The first major scholarly investigation into the rich history and ambiguous status of the body as a written object, this interdisciplinary study surveys varied forms of corporeal writing, imprinting and marking in France in the early modern period. Author Katherine Dauge-Roth demonstrates that the rise in the importance of body marks that takes place in France from the late sixteenth century through early eighteenth centuries must be understood in relationship to the growing development of written and print culture, and a specifically early modern science of signs. The book's five chapters...