Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege in Early Modern England

Abstract

This essay explores medical and literary representations of naturally beautiful heads of hair in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It argues that hair ideals for both beauty and health conformed to a particular, narrow aesthetic. Tied to the veneration of physical and psychological temperance, social acceptance, gender hierarchy, and geography, English hair ideals established a privileged physiology even before the explicit development of pejorative representations of non-European hair in the eighteenth century. This essay demonstrates the crucial importance of texture, curl, and abundance of hair to beauty ideals and shows how these ideals embodied social values. It contends that hair should have a more substantial place, alongside skin color, in thinking about early modern race.