The dumb child. Contribution to the study of the iconogenesis of the dunce cap

This article aims to develop a cultural history of the ancient punishment of the cappello d’asino (literally «ass cap») in Italian schools, which will be analysed from an iconogenetic viewpoint in an attempt to highlight its symbolic roots. An exploration of the practice reveals a fairly complex iconogenesis: on the one hand, the dunce’s cap stems from the late medieval custom of stigmatising the madness of fools and jesters with a hat characterised by animal attributes such as donkeys’ or other animals’ ears. On the other hand, the practice reveals strong links with the ancient practice of marking heretics and infidels with a pointed hat, from the pileus cornutus used to distinguish Jews, to the capirote imposed on people sentenced for religious motives by the Spanish Inquisition. The obligation to publicly wear such headgear was designed to give public visibility to the wearers’ intellectual or spiritual deviance and to expose them to public contempt in order to oust them from the community of the faithful. In the following centuries, the symbolic significance of the pointed hat became so deeply rooted in popular culture that it pervaded the school environment too. Thus the obligation for dumb pupils to wear the school version of this headgear (ass cap) began to mark their ousting from the micro-community of the classroom and to stigmatise their refusal (or inability) to learn: a refusal that was considered akin to downright apostasy, equating the renunciation of reason (by fools) with the abandonment of faith (by heretics). Drawing on Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s research on the hegemonic nature of the modern educational system, it is also interesting to note how this and other school punishments did not stem from an educational matrix only but descended from public systems for the control and repression of social and religious deviance. These punishments were transferred to a symbolic level and adapted to the “condemned”, according to their age and their physical and mental ability to endure them.