ABSTRACT
In his 1650 Anthropometamorphosis, English physician John Bulwer accused the world’s body modifiers of high treason, condemning “the mad and cruell Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Finenesse, and loathsome Loveliness of most Nations fashioning and altering their Bodies from the mould intended by Nature.” Bulwer’s choice to elide contemporary European marking practices is all the more striking given the carefully orchestrated comparisons he makes between the body marking practices among foreign peoples and the vestimentary habits of the “English gallant” in the extensive critique of the excesses of fashion that closes his treatise. Perhaps in part a product of Bulwer’s legacy, signs on European skin have historically been associated by Westerners with the foreign and seen as products of commerce with a so-called savage, uncivilized other.
