In late-medieval civilization the figure of the hangman was seen by contemporaries as closely linked with prevailing societal ideas of physical imperfection. The purpose of this article is to provide insight into these links and associations and explain their apparent rationale from the vantage point of how people thought about or observed their world. I have examined these aspects in depth in a recent monograph and therefore present, here, some additional views and perspectives. First, I examine the significance of the hangman's physical appearance in medieval society and discuss deviant bodily features typically used in representing and describing the figure. Further, I view common beliefs and opinions about an executioner's inner qualities and mental faculties and finally compare them to those prevalent within modern civilizations.

Physical Beauty and Imperfection in European Culture of the Ending Middle Ages

In late-medieval society an individual's physical appearance often became significant for fellow humans, because bodily features were believed to provide important indications of a person's inner qualities, moral character, and behavioral inclinations. Besides being based upon Plato's and St. Augustine's ideas, these beliefs came from the assumption that one's body and soul formed an entity, an inseparable whole: physicality was deemed an expression of a person's inner being.

Medieval Christians, who perceived humans as images of God, generally interpreted bodily beauty as a sign of divine grace. As Jacques Le Goff has explained, for medieval people “beautiful” was frequently synonymous with “valuable” and “good”; he observed, “the high value set on physical beauty was such that beauty was an obligatory attribute of sanctity.” Of course, angels and all inhabitants of the heavenly court were imagined to have (automatically) achieved beauty.

The linking of beauty with goodness was a general cultural rule, while ugliness was commonly associated with adjectives such as ignoble, unholy, and evil: great sinners and evil creatures often appeared very repulsive physically in medieval illustrations. How was ugliness defined in the Middle Ages? As Mellinkoff has shown, all features were regarded ugly that deviated too much from what was considered “normal,” regardless of whether these variations were natural, inborn deviations, or abnormalities caused by some illness or accident.8 Deviance was thus synonymous with ugliness.