Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World

Deliberate, permanent, meaningful marks on human skin are as old as humanity itself. But the early modern period launched a new era in the history of dermal marking, as intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, brought skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines how the distinctive practices in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern era.

By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds, and scars, this volume shows that early modern readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from one another. On the contrary, Europeans described tattooing in North America, Thailand, and the Philippines by referring their readers to the tattoos Christian pilgrims received in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. When explaining the devil's mark on witches, theologians claimed that it was an inversion of holy marks such as divine stigmata. Informed by early modern thinkers' recognition of the fundamental comparability of dermal marking, this book shows how early modern signs on skin both affirmed traditional roles and beliefs and transformed such practices to meet new challenges and demands.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Xiao Chen, Ana Fonesca Conboy, Peter Erickson, Claire Goldstein, Matthew S. Hopper, Katrina H. B. Keefer, Mordechay Lewy, Nicole Nyffenegger, Mairin Odle, and Allison Stedman.