Exploring the Cultural History of Continental
European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’
Exploring the Cultural History of Continental
European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’
Edited by
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’,
Edited by Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4134-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4134-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Anna Kerchy and Andrea Zittlau
Leprous Bodies and Abject Charity........................................................... 20
Kamillea Aghtan
Missionaries, Monsters, and the Demon Show: Diabolized
Representations of American Indians in the Jesuit Libraries
of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Upper Hungary........................... 38
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
Frontier Girl Goes Feral in Eighteenth Century France:
The Curious Case of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc,
the Wild Girl of Champagne ..................................................................... 74
Susan Small
The Diderot Freak Show: The Monster Laboratory
in D’Alembert’s Dream ............................................................................ 90
Dóra Székesi
Spectacular Medical Freakery: British “Translations” of Nineteenth
Century European Teratology ................................................................. 112
Ally Crockford
Monstrous Bodies in Rudolf Virchow’s Medical Collection
in Nineteenth-Century Germany.............................................................. 129
Birgit Stammberger
Enfreakment and German Medical Collections....................................... 150
Andrea Zittlau
Normalizing Bodily Difference in Autobiographical Narratives
of the Central European Armless Wonders Carl Hermann Unthan
and František Filip................................................................................... 169
Lucie Storchová
vi
Table of Contents
“Tiny Artists from the Big World”: The Rhetoric of Representing
Extraordinary Bodies during the Singer Midgets’ 1928 Tour
in Prague.................................................................................................. 193
Filip Herza
From the Showbiz to the Concentration Camp: The Fabulous,
Freakish Life of Hungarian Jewish Dwarf Performers Zoli Hirsch
and the Ovitz Family ............................................................................... 211
Anna Kérchy
The Freaks of Chernobyl: Fantasies of Nuclear Mutants in (Post)Soviet
Society ..................................................................................................... 233
Eugenia Kuznetsova
On Grace and Disability: Personal and Philosophical Reflections
on a Marionette Theatre Project by Disabled Youth in Post-Soviet
Russia ...................................................................................................... 251
Krisztián Benkő
Longing for Endor: Little People and the Ideological Colonization
of the European Fantasy Genre................................................................ 266
Catriona McAra
Contributors............................................................................................. 284
Index........................................................................................................ 288
INTRODUCTION
ANNA KÉRCHY AND ANDREA ZITTLAU
This international, interdisciplinary collection of essays attempts to
recover the lost histories of Continental European freakery and enfreakment.
Our aim is to explore, throughout the centuries, both local and
transnational dimensions of the social construction and spectacular display
of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness associated with the freak in
geographical regions formerly left unexplored by systematic academic
research.
All essays rely heavily on Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s notion of
“enfreakment” introduced in her study on the rise and fall of the freak
show and its most popular human exhibits from the 1830s through to the
1940s.1 Accordingly, “freaks of nature,” i.e. extraordinary embodiments
induced by congenital or developmental disorders (like the “Lilliputians,”
“Armless Wonders,” and “Siamese Twins” examined in this volume),
come to be reinterpreted as “freaks of culture,” who have been consistently
“stylized, silenced, differentiated and distanced” from the norm by the
cultural rituals of ideologically-infiltrated (medical, religious, political)
representational practices. Thus—much in line with today’s social
constructionist view of disability2—the distinction between these “born
freaks” and artificially, artistically deformed “made freaks” (e.g.
“Tattooed Ladies”) eventually becomes blurred, since all freaks always1
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, (ed.), “Introduction. From Wonder to Error—A
Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of
the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.) (New York: New York
University Press, 1996), p.10.
2
While impairment refers to an injury, an illness, or a congenital condition that
does or may likely cause a loss or difference of physiological or psychological
function, disability denotes the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in
society on an equal level with others due to social and environmental barriers. See
e.g.: Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), Michael
Oliver, Understanding Disability from Theory to Practice (London: Macmillan,
1996), Online Archives at the Centre for Disability Studies of the University of
Leeds (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/ Accessed: 14 August 2012).
2
Introduction
already3 seem to emerge as socially constituted, “enfreaked” “icons of
generalized embodied deviance.”4 The show-personas presented communal
anxieties and fantasies of Otherness in highly commercialized, fetishized,
colonized forms, which served entertainment and educational purposes,
conditioned responses of revulsion and pleasure, and consolidated the
comforting, illusorily self-same identity of the ordinary average majority
populace. Paradoxically, as Garland Thomson argues, enfreakment’s
“elaborate foregrounding of specific bodily eccentricities” results in the
solidification of “a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness”
coined “freakery;” as the exhibitions simultaneously “reinscribe gender,
race, sexual aberrance, ethnicity, and disability as inextricable yet
particular exclusionary systems legitimated by bodily variation—all
represented by the single multivalent figure of the freak.”5
Manifestations of the anomalous or unusual human bodily form hold a
tremendous fascination and constitute a particularly complex interpretive
challenge for the collective cultural imagination, precisely because the
(image of the) body re/presents, especially from modernism onwards, the
human being measured in terms of our own identities and its received
images of integrity.6 Thus Otherness is necessarily compared to,
inter/faced with, and touches upon the self-same. As Elizabeth Grosz puts
it, the spectator’s awe and fascination
lies in the recognition that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her
own identity, for it is all that must be ejected or abjected from one’s selfimage to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible.7
In other words, freakery emblematizes an “in-between being” simultaneously
indicating and imperilling the physical, psychic, conceptual limits, which
divide the subject from ambiguities beyond normal, knowable, visible
3
“Always already” is a collocation used by feminist philosopher Judith Butler with
reference to the unescapable subjection (i.e. ideological discipline) of the human
being inherently located, from/and even before his/her very birth, within the social
matrix in a hegemonically organized web of power positionalities and prescriptive
meanings. See Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990).
4
Garland Thomson, “Introduction,” p. 10.
5
Ibid.
6
See Hans Belting. Bild-Anthroplogie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft
(München: Fink, 2001).
7
Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Freakery.
Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.)
(New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 55–69.
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
3
human subjectivity, and outside its corporeal limits effecting the lived and
represented identity.8 This is why Margrit Shildrick insists on the intimate
interconnection between the imaginary activities of making (up)
monstrosity and fearing our vulnerable selves.9
These theoretical considerations constitute communal starting points
for the authors of this volume’s primarily cultural historically oriented
essays. All tread in the footsteps of outstanding scholars, such as
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Robert Bogdan,10 Rachel Adams,11 and
Leslie Fiedler,12 who finely documented, among others, the fascinating
phenomena of freak shows, sideshows, and dime museums, thoroughly
discussing cultural critical, historical, legal, ethical, identity political
questions in connection with freak show celebrities (e.g. General Tom
Thumb), human exhibit’s victims (e.g. Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot
Venus”), famous owners and entrepreneurs collecting or exhibiting human
oddities (e.g. Phineas Taylor Barnum), and memorable sites of the
entertainment industry preoccupied with displaying extraordinary bodies
as major attractions (e.g. Coney Island).
It is by now common-sense wisdom that the “culturally enfreaked”
otherness intimately related to the self-same has never ceased to preoccupy
human fantasy. Already Stone Age cave paintings depict wondroushorrendous human-anomalies, Antiquity praises sacred lusus naturae and
sacrifices the deformed, Medieval treatises speculate about marvels and
monstrosities, the Renaissance nobility’s cabinets of curiosities house
collections of human (and non-human) oddities, the Enlightenment
establishes “museums of living pathology,”13 late nineteenth century
witnesses the heyday of the display of corporeal anomaly for the sake of
entrepreneurial profit and mass entertainment in the form of the famed
“freak show” attractions, the 1960s’ human rights movements embrace
physiognomic deviation as a token of egalitarian political subversion, and
8
Ibid., p. 57, p. 65.
Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster. Encounters with the Vulnerable Self
(London: SAGE, 2002).
10
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show. Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and
Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
11
Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA. Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
12
Leslie Fiedler, Freaks. Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1978).
13
Christopher G. Goetz, Charcot, the Clinician (New York: Raven Press, 1987), p.
xxiv.
9
4
Introduction
the freak-hype of today’s post-industrialist consumer societies functions as
a mode of volatile self-expression.
However, the editors of this collection of essays could not help to
notice the fact that nearly each of the excellent case studies authored by
the above experts of freakery has tackled examples from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century United States and Great Britain. It
seems symptomatic of the current consensual critical understanding of
freak shows that—while Marlene Tromp’s collection relates historical
freakery to Victorian Britain14—Garland Thomson most obviously locates
them in Victorian America, arguing that these “public rituals that bonded a
sundering polity together in the collective act of looking”15 helped to
promote, in an era of crisis and change, an American identity threatened
by inevitably being lost amidst the challenges of modernity. Thereby a risk
emerges of creating the impression that the exhibition of freaks for
amusement and profit is a primarily modernist, and a uniquely and entirely
Anglo-American cultural phenomenon. The aim of the present volume is
to demonstrate that this is by far not the case. A plethora of research and
leisure activities concerned with the adequate scientific documentation of
physically deformed people or the spectacular exhibition of the cultural(ly)
other(ed) set their sceneries elsewhere in Europe, and freakery proves to
have been an established part of the Continental European entertainment
industry, too, with shows attracting masses in amusement parks, funfairs,
vaudevilles, circuses, human zoos which both resembled and differed from
the ones overseas.
Despite the lack of comprehensive analysis, Continental European
scholars have not remained entirely silent on the issue of freakery either.
We shall just mention here a few examples of the sporadic but significant
publications in the field: chapters from Interdisciplinary.net research
group’s long-term project on Monsters and Monstrosity have been
investigating in nine succeeding publications the enduring influence of the
monstrous on human culture throughout human history;16 Jan Bondeson’s
volumes A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (1999) and The Two-headed
14
Marlene Tromp, (ed.) Victorian Freaks. The Social Context of Freakery in
Britain (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008).
15
Garland Thomson, “Introduction,” p. 4.
16
See the detailed bibliographical data of the nine volumes at the website:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/monsters-and-the-monstrous/
(Accessed: 7 August 2012). E.g.: Niall Scott (ed.) Monsters and the Monstrous.
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi 2007).
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
5
Boy and Other Medical Marvels (2000)17 inspect anomalies of human
development, the lives of the extraordinary individuals concerned, and the
social reactions they provoked, through a variety of original European
(French, German, Dutch, Polish, Scandinavian) historical cases; Lorraine
Daston and Katherine Park’s 1998 book on Wonders and the Order of
Nature, 1150-175018 provides an intellectual history of the evolving
collective sensibility of Continental European naturalists, tracking the
setting of the limits of the known, formations of monstrosity, and the place
of wonder from the high Middle Ages until the Enlightenment within the
context of the emerging sciences, especially medicine; the volume Der
falsche Körper. Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Monstrositäten (The
wrong Body. Contributing to a History of Monstrosities) edited by Michael
Hagner19 investigates monstrosities in their cultural and historical settings
from Antiquity to the nineteenth century and covers cases from the
hypertrichose (extreme hairyness) to hermaphrodites, the criminal and the
ethnographic other, the medical and the popularly condemned; and,
perhaps most spectacularly; Hans Scheugl’s 1974 Show Freaks and
Monster,20 a visually impressive exhibition-catalogue, locates corporeal
difference within the context of the entertainment industry—via a mixture
of encyclopaedic listing of freak-show celebrities in Frederick Drimmer’s21
style and of historical (medical and popular) categorizations introduced by
Leslie Fiedler22—focusing on over 300 photographs from the material of
the Adanos collection, one of the most exciting Continental European
storehouses of records of freakery.
The Adanos collection, today a part of the archive of the Pratermuseum
in Vienna, can be considered emblematic because of the adventurous
figure of the initiator of this treasure-trove that still holds plenty of freakrelated material to be explored by curious researchers. Felix Adanos
(1905–1991) was an Austrian (then Slovenian)-born circus celebrity, “the
last of Vaudeville’s great gentleman jugglers”—famed for “manipulating
common objects [pool cues, pens, coffee pots, and soda straws] in
17
Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities: A Compendium of the Odd, the
Bizarre, and the Unexpected (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), The Two-headed
Boy and Other Medical Marvels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
18
Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–
1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
19
Michael Hagner, Der falsche Körper. Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der
Monstrositäten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995).
20
Hans Scheugl, Freak Shows & Monster (Köln: DuMont, 1974).
21
Frederick Drimmer, Very Special People (New York: Amjon Publishing, 1973).
22
Fiedler, Freaks.
6
Introduction
common ways”23—who toured Europe, finished the war as an American
prisoner, got engaged with the Ringling Circus, earned international fame,
and throughout his career collected intensively anything connected to the
freak show business. His publicity photographs and newspaper clippings
evidence a rich European tradition vivified by American inspirators and
followers alike, during a fruitful collaboration of the two continents. As
Adanos’ and numerous other archives attest, many freak-show acts, like
the Missing Link, the Two-Headed Nightingale, Giants, and Dwarfs
appeared simultaneously, successively on various stages worldwide; many
American celebrities toured Europe and vice versa. The dwarf performers
discussed in this collection also provide prominent examples for these
transnational careers: the Doll Family of the Schneider dwarf siblings, the
Singer Midgets, and Lilliputian Companies were German, Bavarian
“imports” to the U.S entertainment industry, became stars of the Hollywood
silver-screen (e.g. as Munchkins in the 1939 Wizard of Oz24), and then
returned to Europe on tour as “tiny artists from the Big World.”25
It was the realization of this intensive Euro-American exchange,
recorded by the Adanos collection too, that urged several authors in this
volume to adopt a transnational approach, deemed to be apt to explore
unjustly neglected dimensions of the representation of extraordinary
bodies that cannot be grasped uniquely by the means of national
discourses. Way beyond the late-nineteenth century heyday of freak
shows, the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious in
the present collection through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries’
diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European
teratology in British medical journals, and the Hollywood silver screen’s
colonization of European fantasies about deformity.26
Another prominent example for the simultaneous resemblance and
difference and the strange interconnectedness of the American and
European freak-show traditions is provided by a historical figure who
certainly deserves to be mentioned—even if only in passing and without
23
Anonymous. “Flash Back. Adieu To Adanos’ Uncommon Way With Common
Objects” Juggler’s World. Spring 1991. Vol. 43, No. 1.
http://www.juggling.org/jw/91/1/flashback.html (Accessed: 16 August 2012).
Based on an article by the Raspyni Brothers in Juggler’s World. Summer 1986.
24
Victor Fleming, dir. The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.
25
See Herza, McAra, and Kérchy on little people in this volume. The variety of
names (Doll Family, Midgets, Lilliputians, Dwarfs, Tiny Artists) used to refer to
little people illustrates the polyvalent significance that can be attributed to
(apparently) one single form of anatomical alterity.
26
See Kristóf, Crockford, McAra in this collection.
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
7
further in-depth analysis in the succeeding essays—in the introduction of a
collection undertaking to explore the diversity of Continental European
freakery. He is one of the most renowned local impresarios, Carl
Hagenbeck, Hamburg’s famous wild animal trainer, zoo owner, and later
circus manager, who organized several ethnic shows between 1874 and
1926, often casting as performers indigenous people marked by their
physical alterity. Hagenbeck’s first ventures staged the ethnographic Other
involved in supposedly daily routines (cooking, eating, mending
equipment) portraying “savages in their natural state:” his 1874 exhibit
presented the “purely natural population” of “Laplanders” (Sami people)
surrounded by their tents, weapons, sleds, aside a group of reindeer, and
“reenacted daily life in Lapland for German audiences.”27 Visitors caught
a glimpse of apparently authentic Sami life-style that, according to the
Hagenbeck schedule, included the building of tents and dismantling them
to build them up again a few meters further away, and catching the
reindeer for no obvious purpose.28 The indigenous people had to live as if
unobserved, providing a view of the life of the ethnic other whose
mundane routines appeared to be strikingly different and yet easily
comparable to the ones’ of the spectators. Hagenbeck’s “reproduction of a
realistic copy of natural life” unsettled the legitimacy of the concept of
naturalness. His insistence on refusing throughout his shows artificial
backdrop props and theatricalized performances of “wildness”—widely
used by freak-show frauds of his times—aimed at (even if somewhat
illusorily) creating an authentic (“echte”) representation of indigenous
people, avoiding their fantastification. His “habitat exhibits”—including
scheduled presentations of native skills, with weaponry, canoeing,
handicrafting, tribal singing and dancing—were replaced by increasingly
scripted and spectacularized anthropological-zoological shows, like
African tribal warriors driving massive horse-drawn carriages, set within
zoo surroundings evoking the sensation of geographical/cultural distance.
Yet they also deviated considerably from the usual carnival attractions
which displayed performers merely for their physical difference.29 Unlike
in the case of Congolese Mbuti pygmy Ota Benga who was exhibited,
labelled The Missing Link, caged together with chimpanzees and an
27
Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen. Rev. ed. Lorenz Hagenbeck.
(Leipzig and Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1948).
28
Haug von Kuenheim, Carl Hagenbeck (Hamburg: Ellert und Richter, 2007), pp.
96–8.
29
Hilde Thode-Arora, Für fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt. Die Hagenbeckschen
Völkerschauen (Franfurt/M.: Campus, 1989). The book also provides a list of all of
Hagenbeck’s shows.
8
Introduction
orang-utan in the Monkey House of Bronx Zoo in 1906, and due to
humiliations committed suicide in his thirties, throughout Hagenbeck’s
shows, indigenous people have never been degraded to an animalistic
status,30 but took an active part of a touristic experience of exotic
entertainment.31 As Eike Reichardt suggests, Hagenbeck “freed the
phenomenon of ethnographic spectacles from their association with
sideshow tents and carnivals and moved them closer to the respectability
of popular science,” while he consistently emphasized the necessity of the
freak-show organizer’s “benign intentions” at “respectable entertainment.”32
The scientific motivation behind his gambit is illustrated by the facts that
several German ethnology museums benefited from his donations of
ethnic objects used in his shows, while pathological expert Rudolf
Virchow (introduced in depth in this volume)33 studied the anthropological
background of Hagenbeck’s actors to place “the ‘tribe’ of Germans in
unified Germany within a grand hierarchy of peoples.”34 (Certainly
Hagenbeck’s aims at authenticity did not prevent German audiences from
projecting their own fantasies upon the racial other: black indigenous
people represented for lower-class spectators a romanticized past of
national superiority, and for the bourgeoisie a dream of workers
disconnected from labour unrest.35)
30
In fact, Hagenbeck’s barless zoo, a precursor to today’s wildlife adventure parks,
was famed for the docile treatment of animals, too, made homely in their life-like
environs, modelling their natural habitat.
31
Ota Benga was first exhibited at the Lousiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. See
Philip Verner Bradford, Ota Benga (El Dorado: Delta Press, 1993).
32
Eike Reichardt, Health, Race, and Empire: Popular Scientific Spectales and
National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (New York: State University of
New York at Stony Brook, 2006).
33
See Stammberger’s essay in this volume, as well as Birgit Stammberger,
Monster und Freaks: Eine Wissensgeschichte außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19.
Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).
34
Reichardt, Health, Race, and Empire, p. 26.
35
David M. Ciarlo, Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire. Colonialism and
German Mass Culture, 1887–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2003), pp.
233–4. Cited in Reichardt, Health, Race, and Empire, p. 27.
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
9
Kaiser Wilhelm II. im Gespräch mit den Äthiopiern bei Carl Hagenbeck in
Tierpark Hagenbeck, Hamburg. 1909. (Emperor Wilhelm II in conversation with
Ethopians in Hagenbeck’s zoo) Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst—
Zentralbild (Bild 183). Image by unknown photographer provided to Wikimedia
Commons by the German Federal Archive. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R52035 / CCBY-SA. Hamburg, 12183-09.
The exhibition of racial others also featured in fairs in Europe and the
United States alike.36 The shows were characterised by an intensive
exchange of information, ideas, and performers. Hagenbeck did not only
ravish entire Europe he toured with his ethnographic exhibits of Nubians
and Esquimaux (Inuits)—likely inspiring Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire’s
similar 1877 human zoo in the Jardin d’Acclimatation de Paris—but he
also contributed to the success of the founding father of American freakshowman-ship, Phineas Taylor Barnum37 by supplying him with trained
exotic animals who also gave shows on Coney Island. Besides exchanging
ideas with Barnum, Hagenbeck, on his turn, was likely inspired by
William Cody’s Wild West Show that toured Europe and the United States
with the same success despite the cultural differences between audiences.
Characteristically, throughout the Continental European cultural
history of freakery pain has had an equal share with amusement.
36
Both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World Fair presented an immensely popular
village nègre, a “Negro Village.”
37
Saxon, A. H., P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: New York
University Press, 1989).
10
Introduction
Especially during the Second World War the caged human earned
completely new associations, not only because of the Nazi genocide that
interned masses of people (othered on religious, racial, political, sexual
grounds) in extermination camps, but also because of the solidarity of a
few brave persons like Warsaw zookeeper Jan Zabinski and his wife who
saved hundreds of Polish Jews during the 1939 German occupation by
hiding them in empty cages of their abandoned zoo.38 A newspaper article
from the Adanos collection adequately reflects the contemporary Zeitgeist’s
condemnatory attitude to freaks when it comments on the photograph of a
performer with hypertrichosis (extreme hairiness) as “another case
illustrating how to make business with illness” and argues it to be “more
beneficial to put this poor man … into a medical institution than to expose
him to the sympathy of the dime of sensation-seeking elements.”39 From
the 1930s onwards, in entertainment ventures all around Europe
performers were no longer allowed to participate in the freak shows unless
they could produce a medical certificate testifying to their physical and
mental health. However, since most performers were denied such an
official permission to continue their business, as a consequence of the Nazi
eugenics programs, many of them were transported to concentration camps
where they died in the gas chambers, while others managed to immigrate
to the United States, never to return to Europe.
This collection of essays aims to consistently highlight that freaks are
made to circumscribe and enforce boundaries of normality in spatiotemporally specific modes which result from traumatic historical
circumstances, decisive geographical contextualizations, as well as related
socio-political concerns and communal anxieties. The Holocaust and the
Nazi eugenics programs is just one of them, next to phenomena like state
Socialism and mandatory humanist normativization, or the Chernobyl
catastrophe and repressed fears of nuclear mutations. Some essays of this
volume observe closely the impact of these events on enfreakment.40 We
bear in mind that Central European historical cataclysms contributed to the
re-evaluation of anatomical difference in quite ambiguous ways: e.g. while
the proliferation of the World War veterans allowed for the gradual
38
Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife. A War Story (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2007).
39
Newspaper article Berliner 8 Uhr Blatt, 3 February 1938 cited in Hans Scheugl,
Show Freaks & Monster, p. 20. Andrea Zittlau‘s translation. The original reads:
“Auch ein Fall bei dem man mit der Krankheit Geschäfte macht. Es erscheint uns
zweckmäßiger, diesen bedauernswerten Mann … in einer Heilanstalt unterzubringen,
als ihn dem Groschenmitleid sensationslüsterner Elemente auszuliefern.”
40
See essays by Kuznetsova, Benkő, Kérchy in this volume.
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
11
engulfment of the realm of the normal by the disabled and an increased
visibility of the formerly othered, the Nazi race-cleansing euthanasia
programs, that undertook the systematic, total extermination of the
“degenerate,” contributed to the disappearance of many freak-show
performers, and still constitute a historical baggage extremely difficult to
come to terms with—an unexplored, silenced,41 yet crucially important
segment of trauma studies. Thus, the collection undertakes to fill a
significant gap of current freak-studies by proposing to trace the
inadequately explored cultural history of Continental European freak
shows, with a focus on the singular, locally distinguished dimensions of
the interpretation and exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their
particular historical, cultural and political context.
Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities (including
feral children, dwarf nobilities, limbless supercrips)42, medical specimen
(including mummies, lepers, conjoined twins)43, and philosophical
fantasies (natural anomalies, graceful disabled youths)44 presenting the
anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets,
anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The cultural construction
of other(ed)s is investigated on various grounds: on levels of racial/ethnic,
gendered, classed, or religious marginalization, through examining iconic
figures such as the demonized American Indian, the interned Jewish
dwarf, or the freak as a monstrous mirror to bourgeois spectators and the
“aristocrat” of the commons (coined so by Diane Arbus, famous
photographer of freaks).45
Although Continental European freaks are introduced as products of
ideologically-infiltrated representations, they also emerge as embodied
subjects endowed with their own voice, view, and subversive agency.
Some articles in this collection pay special attention to self-writings of
freak performers which narrate their private and public trials, tribulations
and triumphs in their own words. To recover the agency of the freak
performer is at the heart of the contributions which accordingly negotiate
41
A book breaking this silence is Suzanne E. Evans, Forgotten Crimes: The
Holocaust and People with Disabilities (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2004).
42
See essays by Small, Herza, Storchová in this volume.
43
See essays by Zittlau, Aghtan, Crockford in this volume.
44
See essays by Székesi, Benkő in this volume.
45
The full Arbus quote is: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a
traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed
their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Cited in Michael Kimmelman, “The
Profound Vision of Diane Arbus: Flaws in Beauty, Beauty in Flaws,” The New
York Times. March 11, 2005.
12
Introduction
the showbiz-made star-image and the “tremulous” private selves whose
individual joys and tragedies seem to be inevitably part of the freak
discourse of their time.
The diversity of the rhetorics employed for the representation of freak
Selves and Others is stunning: we encounter a wide range of discourses,
ranging from aggrandization to abjectification, from medical pathologization
to normativization, from social realism to counter-imaginative
fantastification. And each representational/rhetorical mode turns out to be
heterogeneous and heteroglossic on its own right, alternatively serving
submissive or subversive ends, as in the case of “fantastification,” a
polyvalent term that denotes in one context a hegemonic means of cultural
othering and in another a survival-strategy of the marginalized fighting
their traumatisation by historical circumstances.46
The cultural history of Continental European freak shows, enfreakment
and freakery outlined by the essays of this collection remains necessarily
fragmented, incomplete, and non-comprehensive, obviously limited by the
physical frames of the publication. But our essays also deliberately
embrace partial perspectives and situated knowledge(formation)s, in
Donna Haraway’s sense,47 refusing to settle for a finalized, objective
historical truth and rather opting for keeping the notion of histories in/on
move in a relative and dynamic process, while respecting the agency of
those about whom stories are being told.
The complex and challenging histories of Continental European
enfreaked’s can only be appropriately explored through adopting an
interdisciplinary approach, combining methodologies of Disability
Studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, sociology, museology, popular
entertainment research, and trauma studies, to name just a few of the
involved disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is certainly beneficial on grounds
of combining fresh, new perspectives, and escaping cultural biases, but it
also holds the major disadvantage of a difficult canonization resulting
from more conservative academics’ suspicious attitude towards mixed
methodologies of what we could risk to call “freak-show studies.”
The contributions deal with cases situated geographically in the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the Ukraine and
Russia, while interfacing local and transnational characteristics. None of
the cases remain isolated within a particular community: with the
travelling of exhibitions, performers, showmen, or the news about them,
stage acts were refashioned, mutually formative of each other, their
46
See Kérchy’s and McAra’s articles in this volume.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991).
47
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
13
representational strategies and interpretative guidelines tailored to the
needs of national and international audiences. People from different
countries, from different periods, and at different status of the spectrum of
normality seem to have interacted with one other.
Although the overlappings between the essays could have allowed for
a number of different thematic and logical structurings, for simplicity’s
sake, we have opted for their chronological ordering.
Kamillea Aghtan’s analysis of the medieval religious significance of
leprous bodies relies on Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection to explain the
pivotal role the leper’s putrescent carnality plays in the attainment of
transcendence through the interconnected performances of Christian
charity and the struggle to overcome earthly horrors, on the path to
salvation followed by Saint Francis of Assissi, Thomas of Celano, and
Angela di Foligno. The essay excels in seeking to recover the leper’s, this
“freakish and deformed, silent shamblers’” agency.
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, likewise, concentrates on meaning-formations
within the context of Christianity; she scrutinizes exciting archival sources
from the Jesuit Libraries of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Upper
Hungary with the aim to fully understand the background knowledge that
missionaries gained—usually before embarking on their way to the New
World—from stereotypical representations of diabolization, envisioning
the cultural encounter with the indigenous population in terms of a demon
show.
Susan Small deconstructs the course and coverage of the life of a
Human Curiosity dissected under the hot glare of the French Enlightenment,
as she recovers the traces of Marie Angélique Memmie le Blanc, the Wild
Girl of Champagne, deemed a liminal creature, a taxonomic curio in
Linneaus’ system, existing in what Giorgio Agamben has termed a “zone
of indeterminacy” or a “state of exception,” who fascinated as a favourite
freak spectacle the seventeenth century Parisian salons, and continues to
haunt the shadowy margins of society and collective imagination ever
since.
Dóra Székesi reads Denis Diderot’s speculative philosophical
discourse to highlight how his parade of monsters (including physical ones
like hermaphrodites and Siamese twins, mythological ones like Cyclopses
and Satyrs, and imaginary ones like human polyps or spiderweb
organisms) has been shaped by personal experience, contemporary
scholars,’ physiologists,’ surgeons,’ and anatomists’ experiments, as well
as by his philosophical views of Nature (conceived as infinite and
timeless, yet eternally dynamic), the most significant elements of his
materialism, and his notion of order and disorder.
14
Introduction
During the nineteenth century the interest in extraordinary bodies
climaxed in both popular and scientific culture. Three contributions
dealing with this period reveal how medicine—as an emerging science—
makes use of monstrous bodies in the same way the entertainment venues
of popular culture do.
Ally Crockford analyses Bertram Windle’s extensive serial reports on
teratological literature published in the Journal of Anatomy and
Physiology between 1891 through to 1909, (along with J.W. Ballantyne’s
and Sir John Bland-Sutton’s articles) to reveal how the cases he discusses
stem nearly all exclusively from Continental European journals of
medicine and are presented to the English readers of the journal in a freakshow simulacrum fashion.
The creative interaction between medical academic and popular
entertainment discourse is further explored by Andrea Zittlau who uses
Erving Goffman’s notion of stigma to show how the exhibits of medical
collections come to be identified with enfreaked outcasts of the society—
on accounts of the criminal, the ethnographic other, and the physically
deformed, who all find their way into medical collections where they form
an “assembly of freaks.”
This point is taken up by Birgit Stammberger who tackles the
relationship between elitist scientific and public popular means of
Foucauldian knowledge-formation in her study of Rudolf Virchow’s
medical collection at the turn of the century in Berlin, Germany. One of
the most renown European physicians of his time, Virchow fashioned
himself with his collection, while continuously crossing the borders
between showman-ship and the anthropologist-pathologist’s professionalism
throughout his presentations of monstrous objects to various audiences.
After medical sciences, our focus shifts towards mass entertainment
events popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lucie
Storchova discloses how discourses of difference, narratives of normalcy,
and supercrip scenarios intermingled throughout shaping subjectivites selfarticulated in autobiographical accounts of pre-World War II Central
Europe’s top Armless Wonder performers, German Carl Hermann Unthan
renowned for his violin performances and Czech František Filip celebrated
as “an exemplary entrepreneur” of his nation. Her focus is on how bodily
difference could overlap with culturally determined ideologies of modern
nationalism, capitalism, liberal individualism, economic productivity, civic
fitness, and ideals of completeness and homogeneity.
Filip Herza examines textual, rhetorical strategies of conferring
meanings upon non-normative bodies by analysing a rich archival corpus
of promotional and press material related to the 1928 Prague performance
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
15
of Singer’s Midgets, a troupe of little people of European origins,
organized by the Viennese showman Leo Singer, who mostly earned fame
throughout their U.S. tour, and in particular their impersonations of
Munchkins in the Hollywood hit, The Wizard of Oz. Herza’s main aim is
to describe how the exhibition of physical difference helped to instruct,
edify and reinforce the Czech middle-class identity, along with discourses
of republicanism, and consumerism, while at the same time allowing for
locally specific sentiments of self-criticism and irony.
Dwarf performers are also at the centre of attention in Anna Kérchy’s
contribution, but she undertakes to compare the rhetorics of the
entertainment industry with those of confessional self-definition and
fascist ideology on the basis of the life-stories and reminiscences of
Hungarian Jewish dwarf comedians. Although clown Zoltán Hirsch died in
the concentration camp while the Lilliputian musicians Ovitz family
became Dr Mengele’s favourite research subjects whose medical
enfreakment ironically saved their lives, the memoirs resemble in using
self-fantastification as a subversive discursive device to resist “othering.”
On describing the fatal consequences of the Nazi eugenics programs for
freak-show performers, the significance these memoirs hold for traumaand disability-studies is stressed.
Eugenia Kuznetsova discusses another major European historical
cataclysm and its effects on fantasies and phobias of freakery. Recalling
the fatal explosion of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in 1986, as
well as the fictional revisiting of the tragic event in Tatyana Tolstaya’s
novel The Slynx (2003), she focuses on the figure of (post)nuclear freaks
by uncovering urban legends, the politics of their spreading, and mutants
as embodiments of the ever-so imminent threat of nuclear catastrophe and
of social uncertainties of the post-Soviet reality. Alex Cheban’s haunting
photographs of graffitis in the abandoned residential districts of Prypyat
offer uncanny visual illustrations of the monstrous atmosphere.
Krisztián Benkő remains in the same geographical region when
providing personal and philosophical reflections on the pitfalls of socialist
humanist attempts at the normativization of enfreaked bodies by means of
institutional confinement, and the more successful model of Post-Soviet
social integration, illustrated by a 2009 marionette theatre project
performed by disabled youth. Heinrich von Kleist’s (anti)aesthetics of
“grace”—introduced in connection with non-self-conscious, “natural”
automatons and puppets—provides an adequate model for an empowering
reinterpretation of disability.
Catriona McAra returns to the dwarf performers and deals partly with
the same assembly that has been discussed by Lucie Storchova earlier, but
16
Introduction
from a different perspective: taking the careers of the classic sideshow star
German “Doll Family” and contemporary English dwarf actor Warwick
Davis for her examples, she reveals how dwarf performers were often
appropriated or stereotyped by producers of culture in order to heighten
representations of the fantastic. Relying on Susan Stewart’s ideas on the
nostalgic longing for the miniature, she reads the figure of the dwarf on the
Hollywood silver screen as a metaphor for structural inversion and for the
American film industry’s reverse colonization of European history and
fantasy from the Wizard of Oz to Star Wars.
The articles cover a huge time frame from the medieval to the
postmodern eras and wish to prove that the research exploring the cultural
history of Continental European freak shows is of vital relevance today,
since it might eventually teach us a number of important lessons. It might
help us to discover an unexpected continuity between the nineteenth
century exhibition, the twentieth century annihilation, and the twenty-first
century hyper-spectacularization of freaks. It thus urges us to try to do our
very best to avoid making the same mistakes of othering that-which-differs
in terms of a lesser state of being, and instead encourages all to strive to
appreciate the alterity of disabilities both as a general human condition,
and even a right in the sense of Lennard Davis’ dismodernism,48 and as a
token of the colourful diversity of our very existence.
Since freaks shows are entertainment sites empathically distinguished
by their spectacularity, the editors of this volume found it to be of vital
importance to produce a collection illustrated by plenty of ravishing visual
material. We are proud to state that each essay is decorated by stunning
visual evidence recording Continental European processes of enfreakment.
Moreover, many of the images have not appeared in print before, either
because they are formerly unpublished original artworks, or because they
come from archival sources, old manuscripts carefully explored by our
contributors. The editors would like to thank for their permission to
reproduce visual material: the British Library; the Berliner
Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Preussischer Kulturbesitz; the National Library of Prague; the Archive of
the National Theatre in Prague; the National Széchényi Library, Budapest;
the University Library of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest; the
Somogyi City Library, Szeged; the Old and Rare Book Collection of the
Somogyi City Library, Szeged, especially chief curator Erzsébet
Szőkefalvi-Nagy; as well as individual artists, Emiliano Leonardi, Alex
48
Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and
Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
17
Cheban, Francois Chartier, along with Tim Lawes, General Manager at
Prop Store.
We are truly grateful for visual artist David Caines’ marvellous cover
design and for his generously allowing us to use on the dust-jacket of the
book one of his unsettling and visionary paintings, of an amazing oeuvre
often portraying freakish figures such as amputees, mutants, and circus
performers. His Humboldt’s Wedding (oil on canvas, 2010)—quite
appropriately featured in the Ordinary Monsters exhibition, and inspired
by Alexander von Humboldt, the eighteenth century Prussian scientist
baron, the first European to explore, with his Frenchman companion, the
wilderness of South America—seemed to fit just perfectly a collection
governed by the aim to explore the terra incognita of Continental
European enfreakment from a transnational, transdisciplinary perspective,
embarking on the exploration of the mundane in the unusual and the
unusual in the mundane, tracking the blurring of the scientific
objectification and the aestheticizing fantastification of the Other–
uncategorizable within the self-same.
Further special thanks are due to the tireless staff at Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, to the ever-so cooperative writers of the essays, and
to our patient and supportive families, who all contributed in their own
ways to the making of this collection.
Rostock-Zamárdi, August 2012
Works Cited
Ackerman, Diane. The Zookeeper’s Wife. A War Story. New York:
Norton, 2007.
Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA. Freakery and the American Cultural
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Anonymous, “Flash Back. Adieu To Adanos’ Uncommon Way With
Common Objects,” in Juggler’s World 43.1 (Spring 1991).
http://www.juggling.org/jw/91/1/flashback.html Based on an article by
the Raspyni Brothers in Juggler’s World. Summer 1986. (Accessed: 10
August 2012).
Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthroplogie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft.
München: Fink, 2001.
Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show. Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement
and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Bondeson, Jan. A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities. New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1999.
18
Introduction
—. The Two-headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2000.
Bradford, Philip Verner. Ota Benga. El Dorado: Delta Press, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Ciarlo, David M. Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire. Colonialism and
German Mass Culture, 1887–1914. Madison: University of Wisconsin,
2003.
Daston, Lorraine and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature,
1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Davis, Lennard J. 2002. Bending Over Backwards: Disability,
Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York
University Press.
Drimmer, Frederick. Very Special People. New York: Amjon Publishing,
1973.
Evans, Suzanne E. Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with
Disabilities. Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2004.
Fiedler, Leslie. Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1978.
Fleming, Victor, (dir.). The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. “Introduction. From Wonder to Error—A
Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural
Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Edited by Rosemarie Garland
Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 1–19.
—, (ed.). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New
York and London: New York University Press, 1996.
Goetz, Christopher G. Charcot, the Clinician. New York: Raven Press,
1987.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in
Freakery. Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Edited by
Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York University Press,
1996, pp. 55–69.
Hagenbeck, Carl. Von Tieren und Menschen. Rev. ed. Lorenz Hagenbeck.
Leipzig and Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1948.
Hagner, Michael. Der falsche Körper: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der
Monstrositäten. Göttingen: Wallenstein, 1995.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Kimmelman, Michael. “The Profound Vision of Diane Arbus: Flaws in
Beauty, Beauty in Flaws,” The New York Times, March 11, 2005.
Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau
19
Kuenheim, Haug von. Carl Hagenbeck. Hamburg: Ellert und Richter,
2007.
Oliver, Michael. Understanding Disability from Theory to Practice.
London: Macmillan, 1996.
Online Archives at the Centre for Disability Studies of the University of
Leeds: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/ (Accessed: 13 August
2012).
Reichardt, Eike. Health, Race, and Empire: Popular Scientific Spectales
and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914. New York:
State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2006.
Saxon, A. H. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: New
York University Press, 1989.
Scheugl, Hans. Show Freaks and Monster. Die Sammlung Felix Adanos.
Köln: DuMont, 1974.
Scott, Niall, (ed.). Monsters and the Monstrous. Myths and Metaphors of
Enduring Evil. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi 2007.
Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster. Encounters with the
Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE, 2002.
Stammberger, Birgit. Monster und Freaks: Eine Wissensgeschichte
außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript,
2011.
Thode Arora, Hilde. Für fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt. Die Hagenbeckschen
Völkerschauen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989.
Tromp, Marlene, (ed.). Victorian Freaks. The Social Context of Freakery
in Britain. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body. New York: Routledge, 1996.
LEPROUS BODIES AND ABJECT CHARITY
KAMILLEA AGHTAN
Introduction
The corpus of European medieval Christian thought is liberally
populated by leprous bodies. Freakish and deformed, silent shamblers on
the outskirts of the city limits or contained behind hospital walls, it has
often been argued that the leprous body possesses a very particular
performative value within the texts left by saints, clergymen and medical
monks. Hideously tainted by a disease of the flesh which mirrors the postmortem processes of putrefaction, the decaying, living corpse of the leper
has at once played the stage (but never the actor) for both extreme
revulsion and divine bliss. Sacred and profane, unviewable and
untouchable, the leprous body thus becomes available to play a pivotal
role in the attainment of transcendence through the interconnected
performances of Christian charity and the struggle to overcome earthly
horrors.
Current critical historical research, however, has destabilised the
previously entrenched paradoxes of divine–profane, familiar–absent that
were, until recently, undeniably inscribed within the social sphere upon the
leper’s corporeality.1 It is within the resulting fissures in Christian
discourse which manifest upon such interrogations that this chapter
positions itself, particularly in relation to the accounts of Italian and
German holy figures which were written in the thirteenth-century, when
leprosy was both incredibly endemic to most of the European continent
1
See, e.g., Luke E. Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the
Whole Body (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007); François-Olivier
Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds
and Socieities,” in Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, Lawrence
I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (eds.) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); and Carole
Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006).
Kamillea Aghtan
21
and in the process of being more fully managed by various institutional
socio-medical measures.2
The chapter begins with a rough and potted history of the social
negotiation of leprosy, particularly during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, in light of recent academic contributions which now challenge
various assumptions concerning the contagiousness of the disease and the
ostracisation of its sufferers. It then conducts a textual and performative
analysis of the freakish site embodied by lepers in key moments within the
tracts of three figures of Christendom: namely, the Italian friar Thomas of
Celano’s account of the meeting of medieval mystic Saint Francis of
Assisi and the leper in The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul (1247),3
the tale of the unnamed bishop meeting a stranger in the German prior
Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum (c.1220–1235);4 and
the story of the Blessed (but never sainted) Angela of Foligno’s visit to a
leper hospital in The Book of Divine Consolation (c.1297).5
This chapter argues that within the majority of the religious accounts
falling within the genre of “encounter with the leper” in a theatrical
performance of charity, spiritual transcendence is reached through a
particular situating of the leprous, in which the freakish, diseased body is
instrumentalised as both a prop for the metaphorical play of transcendence
and as the very stage or backdrop upon which the attainment of divine
knowledge operates. Within the literature of Thomas of Celano and
2
While not addressed with any specificity in this chapter, the medical development
of specialised institutions and strategies nonetheless sets an important backdrop to
the arguments at play herein. For further detail, see Katherine Park, “Medicine and
Society in Medieval Europe: 500–1500,” in Medicine in Society: Historical
Essays, Andrew Wear (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.
59–90, providing a useful synoptic study of these developments throughout
medieval Europe, and Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine, for a general
history of social and medical attitudes to leprosy.
3
Thomas of Celano, “The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul,” in Francis of
Assisi: Early Document— the Founder. 1245–1247, vol. 2, Regis J. Armstrong, J.
A. Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short (eds.), trans. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A.
Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2000), pp.
231–393.
4
Caesarius von Heisterbach. Caesarii Heisterbacensis Monachi Ordinis
Cisterciensis Dialogus Miraculorum. Vol. 2. 2 vols. (Cologne, New York and
Brussels: J. M. Heberle (H. Lempertz & Company)), 1851.
5
Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of
Foligno, trans. Mary G. Steegmann (London: Chatto and Windus, 1909). This
book is comprised of two parts, Memorial and Instructions. This chapter primarily
scrutinises the former section, written c.1297.
22
Leprous Bodies and Abject Charity
Caesarius of Heisterbach, instances of charitable contact with and
consumption of leprous fluids (their saliva and their putrefying flesh) act
as the catalyst for such transcendence: their proximity to leprosy invokes a
form of communion with God. However, the ascetic structure of this
experience simultaneously requires a denial of the leper as an active player
in this theatrical performance of charity in various ways and, moreover,
the erasure of the leprous body once it has fulfilled its purpose.
If interrogations into medieval society have yielded evidence of a
greater visibility—and perhaps even direct participation—of the leper
community in aspects of daily life, this chapter argues that such research
indicates the possibility of a far greater significance for the leper in
religious narratives of charity and transcendence than simply functional
enfreakment. Indeed, a close analysis of the account of contemporary
Italian mystic Saint Angela of Foligno, in engagement particularly with
theorists Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille, may reveal an alternative
performative relationship with leprosy which repositions both the dramatis
personae and the casting within a theatre of charity, destabilising the
rigidity of concepts of the freakish, diseased body, of benevolence, and
ultimately of transcendence itself.
Fig. 1: A Leper with a Bell from a Pontifical, c.1400 (vellum). British Library
Lansdowne 451. fol. 127. This image is in the public domain.
Kamillea Aghtan
23
Society of Freaks: The Rise of Leprosy and Leprosaria
The affliction of leprosy itself and its attending social implications bear
a confused and extensively palimpsestic history. During the Middle Ages,
leprosy was generally viewed as a disease that cancerously riddled the
body in its entirety. Based on the medical premise of Galenic humours, it
was understood, at least until the mid to late thirteenth century, to result
from a severe imbalance of the vitreous substances which constituted the
flesh (the blood) and a disequilibrium of the internal composition of the
body (the humours).6 That is, before the identification of the specific strain
of leprosy bacteria microbacterium leprae in the 1800s, the common belief
was not of leprosy as a cutaneous disease but rather one in which the
pustular and disfigured complexion was merely symptomatic of a chronic
disruption of an individual’s bodily fluids.7
The degenerative effect of leprosy on the body was inexorable and
incurable. Indeed, by the time the signs of leprosy started appearing as
waxy, discoloured or nodular blemishes on the skin, it was considered by
many writers of medical tracts to have already thoroughly infected the
body.8 In its later stages, leprosy could impact upon not only the skin but
also the cartilage and bone, causing paralysis and a subsequent shuffling
and ponderous gait. Chronic contraction seized the muscles in the hands
and feet, freezing them into claws. It could infect the larynx and render the
voice raspy and hoarse, often eventually taking away speech entirely. The
face could swell and distort into a bestial visage, assuming the guise of a
lion, an elephant or a satyr;9 the bridge of the nose might collapse; corneal
ulcerations could glaze over the eyes and cause blindness. Bones became
prone to fracture, and infected boils caused pussy fluid discharge
accompanied by the foul smell of decay.10 The unnerving result, as
Catherine Peyroux descriptively elucidates, “mimicked walking death, or
6
Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy,” p. 186; Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern
Medicine, pp. 103–17.
7
Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy,” p. 186.
8
Luke E. Demaitre, “The Relevance of Futility: Jordanus De Turre (Fl. 1313–
1335) on the Treatment of Leprosy,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70.1
(1996): pp. 25–61; see also, Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy,” pp. 187–9.
9
Julie Orlemanski, “How to Kiss a Leper,” in Postmedieval: A Journal of
Medieval Cultural Studies 3.2 (2012): p. 148.
10
Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, p. 3.
24
Leprous Bodies and Abject Charity
life animating a rotting corpse.”11 This was not merely an affliction
residing upon the flesh; rather, it was a disease of flesh, whereby the very
matter constituting the body rots and dies.
While such freakish bodies could be consigned to institutions that
provided specifically for leprous ailments from as early as the sixth
century,12 it is only with the rise and spread of leprotic symptoms across
the European continent that these leper houses—otherwise known as
“leprosaria” or “lazarettos”—became both increasingly common and
institutionalised. Indeed, some of the larger houses organised into “an
almost monastery-like form and size” adopting an equally monastic daily
regime.13 Through the late eleventh to fourteenth centuries, Carole
Rawcliffe calculates that between one quarter and one fifth of all known
English medieval hospitals were intended to care specifically for lepers,
although other patients were sometimes also sheltered.14 Katherine Park
remarks that by the twelfth century, half of all the new hospitals in Europe
were committed to functioning as leprosaria.15 While the number of active
leprosaria is not an exact measure of the commonness of the disease, there
is nonetheless no doubt that by the thirteenth century, leprosy was an
extremely visible phenomenon.16
However, despite the prevalence of the disease throughout the
continent, and contrary to popular opinion of previous historians, recent
scholarship indicates that it was not likely to have been considered a
contagious disease in the modern meaning of the word before the spread of
the Plague in the mid-fourteenth century.17 Indeed, the principle of leprosy
11
Catherine Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts:
Religion in Medieval Society, Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000), p. 177.
12
Park, “Medicine and Society,” p. 71.
13
Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 182.
14
Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, p. 108.
15
Park, “Medicine and Society,” p. 71.
16
Researchers have posited infection rates ranging from 0.5 percent to five percent
of the total European population at leprosy’s peak in the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. See Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” p. 177, and Carole Rawcliffe, “The
Earthly and Spiritual Topography of Suburban Hospitals,” in Town and Country in
the Middle Ages: Contrasts, Contacts and Interconnections, 1100–1500, Kate
Giles and Christopher Dyer (eds.) (Leeds: Maney, 2007), p. 257.
17
Scholars such as Carole Rawcliffe, Luke E. Demaitre and François-Olivier
Touati all call for a re-evaluation of the concept of leprosy as contagious, as well
as the assumed social rejection of the afflicted, in the Middle Ages. Touati calls
this narrative of contagion the “historiographical myth,” bred from, firstly, a