Marked Men: Identity and Surveillance in Late Medieval Italy (Perugia, 1411-45)

Abstract

This article presents and analyses an exceptional and unused source: lists of the patrolmen and court-servants of the judges of fifteenth-century Perugia. These lists are exceptional because of the wealth of detail they provide on the provenance and physical description of these men, personal information that was written down as a sort of identity record. We describe and explain the nature of the source and use the data for multi-faceted exploration of personal identity, discussing the history and historiography of age, stature, hair, beards, facial disfigurement, marks, scars, eyes, noses and skin colour.