Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town
By Valentin Groebner
History Workshop Journal, Vol.40:1 (1995)
Introduction: On 14 April 1479, the Nuremberg Town Council addressed the petition of a citizen, Fritz Schreppler, known simply as ‘Young Schreppler’. According to the Council minutes, he had ‘admitted to the deed he intended to commit against his wife in the marketplace, namely, that he had ventured to cut off her nose’.
What did it mean when a husband threatened to cut off his wife’s nose in a public marketplace? Clearly this was intended less figuratively than we might at first imagine. A few years earlier, 1469, a similar case was recorded in the Offnungsbuch of the city of Basel. The wife of Heinrich Halbysen had cut off another woman’s nose and, suspecting the absent husband of inciting her to the act, the Council ordered that he and his manservant be apprehended if they could be found.
In what follows, I would like to take a closer look at the meaning of the common phase ‘to cut off someone’s nose’, by examining a series of concrete cases from the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. How does cutting off someone’s nose ‘function’? Who or what is being attacked, and what loss exactly is being expressed? Finally, can such an expression, and the use that is made of it, tell us something about the quality, composition and possible interpretations of the public sphere, personal inviolability and honour in a late medieval town?
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