UC Davis

“Front Matter: Reading and Writing the Forehead in Early Modern Literature” explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English views of the body as a text that, when read correctly, could yield diverse knowledges about people. In early modern England, the part of the body most commonly treated as a text was the forehead, which was a site of surprising interest: churchgoers listened to biblical sermons about God sealing the righteous in their foreheads while Satan would mark wicked foreheads; people joked about cuckolded husbands sprouting horns from their foreheads; women followed racial and gendered beauty standards through plucking and cosmetics to make their foreheads high and white; the government branded religious dissenters in the forehead; and physiognomers wrote books about reading one’s destiny in forehead lines. Showing how bodies—especially foreheads—operated as texts, my research aims to change how scholars have understood histories of reading and books. Much has been written about how animal skins were made into books, but I consider how human skin could be a legible text while still on the living body. The skin of the forehead was privileged as an expressive text because its movements were seen as traces of emotion: as a “blank” skin that could wrinkle itself into lines, the forehead was imagined as a self-writing text. The connection between wrinkled skin and underlying emotion anchored other significations to the forehead, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. Yet although treating the forehead as a text allowed practitioners of forehead-reading to claim specialized knowledge about decoding its meaning, it also made the forehead—like all texts—open to misreading and illegibility. This openness of textual interpretation was also occasionally manipulated by people who strategically marked, read, wrote, and interpreted themselves into texts of their own making. Chapter One, “The Anatomical Book-Body: Reading the Materiality of the Fleshly Page” explores the ways in which body-as-book metaphors influenced early modern anatomies. The book-body metaphor was used to imagine a particular kind of interiority for the human body, one in which the exterior was seen as a barrier to knowledge that needed to be cut through and peeled back to reveal the truth of the body, imagined as hidden in the body’s interior. Yet this interiority was not allowed to some racially-othered bodies. Chapter Two “Movable Skin, Movable Type: Motion and the Printing of Emotion in the Forehead” builds upon the analysis of anatomies in the first chapter, arguing that although these anatomies and physiognomies employed different methods of reading bodies, they both valued the bodies as text that helped them create hierarchies between the human, sub-human, non-human, and animal others. Chapter Three, “Brands, Marks, and Seals: Reading Salvation and Damnation in the Forehead” analyzes publications surrounding the punitive forehead branding of two seventeenth-century religious radicals, arguing that the state’s attempt to fix meaning through branding actually made these men’s foreheads subject to infinite interpretations. As forehead-reading methods developed into facial recognition technology—an evolution I trace in my conclusion—what remains clear is that imagining the body as a text allows people to legitimize their “knowledge” of a person by claiming that this “knowledge” is sourced from the body itself. Reading bodies as texts allows us to obscure the origins of our beliefs about different bodies, locating these origins in those bodies rather than in complex and contradictory histories of social categorization and hierarchy. Yet even if it is impossible to escape the reading methods that transform bodies into texts, it is also possible to manipulate these methods to survive and to build more livable lives.