Enfilade

From Penn Press:

Mairin Odle, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 176 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1512823165, $40.

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement.

Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America. Although these bodily practices were quite distinct―one a painful but generally voluntary sign of accomplishment and affiliation, the other a violent assault on life and identity―they were linked by growing colonial perceptions that both were crucial elements of ‘Nativeness’. Tracing the transformation of concepts of bodily integrity, personal and collective identities, and the sources of human difference, Under the Skin investigates both the lived physical experience and the contested metaphorical power of early American bodies.

Struggling for power on battlefields, in diplomatic gatherings, and in intellectual exchanges, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans found their physical appearances dramatically altered by their interactions with one another. Contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference translated into altered appearances for many early Americans. In turn, scars and symbols on skin prompted an outpouring of stories as people debated the meaning of such marks. Perhaps paradoxically, individuals with culturally ambiguous or hybrid appearances prompted increasing efforts to insist on permanent bodily identity. By the late eighteenth century, ideas about the body, phenotype, and culture were increasingly articulated in concepts of race. Yet even as the interpretations assigned to inscribed flesh shifted, fascination with marked bodies remained.

Mairin Odle is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Stories Written on the Body
1  Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted: Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos
2  The ‘Ill Effects of It’: Reading and Rewriting the Cross-Cultural Tattoo
3  Pricing the Part: Economies of Violence and Stories of Scalps
4  Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory
Epilogue: Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

From Penn State UP:

Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky, eds., Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), 294 pages, ISBN: 978-0271094427, $120.

The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Europeans described Indigenous 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 it was an inversion of holy marks such as those of baptism or divine stigmata. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands.

Katherine Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France.

Craig Koslofsky is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe and The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700, and the coeditor of A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction, Marking Skin: A Cutaneous Collection — Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

Part I | Marked Encounters in America, Asia, and Africa
1  ‘Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted’: English Ideas of Tattooing as Indigenous Literacy — Mairin Odle
2  Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes — Xiao Chen
3  Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification — Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper

Part II | Marks of Faith
4  Jerusalem Under the Skin: The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos — Mordechay Lewy
5  Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection — Allison Stedman
6  The Invisible Mark: Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy — Ana Fonseca Conboy
7  Rabies and Relics: Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe — Katherine Dauge-Roth

Part III | Standing Out: Marks of Honor, Shame, and Beauty
8  Skin Narratives: Speaking about Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus — Nicole Nyffenegger
9  Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe — Craig Koslofsky
10  Mouches Volantes: The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France — Claire Goldstein

Afterword, Cultural Inscriptions: Body Marking after 1800 — Peter S. Erickson

List of Contributors
Index