ABSTRACT
The term heritable rather than hereditary underscores that the transmissions, whether complete or imperfect, were not biological or genetic in a post-Enlightenment sense; in twenty-first-century terms, some of these heritable identity markers were cultural or religious. The heritable capacity of milk to transmit qualities from nurse to child was contained in a proverb collected by Sebastian Horozco during the sixteenth century – what is formed in the milk stays until death. The turn to physiognomy freed prosecutors from having to establish the veracity of other claims such as self-asserted place of origin or the test of the mother tongue. The art or science of physiognomy had developed from the pseudo-Aristotelian text Physiognomonics, which understood the body and soul to be linked. The Physiognomonics listed three methods of practicing physiognomy, which Pseudo-Aristotle described as reading the soul or character in the body.
