Eidechsenöl, Fledermaushirn, Bärenschmalz und Taubenkot: Haarpflege als Körper-, Medizin- und Materialwissen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert

This chapter charts the history of hair care in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany drawing on a rich documentation of medical, physiognomic, and botanical treatises, as well as recipes and manuals on herbs and animals. Material knowledge about how to cure, dye, or do one’s hair, I argue, was a crucial element of the everyday praxeology of the early modern self. Hair care was anchored in a broader early modern understanding of temperatures and matters which linked the physical materiality of the body—and hair in particular—with the broader material world of plants, animals, the environment, and the wider cosmos. Conceptualising early modern hair care as everyday performative knowledge, thus, calls for a combined study of the history of the body, material culture, the history of medicine, environmental history, and the history of the self.