Signing the Body

The first major scholarly investigation into the rich history of the marked body in the early modern period, this interdisciplinary study examines multiple forms, uses, and meanings of corporeal inscription and impression in France and the French Atlantic from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. Placing into dialogue a broad range of textual and visual sources drawn from areas as diverse as demonology, jurisprudence, mysticism, medicine, pilgrimage, commerce, travel, and colonial conquest that have formerly been examined largely in isolation, Katherine Dauge-Roth demonstrates that emerging theories and practices of signing the body must be understood in relationship to each other and to the development of other material marking practices that rose to prominence in the early modern period. While each chapter brings to light the particular histories and meanings of a distinct set of cutaneous marks—devil’s marks on witches, demon’s marks upon the