Physiognomy, like leprosy’s diagnosis, occasioned the fraught recoding of medieval bodies into legible signs. The physiognomic art sought to discover a person’s character on the basis of bodily features, and in late medieval England it circulated in the discursive borderlands between medicine, natural philosophy, magic, and literary pleasure. Like phisik, physiognomy derives from the Greek term physis. As one Middle English treatise remarks, “This word phisonomea ys said of phisis, that is nature, and gnomos, that is dyvynynge [divining, discerning].”88 In his influential commentary Roger Bacon (d. 1294) gave the word a slightly different gloss: “‘Physiognomy’ is the rule of nature in the complexion of the human body and in its composition—because in Greek ‘nomos’ is ‘law,’ and ‘phisis’ is ‘nature’ [Phisonomia est lex nature in complexione humani corporis et eius composicione, quia Grece ‘nomos’ est ‘lex,’ ‘phisis’ est ‘natura’].”89 Whether grounded in gnosis or nomos, medieval physiognomy presumed the ordered lawfulness of nature, which undergirded the correspondence of physical features and character. This mutual entailment of body and behavior was usually explained with a nod to astrology. James Yonge, in his translation and redaction of the Secretum Secretorum in 1422, states that “al bodely thyngis [all bodily things] be governyd and ordaynyd by the Planetes and the Sterris [stars],” and accordingly everyone is “disposid dyversly [diversely] to vertues and to vices.”90 Astral determinism does not sit comfortably with Christian theology, and Étienne Tempier’s well-known condemnations of 1277 insisted anew that stars merely incline and do not determine human behavior. But physiognomy leaned heavily on this inclination and elaborated the fantasy that bodies, by virtue of being natural things, made persons legible.
Medieval English readers appear to have been eager for physiognomic writings. The catalogue Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English lists 113 manuscript witnesses for Middle English texts of physiognomy from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (although this number is somewhat inflated by separate entries for prologues and texts). Anglo-Latin physiognomies survive even more plentifully. Physiognomy’s manuscript contexts indicate its flexible generic identity, moving between the medicoscientific and the fantastic. Those in straightforwardly medical contexts include, for instance, three Latin tracts in a medical compilation owned by St. Mary’s Priory, Coventry, which bears annotations and signs of use, like the addition of recipes by the infirmarius.91 One of the remarkable “Sloane Group” of medical manuscripts—identified by Linda Voigts as the productions of a bookmaker specializing in medical compilations—includes a physiognomy, as do three closely related manuscripts.92 Roland l’Ecrivain, a member of the Parisian medical faculty, presented an original physiognomy to the Duke of Bedford in 1430. However, physiognomic instructions also appeared alongside more esoteric and exotic materials, like texts on alchemy and divination.93 In two manuscripts, a physiognomy is incorporated into a romance, the Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, in a combination implying that the pleasures of fantastic narrative and physiognomy were thought congruent, or even mutually amplifying.94 Exoticism is also emphasized in John Metham’s mid-fifteenth-century book, written for Sir Miles Stapleton: a love plot set in Persia is sandwiched between a palmistry and a physiognomy. One late thirteenth-century Latin physiognomy, owned and annotated in the library of Bury St. Edmunds, is preceded by a letter from the legendary figure of Prester John.95
Physiognomy’s fungible generic identity reflects medieval readers’ uncertain sense of what to do with physiognomy’s implications for embodied subjectivity. If the heavenly bodies or other natural forces imprinted personality and left its indices all over the face to be read, where did this leave moral deliberation and free will? However, to critique physiognomy too stridently, or to insist too vehemently on the untrammeled freedom of human behavior, destroyed physiognomy’s alluring promise that learned expertise could turn the treacherous world into a domain of natural signs. Friction between the desire for knowledge and anxiety about physical determinism is variously legible in physiognomic texts, but I focus here on one Middle English example—the unexceptional seventh chapter of a treatise on natural philosophy. The treatise was written around 1400 in a compilation of medical and scientific texts, now London, British Library, Sloane MS 213. The chapter claims that its physiognomic lore is drawn from Aristotle’s teachings to his pupil Alexander, marking its source as the Secretum Secretorum, the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise translated (in full) from Arabic to Latin around 1230. More than six hundred manuscript witnesses of the Secretum survive, in Latin and various European vernaculars; it was a remarkably popular text.96 The physiognomic portion often circulated separately from the rest of the book, as it does in Sloane MS 213.
“Here sues certeyne rewles of phisnomy” (Here follow certain rules of physiognomy) reads the rubric at the start of the chapter, and its contents mostly take the form of rules, or straightforward principles for translating between body and character:
Nose when it es sotyl and small, he that owes it es wrathfull and angry. Who that has a longe nose straght to the mouthe he es gentill, worthy and hardy. Whose nose es like an ape, he es hasty. Schorte nose toknes a schrewe, and if the noseholes be wyde also, that es a synger and liccherous.97
[When a nose is subtle and small, he that owns it is wrathful and angry. He who has a long nose, straight to the mouth, is noble, worthy and strong. He whose nose is like an ape’s, he is hasty. A short nose signifies a rogue, and if the nose-holes are also wide, then he is a singer and lecherous.]
A long list of such physiognomic signs was the quintessential form of the genre. The repetitive sentences that make up the bulk of physiognomic treatises tend to follow one of two formulas: either whoever has x is y—as in, “Who that has right litel eares he es foltisch, thevysch and liccherous [foolish, thieving, and lecherous]”—or, alternatively, x signifies y—as in, “Many heres upon aither [either] schuldre signyfies foly [foolishness, madness].”98 Both constructions imply a model of embodiment that is static, deterministic, and interpretable. Physiognomy, as the treatise claims, gives the power “to knowe by onely [only] thoght when men lokes on any man, of what condicions he es.”99 Quotidian perceptions of bodily form are transformed into esoteric insight into someone’s true identity, thanks to the insights of the physiognomic text.
In actuality, numerous factors mitigated against the straightforward usefulness of physiognomy. Many observations were difficult to make, like the close scrutiny of the eye’s iris or a view of body parts ordinarily hidden from sight. Even if a slew of physiognomic observations were gathered, how did one harmonize them into a comprehensive sense of the person? What if someone had a long nose, making him noble and worthy, and small ears, meaning he was thieving and lecherous? The treatise instructs its readers, “set noght thi sentence [understanding] ne dome [nor judgment] in one of these signes allone, bot gader the wittenes [gather the evidence] to-gider of ilk [each] one.”100 But exactly how to synthesize the evidence was far from clear. Still, the idea that physiognomy really was practicable, that its list of rules could make the social field legible, was essential to its appeal. Physiognomic texts were suffused with what might be called an otiose practicality.
If physiognomy then gives literate expression to an ethos of determined character and legible embodiment—and if this ethos must have been part of its attraction—most physiognomic texts also bear within them an antidote to this idea, an antidote in the form of a story. This is the remarkably widespread exemplum of Hippocrates