The Roman Catholic War on Wigs
The Catholic Church’s ban on wigs in the 18th century was as revealing of attitudes towards disability as vanity and sanctity.
A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome:
Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, has found himself in poor health since the month of September on account of a continuous flux that descends from his head and affects his whole body. He has constant pain inside and outside and, for this reason, has remained without hair and almost without teeth, with dizziness and temporary blindness. Doctors fear that a greater, even unrecoverable, illness could occur. Piervenanzi, on the advice of those who treat him, therefore asks permission to wear a light wig in natural colours, with a tonsure and without curls.
The underlying context of Piervenanzi’s petition was the contemporaneous fashion craze for carefully coiffured false hair. Think of portraits of Louis XIV, J.S. Bach, Marie Antoinette, the Founding Fathers, or the ‘hanging judge’ George Jeffreys. A wig, the larger and the more elaborate the better, was a must-have for any person of importance. Indeed, the great English church historian Owen Chadwick once remarked how ‘the wig became as necessary to the uniform of Anglican bishops as to that of English judges’. Yet Chadwick also noted that the same was not true of Catholic clerics. For several generations, numerous bishops in France and Italy waged a concerted campaign against priests who wore them.
