A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages

Roberta Milliken, Roberta Milliken

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350103047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The Middle Ages were a time of great innovation, artistic vigor, and cultural richness. Appearances mattered a great deal during this vibrant era and hair was a key marker of the dynamism and sophistication of the period. Hair became ever more central to religious iconography, from Mary Magdalen to the Virgin Mary, while vernacular poets embellished their verses with descriptions of hairstyles both humble and elaborate, and merchants imported the finest hair products from great distances. Drawing on a wealth of visual, textual and object sources, the volume examines how hairstyles and their representations developed-often to a degree of dazzling complexity-between the years AD 800 and AD 1450. From wimpled matrons and tonsured monks to adorned noblewomen, hair is revealed as a potent cultural symbol of gender, age, sexuality, health, class, and race. Illustrated with approximately 80 images, A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages brings together leading scholars to present an overview of the period with essays on politics, science, religion, fashion, beauty, the visual arts, and popular culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Religion and Ritualized Belief, 800–1500

ALEXA SAND

The Bible, wellspring of meanings for medieval thinkers of every stripe, provides multiple and conflicting messages about hair. Furthermore, each generation of interpreters focused on different aspects of scriptural trichology, often glossing its moral or allegorical sense through the lens of their own cultural vision. But exegetes were not the only ones engaged with hair in a religious sense. From the institution of tonsuring practices in the fifth century to the heated denunciation of excesses of hair bleaching and styling in fifteenth-century Italy, hair played an important role in the Middle Ages, as it does today, in establishing social roles and communicating ritual status. And medieval hairstyles and head coverings conveyed religious meaning and participated in the formation of identities and interpersonal as well as political relationships.¹

As a mutable extension of the body, hair often exercised a synecdotal function for medieval people. Control, exposure, and manipulation of hair could be interpreted as expressive or indicative of a variety of spiritual and moral states of being. For Christians, the scriptural foundation for understanding the signification of hair was broad; in particular, both Paul and Peter give specific and quite literal prescriptions on the appropriate approaches to hair for both men and women. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:13–15, interprets a woman’s (implicitly long) hair as a divine index of her need to be covered: “You yourselves judge: doth it become a woman, to pray unto God uncovered? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that a man indeed, if he nourish his hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman nourish her hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given to her for a covering.”² Both apostles, meanwhile, caution that women should not indulge in elaborate braids or ornaments for their hair, instead dressing it modestly and soberly (1 Timothy 2:9, and 1 Peter 3:3); in both cases, the occasion for the comment is in the proscription of women’s preaching and the assertion of a wife’s subjugation to her husband. Subsequent Christian theologians would extend this gendered moral understanding of hair—for example, Clement of Alexandria, who in the third book of his treatise, The Instructor, includes a long and detailed set of guidelines for both male and female hair, explicitly linking extravagant hairstyles, hair colors, and hair ornaments to pagan moral turpitude.³ Other Church Fathers, particularly Tertullian and Jerome, advocate veiling for women on a biblical basis; accordingly, medieval women of all classes concerned themselves with head coverings that combined deference to the idea of the covered woman expressed by Paul with a keen sense of fashion and group identity.

Old Testament narratives and legal strictures also informed medieval religious and ritual perceptions and performances of hair. For Jews, Talmudic scholarship and Mishnah provided a guide to untangling the many and sometimes contradictory statements found in the Torah, particularly in regard to the maintenance and grooming of male facial hair. Furthermore, Christian practices provided a kind of antitype for many Jewish theologians, who cautioned Jews against engaging in such idolatrous habits as tonsure and long hair for men.⁴ Meanwhile, Christians fixed upon certain Old Testament figures as typologically significant, and added to the mix hagiographic legends and a host of other (predominantly female) saints whose hair, as a figure for the body, expressed the action of Grace in the world. Muslims, Jews, and Christians looked askance at the woman whose long hair went uncovered and unbound, and at the man whose excessive attention to the cultivation of long locks aligned him suspiciously with such lustful and lust-inspiring females. Thus, the basic elements of medieval religious and ritual approaches to hair can be discerned in the biblical texts that provide the foundation for so much of medieval culture: a concern with the differentiation of gender, anxiety about sexuality and sensuality, and a strong current of misogyny.

Visual artists, theologians, poets, and ordinary people participated in shaping the perception and manipulation of human hair in a number of ways. In what follows, four distinct categories of intervention in the religious and ritual senses of hair are investigated. First, engagement with the scriptural sources of medieval moral and allegorical understandings of hair emerges as an important theme in the depiction of such pivotal biblical personages as Samson, Absalom, Eve, and Mary Magdalene. Secondly, the iconography and semiotics of hair as it relates to the saints can be seen to draw on these traditions of biblical representation. The third arena of engagement has to do with the representation and maintenance of particular coiffures associated with religious status. Finally, the liturgical dimension of hair leaves its trace in the implements of ritual grooming that survive in great numbers and in the much rarer depictions of these objects at work, through which we can begin to come at the somewhat elusive question of how hair figured in the formal and ritual practice of the Mass.

BIBLICAL PRECEDENTS

From the Psalmist’s complaint that “They are multiplied above the hairs of my head, who hate me without cause” (Psalm 69:4) to Paul’s previously cited pronouncements on coiffure and morality in his letters, the Christian Bible provided thousands of possible hair-related topoi. However, relatively few of these became standard features of literature, art, and ritual. Indeed, it was not really until the medieval period that artists and writers began to pay close attention to the expressive and iconographic potential of hair. And when they did, their attention mostly directed itself to a limited number of figures, overlooking some of the most vivid hair-related incidents of the Bible. For example, the dramatic scene from Ezekiel 5:1, where the Lord commands the prophet to use a sword to shave off his beard and hair, to divide it in three parts, and to weigh it upon a scale, was never developed as a visual motif and languished in the margins of medieval literature, of interest primarily to rabbis and to Christian homilists engaged in creating anti-Jewish propaganda.⁵ For the most part, hair-imagery focused on only a few figures, including Samson, Absalom, Eve, and Mary Magdalene. Each of these seems to embody, through his or her hair, the same concerns already identified as central to medieval religious views of hair based in biblical precedent: Samson’s hair is linked to his masculine authority while Absalom’s to his effeminate vanity, Eve’s to her female weakness and immodesty, and the Magdalene’s to her status as a woman at once fallen and redeemed. Again, broad concerns about gender distinction, sex, and the sensual dimensions of embodied experience lie at the heart of medieval interest in the hair of these biblical characters.

The biblical figure most likely to come to mind in relation to hair is of course Samson, the Nazirite, whose special religious status includes a prohibition on the cutting of his hair (Judges 13–16). Samson’s story, like those of other Old Testament heroes, was necessarily allegorized by early Christian and medieval exegetes; as a human type for Christ he is almost perfect, between his divine strength, his humbling at the hands of evil people, and the return of his potency resulting in his death/triumph. Isidore of Seville, in particular, remained an important patristic source on the Christological implications of Samson throughout the Middle Ages.⁶ Erik Goosmann has put forward an interesting proposal that Samson, rather than David or Solomon, was also the first biblical prototype for kingship in the medieval Latin West.⁷ The most extensive and often-cited medieval treatment of Samson is the twelfth-century abbot Gottfried of Admont’s sermon for Palm Sunday that adds to patristic understanding of the Christological significance of Samson specifically in terms of his hair—“the seven locks” cut by Delilah become in his view the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit that imbue Christ with all virtue.⁸ The subtlety of Gottfried’s reading balances the earthier moralizing view of Chaucer’s Monk, who concludes his retelling of Samson’s story by saying, “This old and simple tale is meant to warn all husbands from confiding to their wives anything that they’d rather not have known, if it means danger to their limbs or lives.”⁹

From late antiquity and well into the Middle Ages, artistic representations of Samson, understood as a precursor and type for Christ, emphasized not his hair but his heroic actions; in the catacombs of Via Latina, in Rome, in the fourth century, Samson appears dressed and coiffed like a respectable Roman, with a short haircut and a beard.¹⁰ Later, medieval artists tended to at least give Samson long hair; the Byzantine illuminator of the Homilies of Gregory Nazianzus shows the hero wearing his dark hair long until Delilah’s seduction (Paris, BnF ms. grec 510, fol. 347v). This narrative sequence relies on the detail of hair length for its literal sense.¹¹ Romanesque and Gothic sculptors frequently included episodes from the life of Samson in narrative capitals, such as a Provençal capital now at Harvard (1922.132). Not only do Samson’s locks receive detailed carving, with sinuous, incised lines marking out the coarse, interwoven strands of hair in the scenes of wrestling the lion and carrying off the gates of Gaza that adorn two sides of the block, but, in the cutting scene, it takes three men and an axe to sever the Rapunzel-like braid that Delilah lifts off the nape of the sleeping hero. The same episodes feature on a contemporary capital at Vézelay (Figure 1.1). This central episode taps into two of the prevalent medieval interpretations of the story in Christian biblical exegesis. On the moral level, the scene can be understood in terms of the opposition of Samson’s male spirituality, strength, and reason with Delilah’s female fleshliness, susceptibility to lust, and deceitfulness. This theme of Samson’s victimhood also plays a central role in the literature of gender conduct and ethics.

FIGURE 1.1 Samson and Delilah, Vézelay, Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, nave capital (Salet number 87, 1120–1132). © Jane Vadnal.

Samson is not the only long-haired male in the Old Testament whose tresses figured prominently in the exegetical canon. Hair plays a decisive part in the story of Absalom, the favored but rebellious son of David, whose surpassing beauty is described in 2 Samuel 14:25–6, where the weight of his hair seems to be the measure of its excellence. But it is this same bounty of hair that spells Absalom’s doom when it gets caught in the branches of an oak as he passes under on his mule, and it holds him there until Joab and his men come to slay him (2 Samuel 18:9–15). The opposition of David and Absalom was a type for the opposition of Christ and Judas, and the similarities between Absalom’s death, hanging by his hair from a tree, and Judas’s, hanging by a rope, were too close to be resisted by medieval writers and artists.¹² Thus, the suspended Absalom figures dramatically in one of the capitals from the nave at Vézelay; on the left side of the capital, he dangles, seemingly unconscious, from the leafy canopy as Joab drives a sword into his neck, while on the face of the capital his riderless mule dashes away. Here, Absalom’s long hair streams upward from his head, gathered in Joab’s fist. The gesture of pulling the hair taut underscores the thrust of Joab’s sword and draws attention to the fatal agency of Absalom’s luxurious tresses.¹³

In the Eadwine Psalter (Cambridge, Trinity College ms. R. 17.1, fol. 8r) C.R. Dodwell noted that the illuminator added to the source illustration the figure of Absalom hanging by his hair from an oak tree on the far right side of the composition (Figure 1.2).¹⁴ A rubricated titulus, inside the confines of the picture’s frame, gives the subtitle to Psalm 3, “a Psalm of David when he fled from the face of his son Absalom.” In Augustine’s exposition to this Psalm, this subtitle is glossed with the explicit linkage of David–Christ and Absalom–Judas:

By his undutiful son be here meant that undutiful disciple who betrayed Him. From whose face although it may be understood historically that He fled, when on his departure He withdrew with the rest to the mountain; yet in a spiritual sense, when the Son of God, that is the Power and Wisdom of God, abandoned the mind of Judas; when the Devil wholly occupied him.¹⁵

FIGURE 1.2 Absalom’s Death, detail, Eadwine Psalter, Canterbury (ca. 1160). Cambridge, Trinity College, R. 17. 1, fol. 8r. Courtesy of the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

No mention is made of Absalom’s hair, nor the parallel between his fate and that of Judas’s, both hanging from trees in a grotesque parody of the Crucifixion. However, this dormant motif is explored by the visual artist, who attends closely to the entanglement of locks and tree limbs.

A moral reading of Absalom’s hair is implicit in Paul’s condemnation in 1 Corinthians 11:14, “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that a man indeed, if he nourish his hair, it is a shame unto him?” Excessive attention to coiffure in a man associates him with the typically effeminate vice of vanity, closely linked to lust in medieval moral philosophy; the effete aristocrat, as opposed to the manly laborer, troubles the waters of orthodox Christian masculinity as established by Paul. As early as the ninth century, Alcuin speculated that the cataclysm of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne might have something to do with the Anglo-Saxon penchant for imitating the outlandish hairstyles of the Northmen: “Look at your trimming of the beard and hair, in which you have wished to resemble the pagans,” he admonished his countrymen.¹⁶ As Madeline Caviness has noted, reforming churchmen of the eleventh century such as Ivo of Chartres and Orderic Vitalis linked long hair on men directly to Paul’s censure, condemning it as both effeminate and sexually provocative, while after the Norman Conquest of England William of Malmesbury attributed the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings at least in part to their womanish long hair.¹⁷

The effeminacy of masculine long hair, as it came to be understood in the later Middle Ages, was perceived as negative, since to be female or feminine was to be in virtually every respect less laudable than to be male or masculine. Although prevailing social practices across Europe kept most women from cutting their hair short, and indeed Paul commended long hair on women as an appropriate “veiling” for their sinful heads in the presence of God (1 Corinthians 11:15), long, loose, and uncovered hair on a woman signified vice, particularly sexual misconduct. Veils, coifs, and restrained hair conversely signified feminine virtues such as modesty, chastity, and subservience. In Jewish tradition, a bared female head was understood from Mishnaic time onward as a form of nakedness, entirely inappropriate in all but the most intimate of contexts. Various medieval commentators iterated the importance of restraining the hair, and in kabbalistic thought, uncovered hair was understood to emit energy that could attract demons.¹⁸ Diane Wolfthal cites long, unconstrained hair as one of the salient iconographic tropes of sexual availability or vulnerability. Both seductresses and rape victims signal their status through loose, tous...