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), whose name and situation were linked with Greece, is the first western text to name lepers ‘lazars’, lazari , after Saint Lazarus, echoing the designation given to them by Basil’s brother, Saint Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394). 46 With respect to the Byzantines, it was fashionable on the western side, from Liutprand of Cremona and his famous embassy to Constantinople in 968 onwards, to criticise the culpable negligence of the Greeks with regard to the poor. For example, attention was drawn to the inadequate provision for the poor in the Épanagôgè (the law code
in his being identified as leprosus in 1220. As discussed above, Batalla and the lepers mentioned in 1167 and 1220 were receiving these goods on behalf of the leprosarium , thus acting as the administrator. With so few examples, it is difficult to generalise with respect to the agency or authority that individual lepers could possess within the leprosarium community. There are no extant law codes for Narbonne dictating their lives. It is possible they retained some control over their property, or could remain married once they entered the house, like their
with injuries to the face: what injury was sufficient to cause ‘incapacity’? Could this be merely æsthetic, or did it require impaired sensory function? If only parts of the body that held substantial function were actionable as ‘members’, which did this include? These were far from new concerns, and Patricia Skinner demonstrates the wide-reaching and detailed frameworks of assessment employed in medieval law codes across Britain. 44 Scottish judge Sir Alexander Seton drew directly on Tagliacozzi for his legal discussion of nasal injury in the late seventeenth
dishonour’. 57 He accordingly concludes that a man who takes his opponent's nose wins the duel. For women, the slit nose was associated with sexual transgression. The provision of disfigurement for sexual impropriety in Ezekiel 23:25 was echoed through numerous medieval law codes. 58 Though it was removed from official early modern punishments, records studied by Laura Gowing show assailants threatening to ‘slitt your nose and mark you for a whore’. 59 In Richard Head's The Canting Academy (1673), a group of bawds who accuse a prostitute of withholding profits