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country: A comparison of the treatment of the mentally disabled in late medieval English common law and chartered boroughs’, in W. Turner (ed.), Madness in Medieval Law and Custom (Boston: Brill, 2010), p. 22. 23 Ibid ., p. 35. 24 Ibid ., pp. 35–7. 25 The following description of the Court of Wards is based on Chapter 2 , ‘Court Procedure’, of Neugebauer, ‘Mental Illness and Government Policy’, pp. 30–86. 26 Ibid ., p. 33. 27 76 E
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