By the second century AD, some Christian preachers were beginning to attack Venus and the effects she had on women. Clement of Alexandria, a ferocious name-caller and propagandist, jeered at the goddess as a ‘dirty-minded little waitress’ and reprimanded all the women of Rome, not just prostitutes, for bowing to her influence and dyeing their hair blonde or wearing blonde wigs. Hair-colouring by women and its effects on men he regarded as a moral menace of frightening proportions. While he was at it, he likened women to ‘painted apes’.
Additions of other people’s hair are entirely to be rejected, and it is a most sacrilegious thing for spurious hair to shade the head, covering the skull with dead locks . . . Unawares the poor wretches destroy their own beauty by the introduction of what is spurious . . . So they dishonour the Creator of men, as if the beauty given by Him were nothing worth.16
In succeeding centuries, the howls of outrage were to be repeated again and again by the mouth-foaming fanatics, but never with the slightest effect.
Tertullian, another early Christian proselytiser, took up the puritan cause in his De cultu feminarum, written in the early third century. One of his targets of special loathing was dyed blonde hair. ‘I see some women dye their hair blonde by using saffron. They are even ashamed of their country, sorry that they were not born in Germany or in Gaul! Thus, as far as their hair is concerned, they give up their country.’ And as for such monstrosities as wigs, Tertullian thundered, ‘you may be putting on a holy and Christian head the cast-offs of hair of some stranger who was perhaps unclean, perhaps guilty and destined for hell. In fact, why do you not banish all this slavery to beauty from your own free head?’17
Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, who reigned from about 306 to 337, was alert to the changing mood and made a concerted attack on the old pagan mythology of Rome. His soldiers dragged statues of the gods and goddesses out of the darkness of the temples and into the light. People shouted and jeered as they broke off their decorations and, as a Constantine sympathiser tells us, ‘exhibited to the gaze of all the unsightly reality which had been hidden under a painted exterior’. Coloured images were desecrated, stripped down to their bare marble. Arms, legs and noses were lopped off and bodies mutilated, reducing many of these smooth elegant beauties to the fragmented torsos that we see today in museums.18
To the Christian Fathers, the blonde and naked Venus was the ultimate demon, the most shameful of the company of Olympian demons, plucked as an example of the odious immorality of her times. Thousands of images of her must have been destroyed as symbols of Rome’s decadent past. Yet it was exactly this sensationally erotic goddess, more than any other of the demonised deities, who was to survive her attacks for many centuries to come. Venus was to find a new and lasting guise in the medieval world of Christianity, where her abhorred blonde hair would become an essential element of her power.
a They even suggested contraception methods. Pliny recommended an amulet made by opening the head of a hairy spider, removing the two little worms believed to be inside and tying them in a deer skin. Aetius suggested wearing the liver of a cat in a tube on the left foot.
3
The Devil’s Soap
Whatever the turbid mix of brigandage, superstition and plague that ruled Europe in the Middle Ages, it is clear that by the thirteenth century the medieval Church was in crisis. The people could see that the ideals of Christianity bore no relation to reality. Their lives swung between joy and despair, pious fervour and calamity. Grand contrasts of pageantry and perfume, of lepers with rattles and public executions, lent a flavour of excitement and passion to everyday medieval life. The men of the Church despaired at their failing ability to exercise leadership in this rising spiritual quagmire. One of their problems was women.
Medieval clerics were afraid of women. They were afraid above all of their sexuality; and one emblem of these feared female powers was the mane of flowing blonde hair. Women were all sorceresses to a degree, it was claimed. Many of them were in league with the Devil, their bodies a bundle of animal instincts, their minds unquenchable infernos. Burdened as they inevitably were with all the sins of the world, they were fornicators, deliberately bewitching and inflaming men with their base trickeries.
The Middle Ages was a time when most mature and married women were expected to live beneath the veils in which male authority enveloped them. The slightest glimpse of a lock of golden hair, a curl by the ear, a glint of blonde at the brow, was imagined to be enough to kindle the fever of desire. These powers of attraction were closely entwined with the excitement of temptation and denial. Just as in the Victorian age, when the glimpse of a finely turned ankle beneath weighty layers of petticoats could send men into a frenzy of sexual excitement, in the Middle Ages the near-total concealment of hair further enhanced its seductive powers. Fear and fascination existed as one in the licentiously flowing blonde hair that haunted men’s dreams.
All across England and across Europe, too, preachers, parsons, monks and friars were drumming the hellfire message of woman’s devilry into their congregations. They condemned women as creatures of evil, dangerous beings to be kept at a distance and controlled. Nobody was left in any doubt as to why. It was woman’s powers of seduction that had become the reason for her vicious denunciation. Every Sunday, catalogues of womanly sins were dragged out and scathingly picked over from the pulpit. Her scandalous love of evil fashions and cosmetics, her habit of looking in the mirror, her use of dyes to blonde her hair and the habit of wearing blonde wigs made of false hair – all these were thrown up as evidence of woman’s deceptive wiles and her carnal provocation of good men. Bishop Brunton of Rochester, the Yorkshire friar John Waldeby, John of Mirfield from St Bartholemew’s in Smithfield and many other great virtuosi of fire and brimstone delivered fine bravura performances from the pulpit. They castigated all those who made a habit of tampering with the handiwork of God by putting unnatural colours in their hair and using ‘the Devil’s soap’ (cosmetics) on their faces. ‘Everyone knows’19, ranted the Benedictine monk Robert Rypon, warming to his subject with a most pungent simile, ‘how a sow rolls its nostrils in the foulest dirt. Thus do such foolish women roll their beauty in the foulest dirt of lust . . . With them it is as with the worms that glow resplendent at night, but in the daytime appear most vile.’ And the Dominican John Bromyard of Hereford, not to be outdone, condemned women’s fancy hairstyles, their blonde dyes and wigs, comparing them to devilish fires, ‘each a spark breathing out hell-fire . . . so that in a single day, by her dancing and perambulation through the town, she inflames with the fire of lust – it may be – twenty of those who behold her . . .’20
Saint Bernardino, a radical Franciscan preacher who toured Italy in the early fifteenth century, often concentrated his electrifying sermons on the fashion-conscious work of the Devil whose influence persuaded women to go to mass wearing false blonde hair. ‘Oh the vanity of thee, woman, who deckest thy head with such a multitude of vanities. Remember that divine Head at which angels tremble . . . that Head is crowned with thorns while thine is adorned with jewels. His hair is stained with blood, but thy hair, or rather that which is not thine own, is bleached artificially.’ Saint Bernadino was a famous clerical star of ferocious energy who often preached in the form of running dialogues with his audience. News of his imminent arrival caused a stir in any city, attracting additional crowds from the surrounding countryside. Impatiently awaited, his sermons shook people up, triggering sudden outbursts of collective penance. His words whipped up such fervour that they were often followed by huge public bonfires on which were piled masses of false bleached blonde hair, feeding the raging infernos of the Church’s disapproval.21
This traditionally misogynistic pulpit theme was based on the convenient premise that Eve was the source of all evil in women. By the early Middle Ages, Eve’s malign character had been fully developed in Christian literature. She had become an important tool of the Church in its efforts to discredit and stifle female s
exuality. Eve was disobedient, subversive, lascivious and – perhaps most dangerous of all – beautiful. She was also the ‘foremother’ of all women. Naturally, growled the bullying preachers, her female descendants had all inherited her maddening combination of sexual allure and adulterous villainy. By now, the dreadful fear of effeminacy and luxury which had occupied the earliest Christians in Ancient Rome, more than a thousand years earlier, had built itself up into a fear of women’s powers to seduce. As the ultimate source of beauty and sexual temptation, Aphrodite and Venus had been transmogrified into Eve. And again she wore the sign of the seductress: blonde hair.
Eve is the subject of a story told everywhere, in words and in pictures, throughout the Middle Ages. The story first appears at the beginning of the book of Genesis, describing the origins of the human race and the foundation of the world’s moral and social order. The fathers of the Church, in monasteries and cathedrals around Europe, were much exercised by the text and scrutinised its every word to clarify further its meaning. They logically concluded that Eve, as temptress, was the party most to blame. She was responsible for the sexuality of the human race, for its guilt and for its disenchantment. The libidinous Eve had succumbed to temptation; her appetite for pleasure had caused the Fall of mankind from God’s grace.
By the mid-fourteenth century, descriptions and images of Eve were consistently giving her the free-flowing cascades of golden blonde hair that marked her as the devilish temptress. An image of 1356 by Bartolo di Fredi in San Gimignano depicts the creation of Eve, a pale and sensuous blonde emerging from the ribcage of a sleeping Adam. Masolino’s 1420s painting of the handsome couple shows Eve poised on the brink of sin, voluptuous and enticing beneath a head of delicately waved blonde hair. Artists of this subject were of course not necessarily concerned with realism; they depicted symbols and images. But it was through their work and the supporting words from the pulpits that perceptions were created and accepted by society at large. Their message was clear: blonde was both beautiful and dangerous, both eternally desirable and for ever forbidden.
Literacy did not trickle far down the social scale; but for those Christian women who could read, and for the majority who instead heard the stories in church, the Old Testament was the source of carefully coded narratives designed to put them in their place. If Eve was held up as the first archetypal blonde bad girl, in her wake trailed Mary Magdalene, one of her most promiscuous descendants. Mary Magdalene, too, was depicted as a blonde, a classic combination of feminine beauty, sexuality and sin.
As the favourite penitent of the medieval Church and an important saint, Mary Magdalene appears in countless devotional images of Christ’s life. She can be seen at the Crucifixion and Resurrection, cloaked usually in red. Her blonde hair flows loose as she sits gazing up at Christ’s face, or sprawls shamelessly as the beautiful prostitute at his feet. She is a brazen presence in Masaccio’s Crucifixion of 1426, kneeling with arms raised at the foot of the cross, her long blonde hair spread luxuriantly over her scarlet cloak. Her symbolic elevation from lechery to sainthood so fascinated medieval churchgoers that she emerged in her own right, depicted as the heroine of her own story in stained-glass windows, frescos and altarpieces, in paintings, miniatures and sculpture.
And of course her hair flowed loose, freed from the veil, in an exuberant exhibition of what Eudes of Chateauroux called ‘women’s most precious possession’. Again, men were both attracted to Mary Magdalene and frightened by her. Hair let down on a mature woman was closely associated in their minds with the pleasures of the bed. Mary Magdalene’s flesh half-glimpsed beneath flowing hair was the ambiguous and disturbing picture they absorbed of her. And this is the image that has been passed down in the sensual portraits by Titian and other artists to form the impression we still have of her.
Her story was all about Luxury, a concept linked with Lust and Lechery. Eve was already known as a figure of Lust and Lechery, unable to tame her desire for pleasure. And Mary Magdalene soon joined the ranks of libidinous desire made manifest. In the frantically misogynistic climate of the Middle Ages, the literary images of Luxury, Lust and Lechery were all inevitably personified as blonde women. Taddeo di Bartolo’s 1396 fresco of Hell at San Gimignano depicts ‘Lussuria’ in a state of abandon. Her golden hair is entwined in the serpent tail of the Devil, while another devil blows flames over her, and yet another tickles her suggestively with its serpent-headed tail.
Bromyard, the Dominican preacher from Hereford, was a regular denouncer of the dangerously attractive Mary Magdalene. She appears in his preaching anthology as Luxuria, the personification of all filth relating to sensual desire and forbidden pleasures. Fornication was the typical feminine crime, he believed, and the weapon of temptation was her beauty. ‘A beautiful woman is a temple built over a sewer,’ he declared, warning the men in his congregation that to look at a woman was unsafe and that to overcome thoughts of them he should close his eyes and occupy his mind with holy thoughts.22 Beauty, the Devil’s instrument, he said, attacks through the female glories, primarily her hair; and those who dye their hair blonde do so with sexual motives in mind. The Dominican friar Thomas Cantimpre ranted against the vanities of women spending hours tending their hair in imitation of the seductive Mary Magdalene. They washed, combed and coloured it, he claimed, in order to ‘consume and madden with their manes’. For good measure, he added the revolting reflection that these coiffures and complex headdresses of bought hair were a haven for worms and lice and their eggs. His words echoed the warnings of Gilles d’Orleans, a contemporary of Bromyard’s preaching in Paris, who regularly reminded his parishioners that the fashionable blonde wigs they wore were likely to be made from the hair of those now enduring hell or purgatory. It is not known how much hair was pillaged from the graves of female corpses for the purpose of wigmaking, but for many hundreds of years such accusations formed the ammunition of moralists.23
It is not altogether surprising that women were attempting to imitate Mary Magdalene’s hair, because they certainly had ample evidence of its powers. It was the very glories of that magnificent head of hair, so feared by the men of the Church, that she used alternately to seduce and then to repent her sinful past. That golden curtain which she had tended and dressed to lure young men, she then gathered up and humbly used to dry Christ’s feet. In the late fourteenth-century Livre de la Passion, now in the Vatican Library, Mary Magdalene is depicted cutting off her offending hair beneath the caption ‘Marie Magdaleine coppe ses cheveux et offrit contrition‘.
So blonde hair offered the unemancipated woman of the Middle Ages an unexpectedly powerful tool of influence. Many clearly did indulge in dyeing their hair. Had they not, the regular thunder-claps of clerical exhortations would not have been necessary. The tide of rhetoric ebbed and flowed and, over the course of hundreds of years, generations of churchmen made spirited and imaginative attempts to frighten women away from the practice. The blonde Whore of Babylon was a favourite example repeatedly cited as a demon of exceptional malignancy. She appears in one of her early and most lavish representations in Hortus deliciarum, a magnificent illuminated manuscript of the late twelfth century, dressed in her finery, her long blonde hair hanging loose down her back. As the embodiment of luxury, vice, tyranny and all abominations and filthiness, she meets her fate in the colourfully licking flames of purgatory. She is an example to all women of what lies in wait for those who dress themselves in finery and incite with the treacheries of golden hair. Many books of manners for ladies were written, circulated and read out for the instruction of illiterate women, condemning such vain and evil behaviour and threatening divine punishment.
But the wrath of God proved to be a poor deterrent. Wealthy and leisured women stashed away elaborate collections of cosmetics and beauty aids with which they committed their vain and evil crimes. The privileged visitor to a lady’s private room would have picked her way through semi-darkness into a small private pleasure dome scattered with little tables and chests overflowi
ng with a glinting treasury of the tools of beautification. Through the gloom, she might have seen a chaos of curling irons and small hand-mirrors, smoky with age, stacked against boxes full of delicate tweezers, crusty toothbrushes and evil-looking razors. An ear-picker made of ivory or bone might have been visible, as well as wooden toothpicks and even tongue-scrapers for the most fastidious in their personal hygiene. That was the hardware. Then came the software: perhaps a maze of little boxes of billowing white powders for the forehead and nose, rouge for the cheeks and wheat powder for night-time use on the face and neck. Stacked in rows at the back were bottles filled with various preparations for the hair which were mixed weekly in a large copper bowl. The medieval lady washed her hair in ‘lye’, a mixture of wood ash and water. Soap compounds of beechwood ash and goat tallow could be mixed in to give the hair a ‘saffron’ blonde colour. And sometimes they added – more in the spirit of hope than of science – a dash of wine to strengthen the dyes and add shine. L’ Ornement des dames of the thirteenth century gives a range of recipes for curing falling hair and five for dyeing it blonde. One requires ‘henbane and orpiment [yellow arsenic]’. Another popular hair-bleaching recipe, which must have been effective as it was passed down through the generations into the Elizabethan period, required the creation of a kind of voodoo salad: ‘a quart of lye prepared from the ashes of vine-twigs, briony, celandine-roots, and turmeric, of each half an ounce; saffron and lily-roots, of each two drachms; flowers of mullein, yellow stechas, broom and St John’s Wort, of each a drachm’.
Given the struggle to obtain the ingredients, mix the cocktails, and then soak the hair for hours in the putrid results, it seems unlikely that all married and mature women would then have smothered their newly coloured hair with veils. In church, women always covered their heads as the norm: monks from mute orders used to pass a hand over the head in imitation of a veil to indicate the word for ‘woman’. But only the most pious and most God-fearing women would actually have veiled themselves at all times. Fewer still followed clerical instructions to carry tweezers around with them to pluck offensive hairs detected sprouting at the edge of the veil or the back of the neck.
On Blondes Page 4