This paper argues that facial disfigurement has been neglected in the historiography of medieval Europe, and suggests some reasons for this oversight before examining the evidence from legal and narrative texts. One reason for this may be the lack of first-person accounts of being disfigured, preventing historians from accessing the experience of being disfigured. By situating the medieval examples within a wider frame of modern responses to disfigurement, it becomes apparent that whilst medical advances have assisted in restoring the damaged face, social responses to facial difference remain largely negative.

Taking a micro-historical approach, this paper explores the business activities of Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett, two married women who operated together as pawnbrokers in London in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Based on a protracted inheritance dispute through which their extensive dealings come to light, the discussion assesses married women's lending and investment strategies in a burgeoning metropolitan economy; the networks through which women lenders operated; and the extent to which wives could sidestep the legal conventions of ‘coverture’ which restricted their ownership of moveable property. It is argued that the moneylending and asset management activities of women like Carter and Hatchett were an important part of married women's work that did not simply consolidate neighbourhood ties but that placed them at the heart of the early modern economy.

What is pain? This article argues that it is useful to think of pain as a ‘kind of event’ or a way of being-in-the-world. Pain-events are unstable; they are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language systems, social and environmental interactions and bodily comportment. The historical question becomes: how has pain been done and what ideological work do acts of being-in-pain seek to achieve? By what mechanisms do these types of events change? Who decides the content of any particular, historically specific and geographically situated ontology?