Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for your lovely words and thank you so much as well for inviting me

to give this paper about my recent work.

I'm very happy as well that two of my PhD students came with me and could talk to some

of the fellows here in Erlangen and this is really very interesting for us to exchange

our ideas and talk about the problems we find in our research.

And well, I'm going to speak now about prophetic body signs in early modern Roman literature.

The signatures inscribed in the surface of the human body, molds, words, or birthmarks,

as well as its very form and shape are believed to provide information not only about somebody's

character and moral qualities, but they allegedly also permit us to predict the future.

It is well known that back in ancient Babylonia, different practices of body divination as

allayoscopy, palmoscopy, or the observation of trembling were in use and especially physiognomics

had been employed to foretell the future.

Let me give you some examples of their physiognomic prophecies.

If a man with a contorted face has a prominent right eye, far from home, dogs will eat him.

If a man's face is marked by yellow lines, the state treasury will take all that belongs

to him or only his good furniture.

If a man has curly hair on his shoulders, women will fall in love with him.

It sounds quite funny and we're tempted to laugh at the naivety of the people's in former

times.

Nevertheless, nowadays, we are as credulous and gullible as they were.

Just have a look at the multitude of highly popular self-help books on sale that include

manuals about face reading.

A bestseller author like Simon Brown, a Feng Shui consultant whose clients include international

major companies like British Airways, The Body Shop, and Air France, organizes face

reading sessions in London as well as online courses.

Furthermore, he published a book titled Secrets of Face Reading, Understanding Your Health

and Relationships that was translated into several languages.

While on the one hand, we find this type of superstitious use of physiognomics, on the

other hand, there is, and this is quite surprising, serious scientific research about behavioral

dispositions and its relation to the facial width to height ratio of a person.

Two psychologists, Justin Carey and Cheryl McGormick, analyzed in 2008 to what extent

facial metrics predict aggressive behavior.

Some years later, in 2012, Michael Hazelhoon and Elaine Wong, both working in the area

of organizational behavior, tried to demonstrate that, I quote, genetically determined physical

traits can serve as reliable predictors of unethical behavior, end of quote.

At the same time, a group of researchers led by the Argentinian biologist, Rolando Gonzales

Jose, and the Mexican anthropologist, Jorge Gomez-Baldes, studied the craniums of about

5,000 individuals in order to prove the facial width to height ratio as an indicator of aggressive,

unethical and other kinds of behaviors.

And these examples show at the beginning of the 21st century, ordinary people as well

as scientists still believe in the readability of the human body for different purposes,

just like the ancient Babylonians did.

The belief that the physical appearance is meaningful is not attributed to people of

lower education or low social status.

As a scholar of medieval and early modern Roman literature, I'm interested in physiognomics

because the physical appearance of many literary figures described in texts is based on these

principles as it has been shown, for instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer and Shakespeare.

I am particularly interested in those characters who act as physiognomists or palm readers

in the fictional world, interpreting the bodies of the other characters.