Overview

This volume brings together a range of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to re-examine the histories of facial hair and its place in discussions of gender, the military, travel and art, amongst others. Chapters in the first section of the collection explore the intricate history of beard wearing and shaving, including facial hair fashions in long historical perspective, and the depiction of beards in portraiture. Section Two explores the shifting meanings of the moustache, both as a manly symbol in the nineteenth century, and also as the focus of the material culture of personal grooming. The final section of the collection charts the often-complex relationship between men, women and facial hair. It explores how women used facial hair to appropriate masculine identity, and how women’s own hair was read as a sign of excessive and illicit sexuality.

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9783319734965

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Jennifer Evans is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Her research focuses on the body, gender and medicine in the seventeenth century. She is currently working on a project exploring men’s sexual health in the seventeenth century. Recent publications include Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2017), co-edited with Ciara Meehan.  Alun Withey is Wellcome Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Exeter, UK. An historian of early modern medicine and the body, he is currently working on a major research project on the history of facial hair in Britain. Recent publications include Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-century Britain (Palgrave, 2015).

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