The Sermon as Evidence: Reading a Condemnation Backwards

The later Middle Ages produced a great deal of writing against cosmetics — sermons, confessors’ manuals, moral treatises — and the volume of it is routinely cited as proof that the period disapproved of paint.^[1]

It does prove that. It also proves something the same writers would have been less pleased to establish: that there was a practice to complain about, in the places where the complaining was being done.^[1]

A prohibition is evidence of the behaviour it prohibits. This is the standard historical use of normative sources, and it is especially valuable for a period in which the people actually doing the thing wrote almost nothing about it.^[2]

The detail is what makes these texts useful rather than merely suggestive. Writers who name specific materials, specific practices and specific occasions are describing something they have encountered, and the specificity is harder to fake than the disapproval.^[3]

The objection is more precise than modern summaries allow. The charge is generally not that improving the appearance is wrong in itself but that paint constitutes a deception — a false representation of what God made — and the argument therefore turns on visibility and on intent.^[4]

That distinction has consequences. A preparation that treats a genuine complaint sits differently from one that simulates a complexion, which is exactly the loophole the medical framing had already been exploiting for four hundred years.^[5]

A sermon is a poor instrument for measuring scale. Preachers exaggerate by profession, address the congregation in front of them, and have every incentive to describe a problem as widespread.^[6]

So the inference that holds is narrow: the practice existed, in these places, at this period, and was recognisable enough to be denounced without explanation. The inference that does not hold is any figure at all.^[6]

Preaching is also a genre with inherited material. A sermon against paint may be copying an earlier sermon against paint, which in turn descends from a patristic passage — so a text can be evidence of a literary tradition rather than of anything happening in the street outside. Specificity is the test that separates the two, and it has to be applied case by case.^[6]

The decisive point is that the two bodies of writing overlap in time and place. The same centuries that produced the sermons produced and copied the cosmetic recipe literature, and both were circulating in the same manuscript culture.^[7]

A society in which one set of texts explains how to prepare a depilatory and another denounces the results is not a society that had settled the question. It is a society having an argument — which is what Europe went on doing about this subject for the next six hundred years.^[8]

The target is almost always women, and almost always women of means — which follows from the practice requiring materials, time and leisure, and from the preacher addressing the congregation with the standing to be worth correcting.^[9]

Male use of cosmetic preparation is far less often denounced, which is weak evidence that it was less common and stronger evidence that it was less interesting to the people doing the denouncing.^[10]

That asymmetry has consequences for the record that outlast the period. A practice nobody thought worth condemning is a practice nobody wrote down, and the resulting silence is routinely read as absence. It is one of the reasons the history of men and cosmetics is so much harder to reconstruct than the history of women and cosmetics, in almost every century.^[10]

Nothing in this material supports a claim about prevalence, and any account that cites the volume of condemnation as a measure of how many women painted has mistaken the intensity of an objection for the size of a practice.^[11]

The chronology is also softer than a timeline entry implies. Moral writing against cosmetics runs through the whole period rather than beginning at any particular year; 1400 is a marker for a body of writing, not a date.^[11]

Nor does the surviving preaching represent the preaching that happened. Most sermons were spoken and never written down, and those that survive did so because someone thought them worth copying.^[11]