Fools, Animals, and Social Control: Transformational Shame Masks in Early Modern Europe

Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD

AMEND Postdoctoral Research Associate

Note: This post contains discussions of torture devices and gender- and race-based violence and oppression as well as ableism. 

This blog post explores punishment masks in early modern Europe and their relationships to gender, animals, the idea of folly, and neurodivergence. I became interested in the way these topics come together because of a passage in the English dramatist John Webster’s 1614 tragedy The Duchess of Malfi. Specifically, I was thinking about a moment in which the courtier Castruccio explains that his household fool “cannot speak, you know, but he makes faces; my lady cannot abide him. … Nor endure to be in merry company; for she says too much laughing, and too much company, fills her too full of the wrinkle.” In response, Ferdinand, the cruel Duke of Calabria, replies, “I would, then, have a mathematical instrument made for her face, that she might not laugh out of compass” (1.1.129-37). As Colby Gordon explains, the “mathematical instrument” is suggestive of “the ‘scold’s bridle,’ a tool that restrains unruly women as though they were horses” (79). Or as though they were dogs, for the scold’s bridle – or branks, as it was also known – “musled [muzzled] over the head and face” (Gardiner 111), stopping the wearer’s tongue and preventing her from continuing with the unruly speech the contraption typically punished. 

Curious about how the focus of the passage from The Duchess of Malfi drifts from a fool making contorted faces to a lady being punished with a contraption that would prevent her from moving her face (and perhaps expressing herself verbally), I began searching for images of scold’s bridles online. It seemed clear that there was something to say about fools and scold’s bridles when I saw that a number of artifacts that are identified as scold’s bridles by museums and auction houses incorporate elements that are commonly attributes of fools in early modern European visual culture – primarily: ass’s ears, spectacles, bells, and a hood-like and/or crested profile. As I continued exploring and learned about the related tradition of the schandmaske or “shame mask,” however, I discovered that a broader culture of punitive headgear in early modern Europe may situate Castruccio’s fool among The Duchess of Malfi’s themes in more complex ways than I had imagined. In what follows, I discuss symbolism in early modern punishment masks before reflecting on how neurodivergence fits into Webster’s exploration of animality, autonomy, and abuses of power and, finally, noting the importance of thinking about gender alongside the overlapping topics of neurodivergence and cultures of shame in early modernity. 

Scold’s bridles with visual elements suggestive of fools: 

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  17th-century German punishment mask

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  16th-century Scottish scold's bridle

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  16th-century punishment mask from Belgium

A 17th-century German punishment mask now held at the Tower of London; described by the Royal Armories as a scold’s bridle. An especially strong example of a shaming mask that uses the visual language of fools and folly. Traces remain of the red paint that originally covered the whole object.	A 16th-century scold’s bridle from Scotland, held at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.  Once again, traces of bright primary colors remain on this object. Along with ass’s ears, such uses of color were typical in visual representations of fools and folly.	A 16th- or 17th-century “scold’s bridle” from Belgium.  As Frederick W. Fairholt wrote of a nearly identical German mask in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire all the way back in 1854, it appears to be designed “in imitation of the hood worn by … jesters” (62).
Scold’s Bridle. 17th Century, Germany. Royal Armouries.  Non-commercial / Non-commercial research and personal use ©Royal Armouries	Punishment Mask; Scold’s Bridle. Glasgow Museums. Collections Navigator. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.	A Belgian Iron “scolds Bridle” Mask Used to Publicaly[sic] Humiliate. Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yfhbqur3.  Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Many scold’s bridles were quite utilitarian in design. The above-quoted 1655 text in which Ralph Gardiner describes the item’s muzzling function and explains that it “is the punishment which the Magistrates do inflict upon chiding, and scoulding women” (111) provides the following illustration of “one Ann Biulestone drove through the streets by an Officer” in Newcastle, her head enclosed in an unembellished cage-like object (110). The most striking element of this “Engine called the Branks” is probably the “great gap or tongue of Iron forced into her mouth” (111).

Illustration showing a woman being punished with a scold’s bridle, from England's Grievance discovered by Ralph Gardiner M0012989: Illustration of a woman wearing a Scold's Bridle. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zftwv4r2 

The prominent Quaker Dorothy Waugh provides a firsthand account of this kind of punishment in a pamphlet printed a year later. She details how “their bridle as they called it, which was a stone weight of Iron,” had “three barrs of Iron to come over my face, and a peece of it was put in my mouth, which was so unreasonable big a thing for that place as cannot be well related, … to keep me from speaking” (30). Heavy and uncomfortable, the scold’s bridle was a torture device that (in its most standard iterations) brutally silenced the wearer and had the added function of publicly shaming and humiliating her. 

While the silencing of the wearer was the distinguishing feature of the scold’s bridle, other punishment masks in early modern Europe were defined more by their symbolic shaming function.¹ These schandmasken, or shame masks, were not simply vague indicators that wearers were being punished for some unknown misdeed; they took various fantastic forms that overlaid the wearer’s face with a grotesque and generally bestial symbol of the specific kind of transgression that was being punished. Surviving animal schandmasken frequently depict the face of a pig (to shame sins such as gluttony or slovenliness) (McDonald; Terry-Fritsch); “a seventeenth-century mask from Ingolstadt that takes the shape of a rooster’s head,” meanwhile, most likely “emphasized the male offender’s preposterous vanity,” explains Allie Terry-Fristch (67).

Still other schandmasken seem to portray monstrous humanoids with exaggerated features. Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild explains that masks designed to shame women for gossiping or other speech-related infractions had “big ears … (they heard everything), eyeglasses (they saw everything) and big mouths and long tongues (they spread vicious rumours)” (17). Big, protruding tongues are not a major iconographic hallmark of early modern fools, but the trait is worth noting because it forms a throughline with (and even appeared alongside) the muzzling mechanism of the scold’s bridle as a direct response to unruly female speech. Most commonly, it seems, shame masks sport ass’s ear and prominent eyeglasses. Many also have bells that help draw attention to the transgressor. 

Be-belled clothing and accessories remain among the most recognizable hallmarks of Renaissance fools today, but ass’s ears and (to a lesser extent) spectacles were also used as attributes of fools in early modern visual culture. Ass’s ears were a mainstay of fool’s hoods and foolscaps whose association with foolishness probably derives from the story of King Midas. Visual allusions to potentially warped sight, like mirrors and peeping through one’s fingers, appeared in early modern depictions of fools to suggest an inability or unwillingness to understand moral or religious matters properly, according to Kenneth M. Craig, who connects the occasional presence of eyeglasses in fool depictions to a “tradition in the sixteenth century [that] views spectacles as an ironic attribute of those who cannot or will not see the truth” (120). The rooster’s comb, suggestive of vanity, was likewise a recognizable embellishment of fools’ head coverings – hence the metonymic “coxcomb” as a term for a foolish (and especially vain or cocky) person. 

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  Portrait of a jester holding eyeglasses. Unknown Artist: Laughing Jeste40s, Wikimedia Commons

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  A schandmaske from Bavaria. Schandmaske, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Undated. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Laughing Jester. 1540s, probably Dutch. Nationalmuseum, public domain.  https://collection.nationalmuseum.se/en/collection/item/23832/

Schandmaske. Undated, Bavarian. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.  https://www.bayerisches-nationalmuseum.de/en/collection/00040154

Schandmasken and depictions of fools shared the same iconographic vocabulary at the very least. Through that vocabulary, fool-like shame masks engaged in the same kind of visual rhetoric that animal masks did. The prominence of fools in medieval and early modern European culture stems largely from their role as especially versatile representations of sinfulness. Sebastian Brant used fools to embody a whole boatload of sins in his 1494 Ship of Fools and Erasmus used folly to write about human error because a fool is, very broadly, someone who does not think or behave like other people and in so doing reveals that deviance is irrational or backward. 

It is significant, I believe, that the visually fool-like non-animal schandmasken are identified by scholars as designed to shame people for gossiping. To this day, gossiping – and foolish or harmful talk more broadly – is commonly imagined as a stereotypically female vice. It was for out-of-line speech that women were labeled “scolds” and sometimes punished with the branks. It makes sense that ass ears and glasses, but rarely animal faces, appear on devices meant to stop the wearer’s tongue since these were the elements schandmasken employed to shame related transgressions. 

John Milton gestures to the same allegorical language used by schandmasken (and possibly to the masks themselves) in the 1634 Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, also known as Comus. The people who have given themselves over to the ways of the titular Comus, an embodiment of appetitive indulgence, have become “monsters headed like sundry sorts of wild beasts, but otherwise like men and women” (s.d. 92.2-3) but  

so perfect is their misery, [that they] 

Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, 

But boast themselves more comely than before  

And all their friends, and native home forget 

To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. (ll. 73-77) 

The visible “disfigurement” of Comus’s followers’ heads matters because it is the transformation of “their human countenance, / The express resemblance of the gods” to “some brutish form of wolf, or bear, / Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat” (ll. 68-71), but still more important is what this outward transformation represents: the rational, (and to many early modern thinkers) uniquely almost God-like mind that allows human beings to know and love God degenerates into a “brutish” animal-like mind that does not “perceive” its own badness and “forget[s]” identity, relationships, and everything besides immediate “sensual” pleasures. 

Comus’s “rout of monsters” - Detail from William Blake’s 1815 depiction. Blake, William. Comus with His Revellers. 1815. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comus_with_his_revellers.jpg. Watercolour. 

Milton’s inclusion of Comus’s bestialized followers in his masque allows us to see how – in particular – animal schandmasken implicitly shame wearers for forsaking their God-given human reason and restraint for the simple and unthinking id of a beast. At least two strains of neuronormative ableism are at work in the logic behind both schandmasken and Milton’s “rout of monsters” (s.d. 92.2): first, the reasoning assumes that humanness and its (unique, divinely-derived) dignity are rooted in a set of mental abilities that not all members of our species share or possess in identical ways; second, this logic condemns minds that happen to be oriented toward immediacy and the sensory as lacking in godliness, virtue, privileged mental talents, and humanity.

Moral condemnation of unrestrained and self-centered behavior is by no means always wrong or (necessarily) ableist, but this kind of thinking makes unintelligent sinfulness the only available lens through which to understand actions that might be related to executive functioning challenges or other forms of neurodivergence. And this way of seeing misbehavior is, I think, a major reason why fools served as such useful and versatile embodiments of both general sinfulness and individual kinds of sin in early modern culture: they inherently labeled the forms of deviance they committed or represented as simultaneously mindless and wicked and there was a recognizable whisper of truth in the notion that “foolish” individuals were particularly prone to what was understood as such beastly wrongdoing. 

Castruccio’s domestic fool sounds quite harmless. We are perhaps even supposed to agree with Ferdinand that the lady, Julia, is morally in the wrong for her fear of wrinkles and her unwillingness to appreciate the fool’s amusing faces. And for her vanity and shrewish attitude Ferdinand would fit her with “a mathematical instrument” that is fundamentally misogynistic and demeans her specifically by suggesting that she is little different from the nonspeaking, disabled fool she despises. Through the web of cultural associations that ties punishment masks and folly to animals, however, Ferdinand unwittingly foreshadows his own trajectory over the course of the play.

A violently misogynistic set of base motivations spurs Ferdinand to commit or have committed a series of horrible crimes against his sister, and his guilt eventually drives him insane. Animal transformation is an important motif in the play, and Ferdinand’s eventual madness takes the specific form of “A very pestilent disease … / They call lycanthropia” (5.2.5-6). Its sufferers “imagine / Themselves to be transformed into wolves” (9-10) and behave accordingly, “dig[ging] dead bodies up” (12) and “howl[ing]” (15). Sonya Freeman Loftis writes that Webster uses lycanthropy to portray Ferdinand and simultaneously monstrous and disabled. An animalistic inability to exercise “human” or, perhaps more fairly, neurotypical and neuronormative mental powers grows out of Ferdinand’s plainly wicked misdeeds and his willful pursuit of forbidden desires. Along with an incestuous lust for his sister, but their numbers also include a proud, resentful, and selfish will to control her. There is, perhaps, poetic justice in Ferdinand becoming disabled and animalized by the consequences of having indulged his own vile drive to humiliate and physically dominate women who refuse to cooperate with societal expectations, but such a justice only operates on the conceit that mental differences that might be labeled “folly” or “madness” are inherently bad, like unto the “foul disfigurement” that we are to understand as a terrible thing about Comus’s crew despite the fact that they “Not once perceive their foul disfigurement” or “their misery” as such, “But boast themselves more comely than before.”

No one who was punished with the scold’s bridle or a schandmaske could be ignorant of the suffering it caused or how it made them appear before “all their friends, and native home,” certainly, but appreciating the ableism (and anthropocentrism) structuring these punishments may help us to gain a deeper understanding of just how these punishments were experienced and used. 

Iron Mask, Collar, Leg Shackles and Spurs Used to Restrict Slaves. New York: Samuel Wood. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/98504457/>. No known restrictions on publication. 

As I end, I would be remiss not to note how powerfully the search for images and information related to this tradition attested to the importance of intersectional analyses where we might not even expect them to be relevant. Further research on punishment masks that were used to muzzle people, torture them, or prevent them from eating must consider the existence of such items in the context of racial slavery. Animalization and imputations of lesser mental abilities were major hallmarks of chattel slavery and the subjugation of Black and Indigenous people under the European domination of the Atlantic and the Americas during the early modern period. These fictions of inferiority where not totally unlike those used to oppress women at the time, and very similar tools could be used to exact that control. 

My own research, finally, has increasingly engaged with the ways early modern culture frequently represented neurodivergence as knowable through violations of gender norms. I wanted to quote Gordon’s comment about the moment in The Duchess of Malfi that inspired this blog post mainly because it is, as far as I know, the only critical recognition that Webster’s apparent reference to punitive headgear has received. I think it is significant, though, that this brief observation comes from Gordon’s book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature. The animal-headed followers of Comus, for their part, have been stuck in my mind since hearing Sawyer K. Kemp give a paper about them at the Pre and Early Modern Trans Studies Symposium held at Boston University in March 2025. Given this backdrop of trans studies, I also want to note as I close that several of the more elaborate masks of which I have found images include mustaches or beards – intriguing details for items largely used on women.  

It seems obvious that the point would be shame women for not meeting standard expectations about femininity and not staying in their appointed social place of subservience. Nonetheless, the metamorphoses of The Duchess of Malfi and Comus suggest the possibility of slippages between cross-gender and cross-species transformation in the failure or refusal to fit expected social roles. Fools like Castruccio’s, meanwhile, stood rather outside of (or were excluded from) the ordinary matrix of gender relations and their sexual politics. He is belittled for his disability, but he is also, like Comus’s crew, positioned beyond the constraints of shame. While the brutality of real-life punishment masks cannot be denied, cultural engagements with the kinds of transformations they effectively brought about may entertain the possiility of transformation as freeing rather than as painful and constricting. 

Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD, is AMEND's postdoctoral research associate. Broadly, their research focuses on neurodiversity as an intersectional consideration in 16th- and 17th-century English culture. With Laura Seymour and Bradley J. Irish, they are a co-editor of the collection Neurodiversity and Early Modern English Literature (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). Bartlett's research has appeared in ELH and JEMCS, and they have recently completed a monograph manuscript on neurodiversity and race-making in early modern English literature.

References

City of Bernau. “Museumsgeschichten Aus Bernau: Die Schandmaske.” Stadtnachrichten, 1 Jan. 2025, https://www.bernau.de/de/rathaus-service/aktuelles/stadtnachrichten/artikel-museumsgeschichten-aus-bernau-die-schandmaske.html. 

Craig, Kenneth M. “Proverb’s Progress: ‘A Fool Looking through His Fingers.’” DQR Studies in Literature, vol. 10, 1992, pp. 105-36. 

Fairholt, Frederick W. “On a Grotesque Mask of Punishment Obtained in the Castle of Nuremberg.” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. 7, 1854, pp. 61–64, https://doi.org/10.3828/transactions.7.4. 

Gardiner, Ralph. Englands Grievance Discovered. 1655. Early English Books Online, https://www.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2248551944/12268641/CF5EFB0414CB4C67PQ/26?accountid=14680&sourcetype=Books. 

Gordon, Colby. Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature. U of Chicago P, 2024. 

Herzfeld-Schild, Marie Louise. “’He Plays on the Pillory’. The Use of Musical Instruments for Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.” Torture, vol. 23, no. 2, 2013, pp. 14–23. 

Loftis, Sonya Freeman. “Lycanthropy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi.” Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 209–25. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_10. 

McDonald, Bonny. “Sacred Waste: Performance Pedagogy, Plastic Shamanism, and Ten Thousand Pieces of Trash.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1-22. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/21741432/Sacred_Waste_Performance_Pedagogy_Plastic_Shamanism_and_Ten_Thousand_Pieces_of_Trash. 

Milton, John. A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634. Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, edited by John Carey, 2nd ed., Longman, 1997, pp. 175–234. 

Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensuous Suffering of Criminal Offenders in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, edited by Heather Graham and Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, Brill, 2018, pp. 53–81, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004360686_004. 

Waugh, Dorothy. “A Relation Concerning Dorothy Waughs Cruell Usage by the Mayor of Carlile.” The Lambs Defence against Lyes, edited by “those people scorned and persecuted under the name of QUAKERS,” 1656, pp. 29–30. Early English Books Online, https://www.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2240903989/99864299/6D5AF569EFFC44B2PQ/1?accountid=14680&sourcetype=Books. 

Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Edited by John Russell Brown, Methuen, 1964.