Review of 'Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe'

This brief and self-deprecating portrait is one of only three autobiographical accounts of facial disfigurement in Patricia Skinner’s book. Early medieval sources contain an abundance of marked, blemished, branded and mutilated faces (the appendices listing narrative, archaeological and legal evidence make for sobering reading). But these sources – chronicles and annals, injury fines in law codes, medical and hagiographic texts, cemetery remains – are, notes Skinner, ‘recalcitrant’ on the subject of experience (p. 21). Ranging geographically from Ireland to the Byzantine Empire and chronologically from late antiquity to the 12th century, her groundbreaking study is less about ‘living with disfigurement’ in early medieval Europe than ‘thinking with’ it.