Beard as Veil: Hair and the Past in Latin Ecclesiastical Commentary

Abstract This article seeks to explore a relatively neglected way that medieval Latin churchmen understood and explained their grooming practices by associating hairiness with a superseded past. Using the only medieval treatise about beards, Burchard of Bellevaux’s Apologia de barbis , it examines how Latin clerics connected shaving their faces to their exegetical methods. Beardlessness represented the ability to see through the outer appearances of the Old Testament, the dead “letter that kills” (2 Cor. 3:6) to perceive hidden spiritual meanings. Hair was like the veil of the Old Testament, a thing of the past overcome by a spiritual (and hairless) Christian present. This explanation of Latin clerical beardlessness entangled methods of sacred reading with practices of gendered grooming, creating a particular mode of masculinity for beardless Christian churchmen. Clerical hair was connected to exegetical methods that bore indelible links to hierarchical delineations between different types of people and temporalities.