Tonsure and Punitive Shaving in Early Medieval Byzantium

Abstract From the sixth century onward, it was common for Byzantine monks and clerics to be tonsured. What that meant in practice varied, but usually seems to have involved a shaving of the entire head for monks, and a portion of it for clerics. This hairstyle was then maintained as a permanent marker of status. However, from the late eighth or early ninth century onward, probably first monks then clerics ceased wearing a permanent physical tonsure. Instead, tonsure became solely a symbolic rite of passage marking entry into the clerical or monastic state, a rite that might involve little actual hair loss and which was not constantly renewed. Here it is argued that this change was driven primarily by the concurrent rise in punitive shaving as both a legal and political penalty. In turn the alteration in religious tonsure, which safeguarded against any possible confusion between tonsured monks or clerics and criminals, permitted a dramatic expansion in hair removal as a legal penalty, and also facilitated the rise in compulsory tonsure as a monk as a method of removing political opponents.