Defacing Women: The Gendering of Disfigurement

Abstract

The discussion of disfigurement in early medieval Europe has so far mostly explored cases of men becoming disfigured. This reflects one of the clear findings to emerge from the sample of over 400 instances found in the legal and narrative sources before 1200: that men make up the vast majority of cases documented, whether as victims or perpetrators of the disfiguring injuries. The minority sample of women, however, is itself interesting in that the type or form of the disfigurement they suffer as victims frequently differs from that experienced by men. For a start, almost all the cases of female disfigurement center around some perceived sexual betrayal. This may-in the written reports at least-reflect the concerns of the biblical stories that, I have suggested, underpin the ways in which medieval clerics, the authors of almost all our written material, made sense of and presented their accounts of disfigurements. Women were, in this epistemological framework, the second and secondary sex. They were not-in theory at least-permitted to have authority over men, to teach, to stray beyond their allotted role of obedient daughters, wives and mothers. In some legal codes, they had no separate legal personality from their male relatives, but were under the latters' protection. Their bodies, whether viewed through a religious or a medical lens, were weaker, colder, impaired versions of the male ideal. 1 Eve's betrayal of Adam had left women with an insuperable This chapter further develops points made at the conference European Perspectives on Cultures of Violence, held at Leicester University in June 2013.

Ways of Seeing: Staring at and Representing Disfigurement

“…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.…”