus 28:36 and 39:30, where examples of setting the Lord’s Name on one’s arm or forehead are delineated. It is surmised that this practice originated among priests and only later was imitated by the laity. Special attention is given to Numbers 6:22-27; it is claimed here that ‘setting’ the Lord’s Name was done literally by the priests, in contrast to previous commentators who interpret this verse metaphorically. Thus, priests blessed orally and committed their blessing into a bodily inscription on the people they had blessed. This custom most likely reflects the third commandment (Exod. 20:7): ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’, which is interpreted as inscribing the Lord’s Name and then profaning it. In the Talmud, there is evidence that in Late Antiquity there were Jews who had the Lord’s Name written on their bodies in ink. Moreover, in Hekhalot literature there are two detailed descriptions of how people were inscribed with God’s name accompanied by liturgy, in a kind of rite-of-passage ritual. Additional texts are cited and discussed in what follows (e.g., Revelation 19:16; Galatians 6:17) as evidence that there were Jews in Antiquity who inscribed the Lord’s name on their bodies.