Medieval Beauty
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Episode 322
Who’s the fairest of them all? And, more importantly, how did they get that way? This week, a new biography of Marilyn Monroe sends Danièle down the rabbit hole of medieval beauty, how it was achieved, and how it’s still influencing beauty standards today.
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Danièle Cybulskie:
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 322 of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host, Danièle Cybulskie.
Well, here we are in a brand new year and I don't know about you, but my social media is suddenly flooded with all sorts of tips on how to improve myself. Especially on Instagram, for some reason, I'm being flooded with ideas on how to make myself more beautiful. And so I'm getting all of these tips which are, I think maybe a little, little hurtfully targeted to people with "textured" faces (I think this is code for wrinkles) or for people who need plastic surgery. And so, of course, being me, this sent me towards the research that I've done on medieval beauty, medieval cosmetics, and the way that people used them back in the day. So, I thought today we would talk about medieval beauty, what it looked like, what the ideals were, how people tried to achieve it, and how it is still echoing down the centuries to our ideas of beauty today. So we're going to be talking all about medieval beauty right after this.
So, every year I tend to fall down a rabbit hole of nonfiction. Usually I tend to obsess about Everest. I've read all sorts of books on this to the point at which my friends and family don't even ask me about it because I can go on for a long time. But I tend to look at things that are outside of medieval studies, even though I'm always bringing it back in my mind. But I don't tend to read or look at biographies that often. And part of the reason for that is that when I was a kid, I really watched how Princess Diana was hounded by the press. And so, I tend to just kind of step back from celebrity culture. Although I do like to read autobiographies. So, Elton John's Me is a good one if you're looking for an entertaining autobiography. And of course, Charles Spencer's A Very Private School is an incredible and heartrending read.
But for me, I don't tend to read things that are about people unless they have died a long time ago, like hundreds of years ago. But this time I was at the bookstore and I saw James Patterson and Imogen Edward Jones's book The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe. And I thought, maybe I'll read this one, in part because I don't know anything about this woman, having only seen her films. And I thought, well, maybe - here we are sixty years later - here are things that we didn't know that we do know now. And spoiler alert: there aren't. It's still an entertaining read if this is your type of thing. But we actually don't know much more than we did before.
To sort of supplement this book, this James Patterson/Imogen Edward Jones book, I also watched a documentary on Netflix in part because I wanted to see the images that are talked about in the book. This book actually has zero images, which is kind of a strange thing when we are talking about one of the most beautiful, one of the most photographed women in the world. So, all I can imagine is that there was a problem with rights or something like that.
So, there I am. I've read a book, I've watched a biography, and all I can think of as I'm watching this is the ways in which beauty standards are applied to people, how women are working within these standards, how they are applying them to themselves, and how they're trying to navigate the beauty industry. And of course, this isn't something that applies to just women, but also men. And I thought, let's dig into this because there are so many things that are really similar to the Middle Ages that are kind of haunting us in a way that… that maybe we should be thinking about.
So first of all, I should say it was interesting to look at the ways in which twentieth-century historians can put together a life. I should mention this before I go on, because I think that the ways that they do it are so similar to the ways that we do it as medieval historians, in that there's a lot that's based on documents still, and having to corroborate those documents. But those twentieth-century historians are so lucky because they also have recordings and audio and video and they have photos. So, they are much more lucky than we are.
But it's very clear when you're looking at someone like Marilyn Monroe, that beauty is really a core part of her career, whether she wanted it to be or not. And she wasn't really super into it all the time because it became something that was sort of put onto her. And I think this is something that is familiar from the Middle Ages as well.
What I think sent me down this rabbit hole towards medieval standards of beauty is that people tend to think of Marilyn as being sort of artificial in that her hair is bleached – and we're going to come back around to that in a second – she's wearing makeup, but I didn't realize that she had had plastic surgery. And that was something that made me really think about beauty standards in that they tend to be valued if they are thought of as being “natural”.
And so, when we think about this, this is something that really hearkens back to the Middle Ages. Because to augment yourself to become more beautiful in the Middle Ages was a sin. It was a deadly sin. It was the sin of vanity.
So first of all, what were people trying to look like? Were they trying to look like Marilyn Monroe back in the day? Sort of, in that what was considered beautiful in the Middle Ages was fairness. Fairness of skin. So, white skin that was sometimes compared to milk or ivory or alabaster. Lightness of skin was considered to be very beautiful. Lightness of hair was considered to be very beautiful.
If you look at images from the Middle Ages and sculpture from the Middle Ages, you don't see that sort of bombshell silhouette that Marilyn Monroe had. You see what people in fashion magazines have called a “pear shape”, which is... I mean, when you compare people to [fruit], I don't know that it's ever flattering. But medieval women tended to have a smaller bust, a fairly small waist, and they would have bigger hips. So, kind of that “pear” shape. And that was considered very beautiful. And they also had little… little round bellies, which is considered beautiful in the Middle Ages. Considered pretty beautiful in the ‘60s as well. When I was growing up, it was considered terrible. We were all supposed to get rid of any ideas of having any sort of belly at all. Fortunately, I hope that we are coming out of that a little bit, but it's hard to say. That pendulum is always swinging. In the Middle Ages, though, people weren't really looking so much for an hourglass in that they weren't really creating art of people who were that hourglass, that 36-23-36 type figure, but they were looking for blonde hair, fair eyes, red lips, a nice blush of innocence on the cheeks, sometimes eyelashes. But these sort of ideas of fairness were really what was the goal for women in the Middle Ages.
So, I should mention Marilyn Monroe was not a natural platinum blonde either. She bleached her hair. And people did dye their hair in the Middle Ages as well. So, there are recipes in The Trotula, for example, for augmenting the color of your hair. And if you're interested in The Trotula, which is a women's compendium of medicine and cosmetics, I did do an interview with Monica Green about it. Her edition is still the edition of The Trotula, so you can see stuff in there about hair. But I should also mention that not too long ago I did an interview with Isabel Moreira about Balthild of Francia, an even earlier figure than the people who would have been looking at The Trotula. And Baldhild had dyed hair as well. So ,women are dyeing their hair way back into the ancient world. And we do still have recipes for that that involve some seriously gross ingredients, which you can find in The Trotula.
And speaking of The Trotula, The Trotula has advice, again, on getting rid of things like wrinkles, like freckles. These are things that you don't want to have in the Middle Ages, and that you don't really want to have in the ‘60s either, or the ‘50s, if we're thinking about Marilyn Monroe. That's why they have that sort of soft focus. And from what I learned in the stuff that I've read and watched this week, the more her face looked worn (for example, she had difficulty with addiction) the more her face looked worn, the more they gave her a soft focus. Because beauty is about not having any wrinkles, any freckles. And I think that's something that we are still living with today. A lot of the stuff that that seems to be shown on social media is how to get rid of your natural complexion and just paint a new one on. And again, this isn't a judgment. You can do what you want with your face. I'm just noticing that this is something that is sort of consistent in Western culture way back to the Middle Ages and even beyond.
One of the things that women were also really concerned with in the Middle Ages was grooming their eyebrows. This is something that is consistent as well. You don't want to have a unibrow if you're going to be the ideal standard of beauty. And I'm thinking of this one because not only did women pluck their eyebrows in the Middle Ages, but in the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century, they also plucked their hairlines back so that they would have very high foreheads. Now, that's something that women… we don't have today, but it is something that people did in the Middle Ages. So, imagine plucking the hairs out not only of your eyebrows, but also of your forehead so that you can have a fashionable look.
And this is something that was looked down upon very specifically by a knight called Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, who wrote a book which we now call The Book of the Knight of the Tower, after his name. The edition that I like to look at is by Rebecca Barnhouse. But in this, there is a story… Geoffrey is a knight who tells stories to his children – his daughters – to make them behave well. And one of them he tells about a knight who had three wives. And one of them… he finds out from a hermit who has a vision that his wife, who's now in hell, is being tortured by demons because she had plucked her eyebrows and her forehead. So, when the hermit – the holy hermit who was having this vision – asks the angel who's showing this vision about it, he says, why is this woman being, like, stabbed in the face by these needles, by a devil, by the demons? The angel says – and this is a quote – “she wore cosmetics and smoothed her face to seem more beautiful to the world. And that was one of the sins most displeasing to God. She did it because of pride by which men fall into the sin of lechery and, and finally to all the other sins."
So, this is a very familiar statement, right? She was trying to lure men, she was painting her face. And God didn't like that because he already created a beautiful face for her. So, the angel basically says that this woman – and this is a quote – "she well deserved it because she was always busy dressing and painting her brows and her temples and forehead so she would look fair and pleasing to the world. It's right that in every place where she plucked a hair from her face, a burning brand will be put every day."
And the hermit says, how long is that going to last? And the angel says, it's going to last a thousand years. So, that is the punishment according to this angel who's describing it to a visionary hermit, who's telling a knight, who's telling another knight, who's telling his daughters: this is what you get if you bother to pluck your eyebrows. And I think there's a lot of people who over-plucked in the ‘90s who might be having second thoughts having heard this story, perhaps.
The other thing that Geoffrey de la Tour Landry says in the course of The Book of the Knight of the Tower is that it's okay to jump on fashion trends, even if they're a little bit risqué, as long as you're not the first person. So, that's okay as long as you're not number one on the fashion trend, because that's going to cause too much of a stir. You don't want to be a trendsetter because those are the people that are looked on as being deviant, I suppose.
But thinking about this in terms of the Middle Ages and in terms of Marilyn Monroe in 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s Hollywood – she wanted to make it. You've got to ask yourself, why are these women putting in this effort? It's painful, it's expensive, it's difficult. Why are they doing this? Are they doing it just because they are naturally vain? Well, that is what medieval sermon writers will tell you, what priests will tell you, what monks will tell you is in their hearts. And maybe there are people that are doing it because they are purely vain and they just want people to admire them for the sake of it. But for most people over the course of human history, it's because the stakes are not low – especially for women. What these women understand is that beautiful women are going to be chosen for marriage, for jobs, for prestige.
It's something that we can identify now. It's something called the halo effect. And you may have heard about this before, and that is that beautiful people are tended to be thought of as better people. This is a cognitive bias that we have because our brains love shortcuts. We love to have a shortcut, to not make us think too hard. Because thinking hard takes effort. And who wants to put forth effort? Not natural organisms. That is the answer to that.
So, in order to give you just a sort of snippet of what the halo effect is like when it comes to attractiveness, I just went and looked up just one study. There are lots of studies, but here's just one called "Examining the attractiveness halo effect across cultures". And this was done by Carlota Batres and Victor Shiramizu. And these people looked at, well, here's their abstract: "This study sought to examine the attractiveness halo effect across 45 countries in 11 world regions. Data was collected through the Psychological Science Accelerator and participants were asked to rate 120 faces on one of several traits."
Here we go: "Results showed that attractiveness correlated positively with most of the socially desirable personality traits. More specifically, across 11 world regions, male and female faces rated as more attractive were rated more confident, emotionally stable, intelligent, responsible, sociable and trustworthy. These findings thus provide evidence that the attractiveness halo effect can be found cross culturally."
So, of course people are going to try to make themselves look more attractive because there is a social benefit to it. So, for all of those medieval priests that are saying women are just vain – they understand what the game is and they are playing the game.
For people who are listening to this abstract saying, "there is a halo effect of attractiveness. I'm not attractive enough, am I ever going to make it?" Let me tell you: studies also say that the halo effect is granted to people who have good grooming as well. So, if you smell good; if you're clean shaven (if that's the look you're going for); if you have a neat beard; if you look and smell groomed, you also get the benefits of the halo effect. So, if you're interested in that, check it out. There's lots of places you can look for more information. scholar.google.com is a good place to find articles.
Okay, so back around to the Middle Ages. People are putting forth an effort to make themselves look more beautiful. I think this is something that we can really understand. But when you think about the "sinfulness" of this – and I'm putting sinfulness here in quotes – women are sort of forced to play this game which makes them have to sin twice. They have to sin in that they have to do vain things to make themselves look better, and then they have to lie about it, because the only beautiful people are people who are naturally beautiful. Something that is really applied, I think, to today.
And I'm going to come back around to this again in a second. But first I want to talk about men, because men also think about how they come across, how they look. So, what is considered beautiful in the Middle Ages? For men, it's always things about being proportionate, right? They're neither too tall nor too short. They're neither too broad nor too slim. It's always, like, proportionate. And when we think about the ways in which medieval men are drawn and sculpted, they tend to be lean. You do see muscle definition, but they're not gigantic, not hugely muscular. And the type of muscle that you see that people seem to find attractive – that you can see in the hose that men are wearing, you can see in the buttocks that are peeping out from underneath their tunics when the tunics rise really high in the fourteenth century, to accentuate those... assets, let's say – it's functional muscle. So, the muscle is not just decorative. The idea is that the muscle is being used to help them do things like ride a horse, like swing a sword. So, you don't really see muscle as being divorced from function. These things tend to go together where people are thinking about what this man is capable of, sort of on the tournament field or on the battlefield.
For men who don't have to go into battle, muscles aren't really that important. So, you can see a lot of figures that are lean or a lot of figures that don't have, like, a seriously muscular physique. For example, Philip the Fair, who was called beautiful all his life, he doesn't have a super muscular physique if you look at his tomb effigy.
And I bring up Philip the Fair, as well, because one of the things that people think about when they think about men and beauty is their own hair, right? How do they look? Are they rocking a Magnum PI moustache? I'm really dating myself here. Usually not. People are either clean shaven or they have a beard. The beards are usually neat.
You may have seen Horrible Histories where you have Vikings who are rocking really amazing outfits and their hair looks good and they're really well groomed. This seems to have been the case, where Vikings are well groomed and they do have some pretty cool rockstar beards. Most of the time you do see people being clean shaven, especially people like monks who had clean faces and their tonsures as well. Sometimes you do see a dignified beard. But many times, if you look at portraits of kings, for example, they have relatively short hair like that chin-length, medieval-style hair, not mullets like you see in the movies. But they tend to be clean shaven most of the time.
Back when I was teaching in college, I did a media course and one of the things I talked about was the way in which men have been sort of increasingly pressured to build up muscle so that they look gigantic. And the example that I tended to use was Christopher Reeve as Superman in 19, I think, 77? Something like that. ‘78? And Henry Cavill as Superman recently. And the difference between their two physiques is literally immense. You can really see the way in which men are sort of being pressured to build up this muscle. And it tends to be different from the Middle Ages in that the muscle is for aesthetic purposes, not necessarily functional, but for that specific type of visual effect. The man is supposed to be looking a certain way. And this is something that seems to be valuable at the moment.
One of the things that I think has increased the pressure for all of us and something that I wanted to look into is that – something that I just talked about with Marilyn Monroe – is that we have cameras now, and we didn't have cameras back in the day. And in fact, we didn't really have a lot of mirrors back in the day. People did have mirrors that were made from polished metals for the most part. They did sometimes have glass mirrors with lead backs, which is a technology that is from the ancient world. But those mirrors tend to be very small and they tend to be rounded, so distorted. So, how often did you really see what you looked like, yourself? Not very often. You might see yourself in a reflection if you had particularly good glass – maybe at a cathedral. You might see a reflection in water, polished metal. But rarely would you see yourself perfectly. And almost never would you see your entire body, unless you were looking down at it. Now, we have full-length mirrors.
So, I dove into another rabbit hole for a second and I looked at this book called The Mirror: A History, which is originally in French by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. (I looked at a translation by Katharine H. Jewett.) But I wanted to know: when did we start having mirrors that really showed ourselves more truly? And of course, to look at that for at least Western Europe, we have to look to Venice. The Venetian glassmakers were of course at the forefront – the forerunners – especially people in Murano. And you can actually still get glass from Murano today. My kids went there last year, and they brought me back some Murano glass, which I was so excited about. So, early mirrors, Venetian mirrors, good, good, good mirrors had a very clear quality to the glass – which according to Melchior-Bonnet was called crystalline type glass – and it had a lead backing. So, this is old technology, but in the sixteenth century they started combining tin and mercury to the back of glass. So, I don't know if you've ever looked at the back of a mirror, but it needs to have something reflective behind the glass to work. And people didn't have the type of mirrors that we until the nineteenth century. So, medieval people are looking at tin or steel reflective mirrors, then Venetian mirrors that were made with lead at the back, then later tin and mercury as part of the process of what we still call silvering. But people couldn't see themselves in super clear glass until the nineteenth century. And now we have cameras as well, so we can see ourselves all day, every day.
So, I'm mentioning this because I think that the way that we understand what we look like is really affected by these technologies. And they are – they are technologies. They're so much a part of our lives that it's sometimes difficult to think of them as being tech. But these are technologies that have really shaped us. Then of course, there's social media, so how do we interact with other people? So, this brings me back around to the Middle Ages again, because back in the day, how would you know if you had a cowlick or if you had broccoli in your teeth? Okay, if you had spinach in your teeth or something else in your teeth, garlic in your teeth, how would you know unless somebody told you? So, beauty became sort of a team effort, a community thing in the way that maybe it isn't now the same way. You couldn't just go to the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror and see if you had anything in your teeth. You couldn't see if you had a cowlick, you couldn't really see if you had a zit. I mean, maybe you could feel it. But the point is, you had people that were working together to help each other become more beautiful. And I think that's something really interesting when we think about humanity and how we work together.
When I think about this, I can bring myself back around to Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood and how you have a team of stylists that gets these people ready to go out and look beautiful. And this is something that we know and accept. When we look at a red carpet photo, we know that hours have gone into that. And it applies to people like medieval queens and even kings. Back in the day, they had stylists when you think about it; they had people dressing them and making sure that their hair was down, not flying away everywhere, making sure that they looked beautiful. This is a team event. Now, we can do it at home because we have mirrors, but this is something that, you know, you had to do for your friends and loved ones back in the day to help each other put the best foot forward. All you could do by yourself is really sort of look down and see what things are looking like from the neck down.
So, to bring this all back around, the reason I'm thinking about this, not just because I read about Marilyn Monroe, but because I'm being inundated with all of this stuff about how to make myself more beautiful. And however you decide to do it, that is completely up to you. Your body is your own, your face is your own, and you should be able to do whatever you like with it as long as you feel good. And this is really the crux of the matter. The reason I'm talking about this today, that I thought was worth talking about today, not just because I'm super interested in things like beauty, aesthetics, and cosmetics in the Middle Ages, but because we have the same sort of echoes coming down to us today that we should be beautiful, that we must be beautiful. We see the effect – the halo effect – that happens to us when we put in, quote, unquote, an "effort" to look good. But it's supposed to be natural, and we're not supposed to recognize it about ourselves. I'm thinking about One Direction, who famously sang, "you don't know you're beautiful. That's what makes you beautiful." And my daughter tends to think of this – or she likes to think of this – as "that" means "all of the things I have mentioned," not just the fact that you don't know that you're beautiful. But it kind of feels like that's what the song is saying: the fact that you don't know you're beautiful, you're so humble, you can't tell that you're beautiful. I think that these ideas about what beauty is supposed to be – not just what it looks like, but how it's supposed to be natural, not vain, totally humble, and you're not supposed to notice – is something that is haunting us to this day.
So, whatever you decide to do with your body for the new year, hopefully it's to make it feel good. And if you ever feel weird about it, feel like, "this feels weird", ask yourself: are you doing this for you? Or are you doing this because of old medieval ideas that we just can't shake today? And whatever you decide, I hope that it makes you feel good for all of 2026, because you already look fantastic.
2026 means this is the seventh year of The Medieval Podcast, with downloads in the literal millions, if you can believe that. I find it hard to believe sometimes, myself. So, it seems like the perfect time to enter my new indie era, which means a new way to close out each episode of the podcast. And I think I have just the thing.
One of the things I love most about medieval writers is that they're not just writing for their own contemporary audience. They're writing for posterity, which means they're writing for us. So, I think a really great new way to end each episode is with wisdom from the Middle Ages, itself.
This week, I've chosen a quote on beauty that speaks, like the rest of this episode, to both medieval and modern beliefs. If we look back one last time at Marilyn Monroe, we can see that while she spent her days with some of the most handsome men of the age, the men she chose to marry weren't known for their looks, but for their abilities.
While a lot of medieval writers believed that love entered through the eyes – which is why monks weren't even supposed to look at women – the truth is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This eternal truism is recorded in one of my favorite medieval books, The Well-Laden Ship by Egbert of Liège, translated by Robert Gary Babcock for the Dumbarton Oaks Library. And he writes, "Where Love burns, there our eyes admire beauty."
Finally, this new indie era means it's time to get started building more content for you on Patreon. So here we go.
I'm streamlining the tiers on Patreon to make things simpler so you can have a look to see what suits you best. The free tier will keep you up to date on what's going on on Patreon so that you can stay plugged in. But now there'll just be three paid tiers, priced in American dollars because most of you listeners are American. But don't worry, Patreon will calculate the prices accordingly for you international listeners.
The first tier is for all of you who are happiest ad-free. So, for $5 a month you can listen to this podcast ad-free, including the whole back catalogue. And you can still access medievalists.net ad-free too. Pretty sweet. But the next tier up is where it gets even more fun. For $10 a month you can get ad-free access, just as before, and you get episodes early, plus group chats, discussion posts and a weekly article by yours truly going deeper into the topic covered in the episode or the little nugget of wisdom at the end. Most of you on the survey said written content was your jam, so this tier is definitely for you. And finally, there's a $15 month tier where you get all of the things that I've just mentioned, plus a monthly video where I answer your questions and talk more about all things books. And if enough people subscribe to that tier, I'll start adding more video. But for the moment we're going with monthly while I get my feet under me.
To get us all started, I'm giving everyone access to seven days free when you first sign up on the tier of your choice so you can shop around a bit and see where you're most comfortable. It'll take a moment for the chats to warm up, so please be a little bit patient on that front, but you can find a new written article about The Trotula this week and a new video already there so you can try it out. And from now on I'll actually be there on Patreon to read your comments and jump in on the discussion.
I'm looking forward to creating a positive and fun space together to add to what we already share here on the podcast each week, so I hope that you'll join me there. Since I have to record this before January 1st, all I can say is that the new URL should be patreon.com/medievalpodcast but if there are technical difficulties and I have to choose a different one, you'll find a direct direct link on medievalpodcast.com.
For book links, a transcript of this episode, and more, please visit medievalpodcast.com or find me Danièle Cybulskie, on social media @5minMedievalist or Five-Minute Medievalist.
Our music is by Christian Overton.
Thanks for listening, and have yourself a happy 2026.
