![]() ![]() At that time, men on both sides of the Atlantic had new reasons to boast, but to also feel uneasy, about their status as men. The breakdown of the clean-shaven order in the middle of the 19th century offers a valuable comparison with our own day. ![]() ![]() After Renaissance men embraced hairy nature over holy shaving, beards were again curtailed by new codes of gentility enforced by royal courts, which had effectively replaced the Church as guardians of the moral order. Laymen followed suit, cutting back their beards to be worthy in the sight of God and man. In medieval centuries, men of the Church made the tonsured head and shaved face marks of holiness and goodness, going so far as to inscribe these practices into canon law. Though there was a brief resurgence of beards inspired by Roman emperors, the Alexandrian style held well beyond the Empire’s fall. But on occasion, a general reorganisation of masculine norms has interrupted the shaving-respectability regime.Īlexander the Great established shaving as the ideal in Greco-Roman civilisation when he imitated classical depictions of eternally youthful gods. Defying this regulation meant being ostracised. In the West, for many centuries, shaving has identified a good man properly oriented to a higher order, whether divine or political. ![]()
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