Approaching Facial Difference

Patricia Skinner is Research Professor in History at Swansea University, UK. She is also co-editor of Social History of Medicine.Emily Cock is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research at Swansea University, UK.

This extraordinary collection of essays reveals the ways in which the intersections of gender, cultural notions of beauty and wholeness, and physical difference articulate how people in the West respond to human faces. By explicating the relationship between facial difference and notions of moral soundness, disease, and anxiety—and its apparent continuity throughout the whole of European history—the editors and contributors challenge readers and researchers to re-evaluate modern-day assumptions about beauty and difference based upon their presentation of the past.

• List of FiguresList of TablesNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgments1. Introduction: Situating the Different Face, Patricia Skinner (Swansea University, UK) and Emily Cock (Swansea University, UK)PART 1: LANGUAGE2. Dis/enabling Courtesy and Chivalry in the Middle English and Early Modern Gawain Romances and Ballads, Bonnie Millar (University of Nottingham, UK)3. ‘A Great Blemish to her Beauty’: Female Facial Disfigurement in Early Modern England, Michelle Webb (University of Exeter, UK)4. Does Talking about Disfigurement Risk Perpetuating Stigma? Jane Frances (Changing Faces, UK)PART 2: VISIBILITY5. Hair Loss as Facial Disfigurement in Ancient Rome? Jane Draycott (University of Glasgow, UK)6. Portrait? Likeness? Composite? Facial Difference in Forensic Art, Kathryn Smith (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)7. From ‘Staring’ to ‘Not Caring’: Development of Psychological Growth and Wellbeing among Adults with Cleft Lip and Palate, Patricia Neville (University of Bristol, UK), Andrea Waylen (University of Bristol, UK), Sara Ryan (University of Oxford, UK) and Aidan Searle (University of Bristol, UK)8. Making Up the Female Face: Pain and Imagination in the Music Videos of CocoRosie, Morna Laing (University of the Arts, London, UK)PART 3: MATERIALITY9. Archaeological Facial Depiction for People from the Past with Facial Differences, Caroline Wilkinson (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)10. “Trotule (Trotula) Puts Many Things on to Decorate and Embellish the Face but I Intend Solely to Remove Infection”: L’Abbe Poutrel and his Chirurgerie c.1300, Theresa Tyers (Swansea University, UK)11. Disrupting Our Sense of the Past: Medical Photographs that Push Interpreters to the Limits of Historical Analysis, Jason Bate (University of Exeter, UK)Bibliography Index