Summary
Earlier periods of history have seen more people with scarring to their faces from duelling injuries and infectious diseases but what stopped this leading to a greater tolerance of facial difference ? Historian Emily Cock considers the case of the Puritan William Prynne and looks at a range of strategies people used to improve their looks from eye patches to buying replacement teeth from the mouths of the poor, whose low-sugar diets kept their dentures better preserved than their aristocratic neighbours. In portraits and medical histories she finds examples of the elision between beauty and morality. With techniques such as ‘Metoposcopy’, which focused on interpreting the wrinkles on your forehead and the fact that enacting the law led to deliberate cut marks being made - this Essay reflects on the difficult terrain of judging by appearance.
Emily Cock is a Leverhulm Early Career Fellow at the University of Cardiff working on a project looking at Disfigurement in Britain and its Colonies 1600 – 1850. You can hear her discussing her research with Fay Alberti, who works on facial transplants, in a New Thinking podcast episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast called About Face https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p080p2bc
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.3 | Hello, I'm Shahed Abari, and welcome to this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, in which |
| 0:42.8 | we'll hear an essay from one of the 2019 New Generation thinkers. They are early career academics |
| 0:49.4 | who work with BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council on a scheme that turns their |
| 0:55.0 | research into radio. I was one of the first ten people chosen for the scheme nearly ten years ago. |
| 1:02.1 | In this year's essays, you'll hear topics ranging from cleaning, clean energy, crime and punishment |
| 1:08.0 | and archaeological views of the earth. Emily Cock from the University of Cardiff |
| 1:12.2 | is working on a project looking at disfigurement in Britain and its colonies, |
| 1:16.5 | 1600 to 1850, and she's called her essay Facing Facts. |
| 1:21.5 | Judging by appearances was rife in Shakespeare's London. |
| 1:25.7 | In an ironically truthful moment, his Richard III warns us that, |
| 1:29.8 | no more can you distinguish of a man than of his outward show, |
| 1:33.4 | which God he knows seldom or never jumpeth with the heart. |
| 1:38.1 | What he means is that attempts to uncover a person's true nature |
| 1:41.4 | based on what they look like, are doomed to failure. God knows that the |
| 1:45.7 | heart and the face rarely match up. But in the 16th to 18th centuries, what historians call |
| 1:52.1 | the early modern period, people did try to use the appearance of the face and body to make |
| 1:57.1 | judgments about people they met. We do the same thing today, whether we admit it or not, |
| 2:02.6 | and we respond to this judgment by altering our appearance, |
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