Abstract
This article charts the cultural, religious, social, gendered and medical meanings of hair in scenes of Habsburg-Ottoman cultural exchanges. In particular, it examines the links between medicinal knowledge about hair and the ways in which Habsburg and Ottoman subjects addressed bodily concerns whilst living as captives in the Ottoman or Habsburg Empires. Connecting the early modern body with the trade in early modern captive bodies, this article argues that the performance and description of body practices involving hair helped sixteenth and seventeenth-century Habsburg and Ottoman subjects to unfold a vocabulary that shaped the emotional resonance of Mediterranean slavery. Habsburg subjects lived in a hair-literate society, where estate, gender and affiliation were expressed through hair. Writing at length about hair in Habsburg-Ottoman captivity narratives enabled returning captives to address their spiritual well-being and to define emotional communities of confessional belonging. Returning slaves might thereby negotiate the possibilities of reintegration into a society that was deeply sceptical about possible conversions. This article examines health-related notions of hairdressing and those associated with medicine and sexuality in order to decipher the broader cultural and societal meanings of former captives’ writings about ritual shaving and shearing, as well as about head, facial and pubic hair.
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This article charts the meanings of hair in scenes of Habsburg-Ottoman cultural exchange. In particular, it examines the links between medicinal knowledge about hair and the ways in which enslaved Habsburg as well as Ottoman subjects addressed their bodies whilst living in either the Ottoman or the Habsburg domains. Connecting the early modern body with the trade in early modern bodies, this article argues that the performance and description of body practices involving hair helped sixteenth and seventeenth-century Habsburg and Ottoman subjects to express and shape the emotional resonance of Mediterranean slavery. Writing about hair enabled returning male captives to negotiate the meanings and consequences of enslavement in foreign lands inhabited by people of different faith. By practising hair-care and by writing about hair in general and ritual shearing in particular, former slaves and captives addressed their spiritual well-being and defined emotional communities of confessional belonging. Thereby, they negotiated the possibilities of reintegration into a society that was sceptical about possible conversions during times of enslavement.
Given the significance of the Mediterranean as a hub for slaving activities, Habsburg-Ottoman contacts often manifested in the experience of captivity. Researchers estimate that at least two and a half million slaves lived in early modern Western and Continental Europe, whilst some five million – around a fifth of them of Central or West European origin – served in the Ottoman Empire. Another 850,000 European slaves lived in North Africa. Christians and Muslims of all social backgrounds were taken captive and served as household servants, galley slaves, public and menial workers or sex slaves.1 Many of those who were taken captive and later returned to their homes then wrote about their time in servitude as crucially an experience of bodily subjugation. Such captivity narratives, often lengthy, sold in large numbers as they appealed to an ever-growing market. When the Habsburg emperor’s subjects treated former slaves with mistrust because it was feared they might have converted to Islam,2 and then when Habsburg lands were increasingly involved in military actions with the Ottomans, books and pamphlets on the Ottoman Empire and its society flooded the Habsburg market in printed material. In that situation, readers were keen to read captivity narratives and returning captives had a particular interest in representing their experience as martyr-like suffering.3 In that sense, captivity narratives provide historians with unique insight into strategies of narrating the experience of enslavement. One powerful strategy adopted by former captives who published captivity narratives, all of them men, was to write about hair, as Habsburg subjects lived in a hair-literate society in which estate, gender, and affiliation were expressed through hair.4
In early modern societies, hair evoked broad affective resonances. It could, in certain contexts, ‘summon, mediate, and direct affective states of mind and bodily behaviours’.5 Locks of hair got kept and were used, for instance in embroidery or jewellery, to interweave individual and familial stories with specific artefacts. In that sense, hair was a powerful tool for maintaining and challenging memories.6 In courtly milieux hair-styles such as specific types of braids associated with particular noblewomen articulated social as well as political affiliations.7 With the upheavals of the Reformation hair was further charged with religious meanings. Attacking other people’s hair-styles – both in polemical pamphlets and in acts of physical violence – could easily result from and affect people’s conscious ways of dressing hair in that period.8 These affective dimensions need to be borne in mind when studying the frequent references to hair in Habsburg-Ottoman captivity narratives.
Drawing on sixteenth and seventeenth-century German captivity narratives, Latin anatomical treatises, German medicinal remedies, Ottoman slave manuals and narratives as well as German artisanal documentation, my argument divides into three parts. I first discuss the cross-cultural mobility of Habsburg barbers in the early modern Mediterranean. This mobility was based on appreciation for a highly professionalized artisanate in a society that considered hair-care crucial for healthy life, an understanding that connected Christian and Muslim societies through their shared engagement in the material world of hair-care. Such health-related notions of hairdressing lay behind the accounts of forced shaving and shearing that will be discussed in the second section of this article. Captives’ descriptions of hair removal as ritual humiliation also addressed the threat to their spiritual well-being: in them, hair symbolized emotional communities of religious and confessional belonging. The third part of the article connects the captives’ descriptions of shearing rituals to anatomists’ debates about the sexual meanings of hair. Such a perspective, I argue, reconsiders traditional readings of the gendered implications of shaving rites. The shaving of their beards and head hair did call men’s masculinity into question, but it also gave them the chance to stage libertine flirtations and sexual promiscuity in a new way, as the medical significance of hair for the bodily constitution meant that hair was seen as having an impact on emotions in general and sexual behaviour in particular.
A SHARED MATERIAL WORLD: HAIRDRESSING AND HEALTH CARE
In the Ottoman baths where captives had their hair cut they might also encounter a variety of medical and aesthetic hair treatments. Johannes Wild, an enslaved Nuremberg soldier, wrote that women used ointments mixed from chalk and Indian Earth for the depilation of pubic hair. He described the shaving of men in a similarly attentive manner. Wild praised the skills of Ottoman barbers in hairdressing, washing, massage, and medical cures, emphasizing that German barbers could learn a lot from the Ottomans.9
Such statements point to an understanding of the body that made hairdressing crucial for healthy living. In a medical treatise printed in seventeenth-century Nuremberg, for example, a physician from Saxony wrote that hair is crucially linked to the state of the body.10 Physicians across Europe believed that exuberant hair growth impeded poisonous vapours from leaving the body. As a bodily outgrowth, hair also extracted dangerous liquids from the inner sphere of the body. Hair thus helped to purge the body and to cleanse the brain. Regular combing was therefore central to health care. Physicians even advised regular hair-care to improve the functions of the brain.11 As a result, barbers’ duties covered more than hair-care. Barbers were considered medical practitioners and experts in all sorts of hygienic practices promoting health. They engaged with sweat, pores, teeth, ears, nails and bodily hygiene at least as much as with hair.12
In societies that positioned hair-care as an essential element of health, slaves regarded ill treatment and physical subjection as likely to affect their hair and health. Servitude could involve hard labour, a high risk of injuries, sexual objectification and restricted access to physical recuperation. Captives had often only leaves and onions to treat wounds, whereas barbers had access to a wide range of remedies and their skills were much in demand. The patrician Hans Ulrich Krafft, from the Southern German city of Ulm, went to French and Dutch barbers in Tripoli as a travelling free man. Captured later, he served the Ottomans between 1574 and 1577. Even after his years in captivity, however, he remembered the family members of the barbers who had shaved him in Ulm. During his time in Ottoman servitude, Krafft observed Arabic barber-surgeons and their medicines, including a red powder which was used to cure a wound on a captive’s shorn head. Realizing the shortcomings of the medicines available to him as a captive, Krafft asked a local Dutch barber for some of his ointments and plasters, which he then tested in healing experiments.13 Habsburg captives might be familiar with an experimental approach to medicinal remedies from German contexts. Collections of recipes for plasters from early modern German noble families, for example, remind us how experimental engagement with materials shaped medicinal knowledge. Plasters, according to a sixteenth-century recipe book of Elisabeth of Saxonia (Pfalz-Lautern), contained botanical ingredients besides wax, corals, metals, minerals, and alchemical materials that had to be concocted following very specific instructions.14 For captives, such sophisticated knowledge of experimental making could become essential for their own survival and their body’s integrity. Enslaved Ottomans too paid attention to how Habsburg barber-surgeons used instruments, ointments and medicines. Osman Aga of Temesvar – who was captured in Lipova in 1688 and who wrote a captivity narrative after his return some decades later – described the use by Habsburg barber-surgeons of cupping glasses, bloodletting, unguents and various medications when treating an injured Habsburg lieutenant.15
This interest in barbers was embedded in a shared material world across the religious divide. Early modern Habsburg subjects valued the profession. Ambassadors and travellers praised the Ottomans for their refined material culture of the body. Ottoman barbers were lauded for their insights into the secrets of nature and for their skilful handling of instruments. References to razors, shaving creams, powders, shaving tissues, perfumes and ointments for hair removal are found in diplomatic texts, travelogues, captivity narratives and diplomatic albums.16 (Fig. 1) In the 1570s, the Habsburg embassy’s apothecaries went to the local bazaars of Istanbul to purchase herbs for medical use.17 Given the high degree of professionalization among German barbers, such travellers would appreciate the knowledge and skills of ‘artisans of the body’, whatever their religious affiliation. Hairdressing and the other activities of barber-surgeons were seen as essential medical practices, ensuring the motility of bodily fluxes and thus a person’s health. In the German and Ottoman lands alike barbers were organized in guilds, and their work was formally defined as a craft that necessitated a long apprenticeship to acquire specific artisanal, bodily, and medicinal knowledge.18
An Istanbul street-barber at work, depicted in a Venetian diplomatic album (c.1650). From Alt-Stambuler Hof- und Volksleben: Ein türkisches Miniaturenalbum aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz Taescher, Hannover, 1925, no. 21.
Habsburg subjects living as slaves and captives in the Ottoman lands shared the common Muslim and Christian appreciation of barbers’ skills. If they could gain knowledge of the Ottoman culture of hair-care, this could also give captives some influence on the events of their captivity. Johann Matthäus Fuchs, citizen of Meiningen (Thuringia) and a valet, who was taken captive whilst supporting the Venetian military campaign in Dalmatia in 1649, took such an advantage. In order to escape his Ottoman master, he pretended to be ill. A Dutch barber was called who enabled the German slave to flee aboard an English ship. Fuchs changed his appearance with different clothes and altered hair. After failing to purchase a wig, he knotted an artificial hairpiece from flax which he then dyed blond. For such a procedure, he needed to know about the composition and application of dyestuff. Elector Palatine Ludwig VI, for instance, had collected recipes on hairdressing at least since the early 1570s and he knew very well about the complicated procedure of dyeing hair blond. The roots of the nettle had to be prepared in a basic leach.19 Fuchs, however, made use of an Ottoman recipe by using ‘Cunna …with which Turkish women dye their hair’. With such ‘golden yellow hair’ the fugitive slave was not recognized by his Ottoman master. Here, a captive’s storytelling addresses a readership that was familiar with similar stories of fake hair on theatre stages. Confirming his hairdressing literacy before German readers, Fuchs added a list of Ottoman words that includes beard and hair-related vocabulary.20
Returning slaves elaborated their stories of cultural encounters and personal suffering in the light of a shared material world of hair-related health care and medicinal proficiency. Captives, both Christian and Muslim, who gained familarity with the practices of either Ottoman or Habsburg barbers might try to use this skilled knowledge after their return.21 When Krafft boarded a ship in Marseille, which set sail for Syria, the Dutch apprentice of the crew’s barber-surgeon had previously lived as a slave in North Africa. Krafft notes that he was ‘well equipped with a plenty of medicines, plasters, ointments, and proper instruments’.22 Such passages hint at the cross-Mediterranean experiences of barber apprentices.
One of these was Hans Jacob Riedle. (Fig. 2) Born into a family of surgeons, he learned the ‘art’ of barbering in Ulm, the same city that Krafft was living in, before travelling to German and Dutch cities and courts. Riedle intended to use his journeyman years for ‘bringing the things that I had already learnt and seen in further exercise to a better perfection’. However, after Riedle was hired as a Hamburg ship’s barber in 1667 and later was taken captive by Algerians, he had to do his years of apprenticeship in Muslim North Africa. Qualification for the craft mastery to which Riedle aspired had to be obtained by treating Muslims.
A portrait of Riedle in the Book of Masters of the Barbers and Barber–Surgeons of Ulm (1682).
When Riedle returned to Ulm six years later, he wrote a captivity narrative into the common book of the master craftsmen in order to reinscribe himself into the honourable community of the local guild of barbers. In seven pages, Riedle made sense of his six years in Algerian slavery (Sclavereÿ) in the light of God’s providence by referring to the common tropes of emotional suffering. According to Riedle, ‘the worst was that I had to use my art and science, awarded to me by God, for the benefit of those who, during my entire servitude, had not only brought me into this misery but sought to bring more of my fellow Christians into this [misery] every day’.
According to Riedle, God was testing him by making him practise the craft of barbering for Muslims whilst enslaved. After his return, however, exactly this experience made him an esteemed member of a group of barbers committed to a code of artisanal honour. After his miraculous salvation through God’s mercy – and the collection of the considerable sum of 1,000 gulden for his ransom – he returned to Ulm in August 1673. Only two months later Riedle passed the exams of the city’s surgeons. The short timespan reveals the degree of proficiency in barbering that he had gained during his years in captivity. He swore an oath on the barber’s code of honour, which was documented in the very same book in which Riedle wrote his captivity narrative. The book also records the appreciation that his fellow barbers felt for Riedle. In 1695, his colleagues appointed him as one of the guild’s examiners (examinatori chirurgiæ). When he died a year later from the after-effects of his treatment as a slave, his fellow guild members declared that he had been a ‘sincere, honest, and devout man, who faithfully and honestly served his fellows in his officio’.23 These captivity narratives could thus rely on a shared material world of health-related hairdressing. Appreciation of barbers’ activities across the religious divide allowed captives to turn hair-related stories into cultural capital that helped to define communities and social belonging.
POWER, FAITH AND THE BODY
The most common mentions of hair in Habsburg captivity narratives refer to an act of humiliation: the forced shearing of a male captive’s hair by order of a new master. In 1611 Johannes Wild returned to Nuremberg, the city he had left to fight the Ottomans in Hungary. Nineteen when captured, he was to serve at least eight masters, in the Balkans, Constantinople, Cairo, Mecca, Damascus, Jerusalem and Yemen. He had been quickly offered for sale and given a thorough physical examination. ‘And when I was with this Turk [his new master] for three days’, Wild states, ‘he brought a barber and cut off all my hair, wherefore I wept inconsolably. Yet, it was in vain and I had to be silent because they offered beatings.’24 Hair-care as a valued act of both ‘physical and spiritual care’25 in such descriptions was shown being denied by the intimate intrusion involved in forced shearing. Recounting the humiliation, however, might perhaps allow returned captives to address their own spiritual well-being and to re-assert their belonging in religious communities.
Wild’s description addresses one of the most important rites of enslavement. Ottoman handbooks on the purchase of slaves, Mamluk chronicles, and Islamic treatises all emphasize that the shaven heads of male slaves dishonoured captives and visibly placed them at the lowest end of the social ladder. The procedure aimed at humiliation to make the slaves accept their new societal status through shame.26 In Ottoman Egypt magisterial beards symbolized religious and authoritative power whereas captives’ were shorn in the tradition of early Islam.27 Mamluks (former slaves with military status who formed the ruling elite of late medieval Egypt) were only allowed to grow beards after formal manumission, and chroniclers praised the wisdom and vitality of bearded rulers.28 Islamic scholars admonished readers to groom their beards as a sign of authority in accordance with the Qur’an, the sunna, and the ahadith.29 Advice literature on the purchase of slaves furthermore encouraged Muslims to study the bodily appearance of enslaved Christians. The hair, in particular, might inform about illnesses, but hair-styles also defined the physical appeal of household and sex slaves. In 1564, the Ottoman legal scholar Qinalizade praised German captives (male and female) for their ‘graceful and beautiful appearance’ and recommended them for ‘high services’. Since hair indicated the captive’s previous social status in the Holy Roman Empire’s estate-based society, it also revealed the profit that a Muslim purchaser might anticipate through future ransom.30
Shearing the male captives’ hair, however, also functioned as a ritual of integration, establishing artificial kinship as well as marking subjugation. In Ottoman military tradition, shaving rites were considered to represent a father-son relationship. The beardlessness of boys levied from Christian families by Ottoman officials in the Balkans (a tribute or tax called devşirme) symbolically prefigured their potential transition into new social relations of servitude to and kinship with their new father, the sultan.31 By shaving the head and facial hair of the captives, the new masters marked their subjugation within a new social environment. Habsburg captives, who were familiar with both forbidden and enforced shaving as popular punishment in the Holy Roman Empire, experienced such procedures as deeply humiliating.32 ‘In this severe imprisonment’, the Protestant Michael Heberer stated some years after his time in Egyptian slavery in the 1580s, ‘they started to cut the hair on the head as well as the beard entirely with a clipping knife. This made us even more distressed and such mockery hurt much more than the actual imprisonment itself’.33 Like many other returning captives, Heberer emphasized the painful longevity and emotional quality of such moments. In the engraving which he commissioned to accompany his narrative, the clean-shaven face and the head shorn of hair, like the shackles, are visual marks of slavery. (Fig. 3)
Heberer commissioned a portrait showing him shorn and bound in chains in Egypt.
Returnees emphasized the violent character of shaving rites. Heberer mentioned the ‘bloody beatings’ that would have followed resistance. As authors, however, some ex-captives were eager to stress ways in which they negotiated the meanings of humiliation and honour. Heberer quotes a fellow captive who decided to take the scissors and razor to cut his impressive beard by himself. ‘These [Muslim] rascals’, he stated, ‘aren’t worthy to take his hair’ and he then asked a fellow captive to shave the remaining stubble. Many captives followed this example, claiming agency over their bodily appearance just as masters claimed power through the subjection of their bodies.34 In such moments, slaves’ hair-care also meant caring for each other, a constitutive element for emotional communities.
At a time when granting someone physical access to one’s beard and head hair was a measure of social relationship, such descriptions challenged the emotional meanings of ritual shaving and shearing. By accepting the humiliation of the experience, captives could express their belonging to a group of men who experienced emotional sufferings as if martyrs. Consequently, returnees frequently referred to biblical motifs of captivity like the ‘slavery in Egypt’ (aegyptiaca servitus) and the ‘imprisonment’ (gefengnus) of captives. Protestant readers were familiar with these biblical stories, and they also knew the biblical story of Samson as well as pastoral sermons on the religious meanings of hair.35 By expressing their experience in this religious vocabulary, returning Habsburg subjects shaped the emotional qualities of suffering forcible shaving for a German-speaking audience.
Captives’ descriptions thus extended the confessionalized landscape of Reformation Germany where devotional and body practices marked piety and belonging.36 In this multiconfessional milieu, the ways that people groomed their hair to face the day became increasingly discussed. The description of ritual shearing, in that context, enabled returnees to prove their constancy of faith in servitude as much as to demonstrate confessional belonging.37 When Heberer realized that Catholic captives cursed God for their fate, the Reformed Lutheran severely admonished them to be patient and to have faith in God’s plan of salvation. In this logic, the ‘pious’ captives who shaved their own hair even promoted God’s moral regime. Such a description allowed the Reformed Protestant to fashion himself as a person who retained faith in God under the harsh conditions of captivity and who spoke out against the ‘godless character’ of fellow captives of Catholic faith.38
Similar observations can be made for texts written by returning Catholics and Muslims. Catholic captives likewise made use of biblical and devotional motifs. The Swiss priest Villinger presented his enslavement as a pilgrimage and itinerary to heavenly redemption that was fulfilled by the Virgin’s intercession. When he was taken captive, Villinger’s head and facial hair were shorn. After his release he went to an Ottoman barber in the Christian quarter of Istanbul in preparation to attend a Franciscan mass.39 Captives who had accepted the significance of the shearing of head hair as a transitional rite, then, might apply the very same logic after their redemption by making hair-care symbolize the return to their particular group cultures.
Ottoman men who returned from their time in Habsburg captivity likewise consciously groomed their hair. One former slave was perceived as having used his time in captivity to let his beard grow, and thereby to grow up. ‘You have a beard now?’, Osman Agha reports the reaction in his captivity narrative, ‘it suits you fabulously! You have become quite handsome!’40 Coming back from captivity was an excellent opportunity to self-fashion as a returned man belonging once more with other believers – Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. The close association between physical and spiritual care can also be observed in Ottoman captivity narratives. Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, who was born in Istanbul and taken captive by the Knights of Malta in 1597, repeatedly lamented the violence he had to endure. When his hair and body were in danger, Macuncuzade found solace in writing poetical verses that consolidated his faith in Allah.41
Slaves’ acts of hair-care gained meaning as physical and spiritual care that articulated how the experience of humiliation defined the boundaries of emotional communities. His masters had denied the captive’s autonomy of decision over haircut and beard growth, so Villinger marked the end of slavery and the new experience of ‘freedom of the body’ and ‘freedom of the soul’ through having his hair dressed in accordance with his own wishes.42 Hairdressing, here, served his physical and spiritual well-being by marking the personal transition from serfdom to freedom.
The beard, then, might be a means of negotiating the boundaries of reintegration through face-work.43 Krafft returned via Wrocław and Opava to Ulm and wrote: ‘I spread out my beard a bit and put on a sour face’ to avoid being recognized by former acquaintances.44 German travellers to the Iberian Peninsula, a hub of cross-Mediterranean human trafficking, noted the conspicuously bearded appearance of ransomed Habsburg slaves who collected money for the redemption of fellow captives. (Fig. 4) The returnees’ ostentatious beards were intended to evoke compassion for they clearly aimed at the intensification of the very same emotional registers that people would associate with captivity.45 Such conscious face-work, though, produced its own perils, for ex-captives were obviously tempted to exceed the acceptable norms of beards. If returnees from the Ottoman lands had ‘a strong goatee and not few hairs below it’, one captive wrote, they sometimes were considered ‘Turkish spies’ and imprisoned.46
Christoph Weiditz depicted a long–bearded former Habsburg captive who collected money for the redemption of slaves in the late 1520s and early 1530s.
Just as captives’ hairdressing helped to facilitate their reintegration, so the visual representation of hair-care was crucial.47 Wolfgang Münzer von Babenberg, a wealthy Nuremberg nobleman taken captive during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, lived as a slave in the Ottoman Empire between 1557 and 1559. Around 1567, he commissioned a life-sized portrait that drew on a genre that was popular in élite and court circles. (Fig. 5) The painting depicts him wearing precious clothing and jewellery that shows his wealth and gallant taste. Furthermore it shows a former captive who wished his return to be represented as a story of success. Once forbidden to have a beard, here he has a well-trimmed full beard and a neatly twisted moustache, in accordance with contemporary high fashion. The captive has returned to his family, whose emblem he carries above his heart.48
Nicolas Neufchâtel's portrait of Wolfang Münzer von Babenberg, Nuremberg, c.1567.
In visual representations, bodily performances and textual descriptions, some former slaves made hair a crucial marker of confessional and societal belonging. They used hair-care’s significance for health to stage spiritual well-being and social integrity. These captives’ hairdressing became a constitutive element for claiming agency over the deprived body and belonging to emotional communities. Because the shorn head proclaimed a man’s status as a slave, male captives were keen to address the emotional qualities of these rites. By describing their close-cropped hair at length, returned captives communicated and interpreted their experience to a highly confessionalized readership. The more convincingly captives played out such strategies, the greater their possibilities of reintegration. The emotional vocabulary that male slaves unfolded in their description of ritual shearing thus marked them as members of emotional communities and made hair a central stage on which to negotiate confessional and social belonging.
A MAN’S WORLD: HAIR, MEDICINE AND SEXUALITY
The description of shaving and shearing played a prominent role in men’s captivity narratives because their authors had experience of the significance of hair prior to enslavement. In early modern Germany, hair was a prime indicator of status and honour, both concepts closely associated with the body and sexuality. Ritual shearing targeted the gendered body and sexual honour of male captives, and readers of the narratives were aware of this just as they were familiar with religious texts that offered templates for the interpretation of martyrdom. In addition, readers had access to widely circulating medicinal and anatomical writings. This section explores the extent to which an analysis of the medical notions of hair prompts us to reconsider the descriptions of ritual shearing in relation to gender and sexuality. It turns out that captives built upon Renaissance medical thinking about hair in order to legitimate their different behaviour during captivity.
In accordance with humoral pathology, sixteenth-century German physicians understood the body as a mixture of fluids and the properties assigned to them. The four humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm – and their particular qualities – dry and wet, hot and cold – were not only associated with specific organs and environmental elements, but also formed the medical background for the meanings of hair.49 Physicians considered facial hair to be the by-product of the concoction of semen through a man’s bodily heat that was caused by the existence of hot yellow bile. Already Galen had defined the beard as a man’s ‘ornament’.50 Acording to Felix Platter, a sixteenth-century physician from Basel, the growth of facial hair, which starts at the time of a boy’s puberty, was a natural sign caused by the growth of a man’s genitalia. The growth of the beard was intrinsically linked to the quality and quantity of a man’s semen and thus was itself a symbol of sexual virility, which separated the gender of bearded men from beardless boys and women. Platter’s treatise consequently also includes a discussion of the extent to which castration might affect the growth of the beard. That debate built on Aristotelian positions which captives might have had in mind when they encountered Ottoman eunuchs.51
The strong physical connections between hair and sexuality, outlined in Renaissance medical thought, thus made the shearing of captives potentially an act of feminization. No wonder, then, that some captives described the shaving of their beards as a threat to their masculinity. A Pomeranian allegedly said that ‘it would be womanish and whorish to have oneself groomed in that manner’.52 The shaving of their beards could made male slaves even imagine behaving as if they were women. Some beardless male slaves accepted their effeminacy and imagined escaping their servitude by cross-dressing as women.53 The master’s bodily assaults, thus, not only restricted the agency of slaves but also enabled them to go beyond what gendered norms would have allowed in other contexts.
Shorn hair did for sure threaten the masculinity of slaves. However, if such rites rendered men effeminate they also allowed captives to perform virility. Early modern meanings of beards and of head hair were understood in gendered terms. Whilst coldness characterized the bodies of women, heat defined the processes of men’s bodies. The degree of heat, the physician Johann Dryander argued, produced ‘the brain’s vapours’ that would exit via the pores of the skin and thereby modulate the growth and length of head hair. In the Galenic tradition, these vapours were considered to generate, nourish or impede the growth of hair.54 Yellow bile, associated with dryness, heat and men, exemplified the gendered concept of hair. Women’s ‘deficiency of yellow bile’, resulting in the body’s coldness, caused menstruation ‘because their excess blood was not otherwise consumed’.55 Women’s lack of heat furthermore gave a reason for their often long head hair, which was not burnt through the body’s temperature and which was considered femininity’s true ‘ornament’. Women with exceedingly cold bodies, the common contemporary image of witches, were therefore thought to have particularly long hair. Men’s larger quantity of hot yellow bile, in contrast, produced hot vapours in the brain that limited the growth of head hair and sometimes even burnt it entirely, causing baldness.56
Hence, the captives’ close-cropped or even entirely shorn head hair was associated with a high degree of bodily heat that made up men’s degree of manliness. These beliefs meant head hair was widely associated with sexual behaviour. In Aristotelian tradition, women’s coldness also gave them a passive role in sexuality. Men’s heat, in contrast, caused their active sexual role as much as the loss of head hair.57 In turn, sexual behaviour also affected hair. According to Paracelsus, coitus posed a threat to the balance of bodily temperatures and liquids. This might result in the increased production of salt, he argued, which exits the body via the skin and would cause loss of hair.58 Such sex-related interpretations of hair loss had a long tradition that was strengthened by Renaissance humanists’ interest in ancient philosophers. Aristotle, besides Galen the most prominent reference point for sixteenth-century German anatomists, stated that men’s ‘eyelashes do not grow, but fall off, when sexual activity begins, and the … greater this activity is’. Aristotle explicitly mentions that the loss of hair only ‘occurs in a man (when) he has entered upon sexual activity’. ‘Those who are naturally prone to intercourse’ and ‘who are plentiful in semen’, Aristotle continues, ‘go bald.’59
With these strong links between hair, semen and sexuality, it is no surprise that Renaissance men might be concerned about baldness. Elector Palatine Ludwig VI even owned a recipe that promised to let hair grow within no more than three days. Using the foam of the spawn of fishes together with honey had proven to be successful. Another recipe suggested the use of the green Milanese beetle (Meloidae family), parts of the root of tragopogon porrifolius, oil and wax.60 Corresponding with humoral logics, the main ingredients of these recipes supposedly had particularly moist and cold qualities (fish spawn, beetle) that rebalanced the dried-out nature of the location that was affected by hair loss due to the increased production of heat.
These medical notions of hair, associated with semen, menstruation and sex, have wide-ranging implications for the understanding of how captives referred to hair, hair loss and hairlessness. Medical interpretations detailing the different relationship between facial hair, head hair and sexuality meant that shaved beards materialized the captives’ potential effeminacy whilst their shorn heads could similarly suggest virile potency. The shaving of the groom’s hair before the bridal night was thus a wedding custom in early modern Germany, and authors from around the Mediterranean warned their readers of the sexual perils of captivity. Both Christian and Muslim authors as well as readers believed that captives were not only victims of sexual violence, but were also actively engaging in illegitimate sexuality by going to prostitutes and by committing sodomy.61
This ambiguity between captives’ potential for effeminacy or for manliness is anchored in early modern medical knowledge and practice which conceptualized the body as porous and in motion, depending on, interacting with, and embodying outside phenomena such as astrological constellations, weather conditions or food and drinks.62 At a time when good health required that a person keep perfect balance of temperatures, sudden change in weather or climate was dangerous. Captives entering the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean encountered much greater heat than they had known in the German lands north of the Alps. This coincided with different food, often hot and spicy. The Silesian Melchior von Seydlitz stated that he became very ill soon after being taken captive near Jaffa. This was ‘due to the great heat, the bad food, and the nasty warm water which we had to drink’. Seydlitz saw similar symptoms of illness among fellow captives.63 Captives described in detail the digestive problems that they faced upon enslavement. Krafft’s problem – serious constipation – derived from an imbalance of the dietary regime and its temperatures. He had eaten hard-boiled eggs for days without having had any ‘warm dish’. After his manumission, Krafft travelled to Marseille experiencing change in climate and issues with nourishment and temperatures again. His phlegmy stomach refused any warm dish. Even when he ate only a spoonful of warm soup, ‘a visible vapour came off my head via the back of my neck’. A barber’s bloodletting and cupping therapy then rebalanced the body’s inner temperature.64 Shifts in climate thus added another physical dimension to the medical dangers to captives’ deprived bodies.
Hair connected the inner and outer worlds of the porous Renaissance body and revealed dangerous medical and emotional imbalances, as a Tyrolese nobleman’s autobiographical record from 1686 exemplifies. Having only one single hair on his chest, Osvaldo Ercole Trapp reflected on the possible reasons for this, concluding that because his mother had regularly tied a bandage around his belly as a boy, the heat of his stomach had been drowned and redistributed inside the body. The lack of heat then caused the lack of chest hair. Due to bad nourishment, sorrows and imbalanced passions, Trapp’s hair radically changed its appearance. Once it was ‘thin, thick and almost straight, of light brown colour’, however, the body’s increasing dryness and its lack of inner heat transformed the colour of head, facial, and axillary hair into black and white and finally caused hair loss.65 Physicians also corroborated the idea that hair was connected with actual outside materials, for instance, with herbs or other materia medica whose texture closely resembled that of hair.66 Exactly because of the connective qualities of hair, it might easily have caused serious medical problems. Physicians debated whether hair washing was dangerous since cold or warm water was applied onto the head. Similarly, anger was considered to produce heat that dried out the body and caused white hair and hair loss, sometimes even leading to ignition of the heart.67
Given such interpretations, known across early modern continental Europe and the Mediterranean alike, the misery of captives might well have had severe bodily consequences. During his two years in Maltese slavery, the Ottoman Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi attentively observed physical changes that he attributed to the disruption of his emotional equilibrium during captivity. From the very moment of his enslavement Macuncuzade had experienced ‘hardness, poison, and violence’. He had cried so heavily that his eyes turned red until he finally wept real blood. Not menial work, but ‘fate’s burden’ humped his back and aged him. The Ottoman considered slavery a very bodily experience, a ‘fever’ that caused pain and that consumed his body.68 This ‘fever’ made Muslim captives experience slavery as a surplus of bodily heat. The captive’s emotional imbalance ‘inflames’, in Macuncuzade’s words, ‘the confused, unfortunate heart with its agony’. The captive’s grief heated the heart until it actually burnt. This produced both heartache and smoke, which was then carried upwards to the head through the slave’s sighs. ‘The fire of grief made my body melt like plumb in the alembic’, Macuncuzade says in his captivity narrative. The smoke, produced through hot sorrows in his heart, left his body via the skin of the head. Here, the hot smoke not only caused suicidal thoughts, but actually dyed his turban and face black. ‘The white beard itself is my testimony for the blackness of my face.’69
What helped to quench the body’s inner flames? Reading the Qur’an and heart-felt praying were the most effective medicine for cooling the Ottoman captive’s body and emotions. The praise of Allah in spoken verse was a ‘heart-burning lamentation’ that ‘decomposed our body, which is built of dust’, and thereby also vanquished bodily pain. Writing an autobiographical text about his captivity as well as composing poetry was further ‘balm’ for the body. In that sense, the copying of Macuncuzade’s text by other captives, as well as their notes of testimony, was an actual healing practice. Words had the power to cure illnesses that derived from the emotional experience of captivity. Another remedy, according to Macuncuzade, was love and the writing of love poetry.70
References to the porous body, embodied emotions, and the body’s motile fluxes were thus prominent in Mediterranean captivity narratives across the religious divide. In particular, changing climates was held to exacerbate bodily imbalances. Ottoman slaves living in the Habsburg lands, for example, remembered particularly cold winters.71 With Habsburg subjects, the new environment of an uncommonly hot climate further increased the heat of the body. This was considered to affect hair and sexual behaviour too. On the one hand, Aristotle assumed that a ‘deficiency of natural heat’ in a body or its environment causes the ‘putrefaction’ of hair, or its greyness. Galen also stated that the lack of hot humours, the ‘nourishing fluid’ of hair, results in its destruction. On the other hand, the ‘people who live in hot regions’, and particularly those who inhabit places in Africa, ‘have curly hair, because both their brain and the environing air are dry’. Southern Mediterranean heat and dryness, according to that logic, produced a hot, dry and ‘smoky exhalation’ of the brain that evaporated the body’s fluids and caused the potential loss of head hair as well as an increasing concoction of semen and thus a rise in sexual desire.72
Humoral pathology in Renaissance European treatises therefore implied a link between temperature, hair and sexual behaviour. As a consequence, the behaviour of Habsburg captives in the Ottoman Empire differed from what Christian readers would have expected of them in the German lands. Entering the city of Cairo as a recently shorn captive also meant walking bareheaded through hot streets where the sun’s ‘great heat’ drained the body’s fluxes and increased its heat with severe bodily consequences. The hottest parts started to hurt – captives regularly complained about headache and eyestrain, but the stimulation of the concoction of semen was another consequence.73 Behind the façades of the surrounding houses, often covered with wooden balconies, women were sitting and captives were eager to glimpse them and to start flirtations. Captives knew well that Ottoman and Arab women wandered the streets in small groups. They observed their behaviour, their manner of walking, and their veiled faces. Captives wrote about how to approach Muslim women without being detected and also knew that men mocked others who had spoken to women on the street, asking ‘whether he was so in need of it that he could not do it beforehand or afterwards at home’.74
The flirtatious atmosphere, promoted through the heat, is well captured in Krafft’s account. One day some noblewomen from Tripoli visited the captive’s master. Six of them asked a black servant to open the door to the chamber of the Habsburg slave, since the women wished to see him. The fellow servant had told Krafft what was going to happen. Within the next fifteen minutes, Krafft fell desperately in love with a ‘beautiful black Moor’. They conversed with the help of the servant and Krafft admired her ‘beautiful eyes’ and ‘white teeth’. The captive also unveiled the ‘pretty tender and white’ faces of visitors, ‘because I had not felt any peril’. Given that he had seen no unveiled woman for the last three and a half years, Krafft explains these fifteen minutes to have been the best of his entire captivity: a true ‘mercy’.75
Such a statement was significant in a context where sexual intercourse was considered to keep the fluxes in motion. Krafft’s bodily liquids were hardened; heat had bottled up inside; also captives’ shorn heads meant that the sun entered the porous body via its hottest part, the brain. The accumulated heat and the greater concoction of semen in which it resulted supposedly made slaves even more disposed to engage in flirtations. It also made such situations still more dangerous in the eyes of the reader. Only some days later, another ‘tender woman’ approached Krafft. The unveiled lady was obviously well informed about the slave and asked why he always slept in company with another male servant. Krafft replied that his master wished him to do so in order to prevent him from running away. She then told Krafft that she could change this. The woman stroked Krafft, calling him ‘my darling’ (ḥabībī), touching with her right hand the tiny beard that Krafft had been able to grow because of his high position in servitude (he even guarded other slaves with entirely shaven heads and faces). This small goatee now became the focus of emotional performance. All of a sudden, Krafft claimed, he was struck speechless. Later in his captivity narrative he tried to find the right words. He was afraid of marriage and that he would have to become a Muslim, especially after the woman stroked his beard again and even kissed the very same hand. Krafft decided to run away and to lock himself in another chamber.
Such stories reveal the ‘erotic appeal that late Renaissance culture attributes to hair’.76 Returning Habsburg subjects sketched situations of sexual pleasures and perils above all when describing bathhouses. Wild refers to women’s pubic hair and to shaved genitalia when talking about Ottoman bathhouses.77 Such descriptions resonated with the depiction in sixteenth-century German costume albums of Ottoman women bathing translucently dressed and with depilated pubic hair. (Fig. 6) Given the strong links between medicine, hair and sexuality, it would be misleading to interpret such references as mere Orientalist imaginings. At a time when Reformation iconography linked sweating baths with heat and sexual excess, (Fig. 7) the hamam’s heat not only opened the pores of the captives’ skins for sweating, but also stimulated their sexual imagination.78 Contemporary Habsburg observers noted that the shaving of the facial and head hair of galley slaves also prevented the main cleansing function of hair: sweating.79 The body heat was thus retained inside with potentially fatal consequences of inner calefaction: drying-out and sexual desire. ‘Turkish prostitutes or virgins’ with their most beautiful ‘ornament’ – exceedingly long, thick, red-dyed, curly hair – featured prominently in printed costume albums. (Fig. 8) Captives were sometimes very knowledgeable about Ottoman prostitutes.80
A Nuremberg costume album depicts an Ottoman woman on her way to the bathhouse, 1577.
Women in a bathhouse with a tiled stove. Engraving after Barthel Beham, 1548.
An Ottoman prostitute portrayed in a Nuremberg costume album, 1577.
The sensibility of some male captives to the erotic qualities of hair and their surprisingly open references to flirtatious adventures with Muslim women point to the very bodily understanding of hair which made it a prime reference through which to address and legitimate sexual behaviour. The warm setting of Ottoman sweating baths and of North Africa and the Levant in general, associated with the male captives’ short head hair and a larger degree of bodily heat, was considered to have very physical consequences: significant increase of the production of semen and of sexual desire. These medicinal notions allowed male captives to stage and address libertine flirtations and promiscuity, even with women of Muslim faith, in ways that would not have been possible in the cold Habsburg lands. If ritual shearing threatened captives’ manliness, it also allowed them to alter their sexual behaviour and even to address sexual desire in their narratives.
HEALING COMMUNITIES: HAIR, INTIMACY AND SLAVERY
This article has explored the medical contacts and exchange in the Habsburg-Ottoman Mediterranean manifested in the shared appreciation of barbers’ skills in hair-care and health-care. Close study of Renaissance medicinal notions and practices opens up new trajectories for interpreting the role of the body in captivity narratives. Male captives’ hair-centred storytelling made medicine a means of talking about the bodily experience of deprivation and slavery. Across the religious divide, the early modern concept of the porous body with its unstable balances of fluxes literally made slavery a peril of the body that reached beyond forced labour, injuries, and potential death. Captives’ everyday life experiences were anchored in the body’s endangered inner and outer balances. Hair, as a central connective organ with purging functions, thus became a crucial site for managing the embodied emotions of captivity.
For this reason, male captives might also readdress the cultural meanings of deprivation through hairdressing and its textual and visual representation. After being denied bodily autonomy, through hair-related storytelling they could regain interpretative authority over their actions and time while in captivity among communities of different faith. On the one hand, medical knowledge conceptualized hair-care as physical care and therefore increased the slave's chances of survival and reintegration. Slaves could cure injuries and treat their bodies, and might even use such knowledge to escape. On the other hand, medical notions opened the way to talking about religious belonging as spiritual health. As an act of physical care hairdressing overlapped with spiritual care, and so permitted debate about religious health in general and confessional belonging in particular. The medical understanding of hair in relation to the body, its environment and emotions furthermore granted hair a significant role in the discussion of sexuality. By drawing on such interpretations, male captives legitimated their sexual behaviour and claimed the right to behave differently when in foreign countries. In this sense, captives’ hair involved constraint and agency alike.
Living as slaves in the Ottoman Empire or Muslim North Africa, in new environments that affected body and health, Habsburg subjects built ‘healing communities’81 by drawing and elaborating on medicinal knowledge around hair. Hair-care, as a physical and spiritual act, was rooted in the body’s fluxes, its environment, and embodied emotions. Therefore, talking about hair-care – its practices, possibilities, restrictions, and implications– allowed captives to define the emotional bonds and boundaries that shaped contemporary understandings of cultural belonging. To engage in hairdressing meant caring for the self as well as for other members of the community on a bodily, emotional, and spiritual level. In a society that considered hair such a crucial element, having access to someone’s hair was highly intimate. That is why some captives looking back were ready to talk about hair in relation to emotions: such intimate performances allowed former slaves and captives to reflect on cultural, religious, and sexual intimacy, that is, the key concepts with which people judged the loyalty of returning slaves.82
The Habsburg slaves presented in this article created their own healing communities by practising and discussing hair-care as intimate practices that addressed the body and emotions as much as cultural belonging and societal inclusion and exclusion. The description and discussion of ritual shearing and of acts of hair-care therefore enabled returned slaves to see confessional belonging as membership of an emotional community, characterized by the joint experience of suffering and caring that was elaborated in the emotional vocabulary of captivity narratives. Such acts of definition heavily affected the possibilities of social reintegration. The descriptions of ritual shearing and shaving have therefore to be read as crucial passages in which former captives’ storytelling unfolded its social relevance.
By revealing the significance of early modern medicine for how slaves addressed the very bodily experience of deprivation in relation to environment, the body, the senses, emotions and intimacy, this narrative material also sharpens our awareness of the general significance of hair for claiming cultural belonging and position in hierarchies. To this day, having hair forcibly shorn rates among the most fundamental experiences of captives and detained persons. Head hair was shaved in Nazi camps, and French citizens publicly shaved the hair of French women who were thought to have had sexual relationships with Nazi soldiers.83 So-called ‘forced groomings’ were widely practised by US soldiers torturing detainees in Guantanamo detention camp and Abu Ghraib.84 In these and further examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries underlying discourses differ of course from those in early modern contexts. In both cases, however, authority, hygiene, religion, subjectivity, sexuality, humiliation and purity are highly relevant categories for the construction and maintenance of notions of enmity and hierarchy. Hair continues to serve as a means to claim emotional community and moral superiority. It is therefore time to consider the consequences of the bodily experience of vulnerability for the negotiation of group solidarities, the legitimacy of aggression and the status of human life in regard to both historical and recent attitudes to hair, in scenes of violence and subjugation, and in cross-cultural encounters.85
Dr Stefan Hanß is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on early modern material culture and cultural encounters in the early modern period. Hanß has widely published on Mediterranean slavery, the Battle of Lepanto, Veneto-Ottoman diplomacy, and Ottoman language-learning, as well as on early modern feather-workers, concepts of time/timing, and the history of hair. His research explores new trajectories and tools in material culture studies such as the usage of digital microscopes or remaking experiments. His current research is devoted to the history of hair in Reformation Germany and the broader Habsburg world.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Tom Hamilton, but also to Ulinka Rublack, Claudia Ulbrich, Sophie Pitman, Richard Oosterhoff, Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Abigail Gomulkiewicz, José Ramón Marcaida, Katherine Bond and John Gallagher for sharing their thoughts and comments. I presented earlier drafts at St John’s College Cambridge, the University of Manchester, the University of Erfurt, and the Berlin conference of the Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. I wish to express my thanks for all comments that I received during these events, especially for those from Sasha Handley and Charles Zika. Years ago, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger shared her remarks on a very early (and very different) draft for which I want to thank her again. This article is a result of a broader project that studies the history of hair in the Habsburg world.
Footnotes
Stefan Hanß, ‘Sklaverei im vormodernen Mediterraneum: Tendenzen aktueller Forschungen’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 40: 4, 2013; Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800): Neue Perspektiven auf mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800), ed. Stefan Hanß and Juliane Schiel, Zurich, 2014; Salvatore Bono, Schiavi: una storia mediterranea (XVI–XIX secolo), Bologna, 2016, pp. 71–5.
Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats: XVIe–XVIIe siècles, Paris, 1989.
Claudia Ulbrich, ‘“Hat man also bald ein solches Blutbad, Würgen und Wüten in der Stadt gehört und gesehen, daß mich solches jammert wider zu gedenken…”: Religion und Gewalt in Michael Heberer von Bretten’s “Aegyptiaca Servitus” (1610)’, in Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), Göttingen, 2006, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner.
Stefan Hanß, ‘Face-Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, in Das Haar als Argument: Zur Wissensgeschichte von Bärten, Frisuren und Perücken, Gotha (in press), ed. Martin Mulsow; Evelyn Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 23: 3, 2008.
Sasha Handley, ‘Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-Sheet’, History Workshop Journal 85, 2018, p. 170.
Jane Wildgoose, ‘Ways of Making with Human Hair and Knowing How to “Listen” to the Dead’, West 86th: a Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 23, 2016, pp. 79–101.
Welch, ‘Art on the Edge’.
Hanß, ‘Face-Work’; Stefan Hanß, ‘“Wherefore we are Pleased to Preach Christ’s Doctrine of Head and Body Hair in Public”: the Body’s Confessional, Visual and Material Plausibility in Reformation Germany’ (work in progress).
Johannes Wild, Neue Reysbeschreibung eines Gefangenen Christen …, Nuremberg, 1623, pp. 191f.; Michael Heberer, Ægyptiaca Servitvs …, Heidelberg, 1610, pp. 369, 437f.
Johann A. Schlegel, TRACTATVS MEDICVS …, Nuremberg, 1686, p. 43.
Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, Oxford, 2013, pp. 59, 104, 240–3, 247, 261, 265.
Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities, Manchester and New York, 2007, pp. 38–63.
Reisen und Gefangenschaft Hans Ulrich Kraffts, ed. Konrad D. Haszler, Stuttgart, 1861, pp. 54, 75, 79, 186f., 217–24, 232f., 402.
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Cpg 801 (c.1554, 1575–77), fol.41v–54r; Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany, Chicago and London, 2013.
Osman Aga, Leben und Abenteuer des Dolmetschers Osman Aġa: Eine türkische Autobiographie aus der Zeit der großen Kriege gegen Österreich, ed. Richard F. Kreutel and Otto Spies, Bonn, 1954, p. 48.
Jean de Thevenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant …, London, 1687, pp. 31f.; Wild, Reysbeschreibung, pp. 191f.; Pierre Belon, Les observations de plvsievrs singvlaritez & choses memorables …, Paris, 1554.
Reinhold Lubenau, Beschreibung der Reisen des Reinhold Lubenau, ed. Wilhelm Sahm (1914–30), Frankfurt a. M., 1995, vol. 2, pp. 66f.
Cavallo, Artisans; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago and London, 2004, pp. 82–99; Willibald Gutsche, Geschichte der Bader und Barbiere in Erfurt, Erfurt, 1957; Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans, London, 2009.
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (c.1570–1579), Cpg 192, fol.5r.
Johann M. Fuchs, … Einfa[e]ltiger doch wahrer Bericht …, Zerbst, 1662, pp. 71–80, 133, 137f.
Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Labor Recruitment and Control in the Ottoman Empire (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)’, in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950, ed. Donald Quataert, Albany NY, 1994, pp. 22f.; Bono, Schiavi, pp. 137f., 163f.
Haszler, Reisen, p. 20.
Ulmer Museum, Inv.Nr. 1925.6026, pp. 83–91.
Wild, Reysbeschreibung, pp. 9f.
Diana DiPaolo Loren, ‘Dress, Faith, and Medicine: Caring for the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Texas’, in Archaeology of Culture: Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, ed. Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht and London, 2015, pp. 143f.
William I. Miller, Humiliation and other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence, Ithaca and London, 1993.
Chase F. Robinson, ‘Neck-Sealing in Early Islam’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, 2005, pp. 409f.
Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Mamluk and Ottoman Political Households: an Alternative Model of “Kinship” and “Family”’, in Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages, ed. Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Francesa Trivellato, New York and Oxford, 2011, p. 48; Ibn Iyâs, Alltagsnotizen eines ägyptischen Bürgers, ed. Annemarie Schimmel, Lemmingen, 2004, pp. 35, 112.
Abu Talib al-Makki, ‘The Beard’, Muslim World 68, 1978.
Hans Müller, Die Kunst des Sklavenkaufs nach arabischen, persischen und türkischen Ratgebern vom 10. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, Freiburg, 1980, pp. 179f., 186; Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800, Basingstoke, 2004, p. 62.
Antonio Fabris and Maria P. Pedani, ‘The Angels’ Questions: Symbols and Ideas about Death between East and West’, Mediterranean World 21, 2012, p. 167; Stefan Hanß, ‘“Io ritorno, serenissimo principe dal sultan Solimano …”: Devşirme and Yeñi çeri in a Record of the Venetian Bailo Bernardo Navagero, 1553’, Eurasian Studies 10, 2012, p. 105.
Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 2, Munich and Leipzig 1928, pp. 786–9, 837, 869, 878.
Heberer, Ægyptiaca servitvs, pp. 99f.
Heberer, Ægyptiaca servitvs, p. 100.
Heberer, Ægyptiaca servitvs, p. 100; Hanß, ‘The Body’s Confessional, Visual, and Material Plausibility’.
David W. Sabean, ‘Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism’, Central European History 29, 1996, pp. 1–18; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany, Oxford, 2010; Lyndal Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body: the “Stout Doctor” and his Biographers’, American Historical Review 115, 2010; Andreas Bähr, ‘Abgötterei stinkt: Unreinheit, Konfession und Krankheit im 17. Jahrhundert’, in Reinheit, ed. Peter Burschel and Christoph Marx, Vienna, 2011.
Douglas Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, their Professions, and their Beards, Philadelphia, 2015, pp. 181–206; Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, 2001, pp. 155–87.
Heberer, Ægyptiaca servitvs, p. 100.
Peter Villinger, Bilgerfahrt vnd Beschreibung der hierusolomitanischen Reiß …, Konstanz, 1603, pp. 121, 158.
Osman Aga, Leben, pp. 116, 168.
Werner Schmucker, ‘Die maltesischen Gefangenschaftserinnerungen eines türkischen Kadi von 1599’, Archivum Ottomanicum 2, 1970, pp. 203, 205, 209f., 238.
Villinger, Bilgerfahrt, pp. 158.
Hanß, ‘Face-Work’.
Reisen, ed. Haszler, p. 401.
Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, Hs 22474, no.21; Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud negroafricana en la historia de España, siglos XVI y XVII, Granada, 2010.
Reisen, ed. Haszler, p. 370.
On further reintegration rituals see Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Stanford, 2011, pp. 69–71; Andrea Pelizza, Riammessi a respirare l’aria tranquilla: Venezia e il riscatto degli schiavi in età moderna, Venice, 2013, pp. 187–205.
Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, Gm1076; Kurt Löcher, Die Gemälde des 16. Jahrhunderts: Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Stuttgart, 1997, pp. 331f.
Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800, Cambridge, 2007, p. 103; Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 83–158; Penny H. Jolly, ‘Pubics and Privates: Body Hair in Late Medieval Art’, in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. M. Lindquist, Farnham, 2012, pp. 185f.
Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, ed. Margaret T. May, Ithaca and New York, 1968, p. 530.
Felix Platter, QVÆSTIONVM MEDICARVM Paradoxarum & Endoxarum …, ed. Thomas Platter, Basel, 1625, col.22ff.; Aristotle, Historia Animalium in Three Volumes, transl. A. L. Peck, vol. 1, London and Cambridge, Mass., 1965, p. 205; Aristotle, Generation of Animals, transl. Arthur Leslie Peck (1902), London and Cambridge, Mass., 1943, p. 525; Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: a Cultural History, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 27–30; Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard’.
Heberer, Ægyptiaca servitvs, p. 100.
Reisen, ed. Haszler, pp. 230f.
Johann Dryander, Aetzenei Spiegel …, Frankfurt a.M., 1547, fol.94v; Galen, On the Usefulness, p. 531; Galen, Method of Medicine, ed. Ian Johnston and G. Horsley, vol. 3, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, p. 529.
Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800, p. 103.
Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: from Sprezzatura to Satire, Farnham, 2014; Charles Zika, ‘Hair’, in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden, Santa Barbara and Oxford, 2006.
Crawford, Sexualities, pp. 102f.
Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings, ed. Andrew Weeks, Leiden and Boston, 2008, pp. 466–73.
Aristotle, Historia Animalium, pp. 205–7; Aristotle, Generation of Animals, pp. 515–9, 523ff.; Marcus Antonius Ulmius, Physiologia barbæ hvmanæ …, Bononia, 1603.
Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (c.1570–1579), Cpg 192, fol.5vf.
Hans Stockar, Heimfahrt von Jerusalem …, Schaffhausen, 1839, p. 159; Eric Dursteler, ‘Slavery and Sexual Peril in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, in Mediterranean Slavery Revisited, ed. Hanß and Schiel.
Schlegel, TRACTATVS MEDICVS; Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: a Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Cambridge MA, 1991; Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: the Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, History Workshop Journal 53, 2002; Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe, London, 2011.
Melchior von Seydlitz, Gru[e]ndtliche Beschreibung Der Wallfart nach dem heiligen Lande …, Görtlitz, 1580, fol.Jr.
Haszler, Reisen, pp. 32, 178f., 325f.
Siglinde Clementi, Körper, Selbst und Melancholie: Die Selbstzeugnisse des Landadeligen Osvaldo Ercole Trapp (1634–1710), Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2017, pp. 29f., 37.
Schlegel, TRACTATVS MEDICVS, p. 303.
Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, pp. 183, 277.
Schmucker, ‘Gefangenschaftserinnerungen’, pp. 207, 217, 222, 224ff., 229, 238, 241.
Schmucker, ‘Gefangenschaftserinnerungen’, pp. 209, 223ff., 235, 238.
Schmucker, ‘Gefangenschaftserinnerungen’, pp. 193, 224, 228, 232, 239, 242ff., 251.
Osman Aga, Leben, pp. 45, 47, 64f.
Aristotle, Generation of Animals, pp. 517–21, 529–31; Galen, Method of Medicine, vol. 3, p. 529; Aristotle, Usefulness, p. 532.
Wild, Reysbeschreibung, p. 54.
Reisen, ed. Haszler, pp. 232.
On this and below, see Reisen, ed. Haszler, pp. 209, 231–6.
Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, p. 245.
Wild, Reysbeschreibung, p. 191.
British Museum, Prints & Drawings, 1853,0709.78; Haszler, Reisen, p. 8; Cavallo, Artisans, pp. 38–63.
Salomon Schweigger, Ein newe Reyßbeschreibung auß Teutschland Nach Constantinopel vnd Jerusalem …, Nuremberg, 1608, p. 97.
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James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, Chapel Hill, 2011; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770, Chapel Hill, 2003, pp. 139–60; DiPaolo Loren, ‘Dress’; DiPaolo Loren, ‘Bodily Protection: Dress, Health, and Anxiety in Colonial New England’, in The Archaeology of Anxiety: the Materiality of Anxiousness, Worry, and Fear, ed. Jeffrey Fleisher and Neil Norman, New York, Heidelberg, Dordrecht and London, 2016.
Ulbrich, ‘Religion und Gewalt’; Dursteler, ‘Slavery and Sexual Peril’.
Carmen M. Cusack, Hair and Justice: Sociolegal Significance of Hair in Criminal Justice, Constitutional Law, and Public Policy, Springfield, Illinois, 2016, pp. 63–6.
The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel and intro. Anthony Lewis, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 228, 342, 358, 476, 478, 985f., 978, 1,239.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence, London, 2004.
