Katie L. Walter

Reading skin in medieval literature and culture

Introduction Katie L. Walter 1. Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmyes Touch Lara Farina 2. Noli me tangere : The Enigma of Touch in Middle English Religious Literature and Art for and about Women Elizabeth Robertson 3. Haveloks Bare Life and the Significance of Skin Robert Mills 4. The Medieval Werewolf Model of Reading Skin Susan Small 5. Cutaneous Time in the Late Medieval Literary Imagination Isabel Davis 6. The Form of the Formless: Medieval Taxonomies of Skin, Flesh and the Human Katie L. Walter 7. Discerning Skin: Complexion, Surgery and Language in Medieval Confession Virginia Langum 8. Desire and Defacement in The Testament of Cresseid Julie Orlemanski 9. Touching Back: Responding to Reading Skin Karl Steel

Books and bodies: ethics, exemplarity, and the “boistous” in medieval English writings

‘Boistous’, along with ‘rude’, is a common descriptor for Middle English writings, and has often been understood to point to writers’ anxieties over the inferiority of English as a literary medium. However, ‘boistous’ can also refer to the exemplary, the natural, and the bodily, and so simultaneously points to writers’ understandings of the didactic and rhetorical potency of English. By looking to John Trevisa’s translations of De regimine principum and De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the writings of Thomas Usk and Nicholas Love, this essay contends that ‘boistous’ demarcates a form of vernacular writing that claims a mode of reading for the lay and unlearned that is predicated on the senses of taste and touch, and that is understood to be fundamentally good-for thinking with, for ethical life in the world, and for salvation.

Fragments for a medieval theory of prosthesis

Medieval surgery adumbrates a theory of the body in which flesh, because it is sanguine, is radically different from the other simple members that make up the body, such as skin, which are understood instead to be spermatic. In contrast with spermatic members, sanguine flesh is renewable, and so is held to be able to stand in the place of lost, diseased or injured spermatic parts. Surgical theory and practice utilises and artificially enhances this natural capacity of flesh to supplement and substitute in its remedies to repair the body, in what is broadly termed ‘incarnatyf’ medicine in Middle English. This essay suggests that this ‘incarnatyf’ tradition is part of a missing history of prosthesis, which in turn grounds forms of medieval prosthetic thought in two Middle English examples: the miracle of Cosmas and Damian, in which a living man’s rotten leg is replaced with the healthy leg of a dead man; and a series of connected revelations in Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis, in which incorporation into the body of Christ is effected through Christ’s own practice of surgical prosthesis. Raising questions about the relationship between self and other, life and death, and the human and divine, the medieval ‘incarnatyf’ imaginary also asks questions about the possibilities and limits of prosthesis as a metaphor for community and for the body of Christ itself.

Reading without Books

Although only a handful of the books written by Reginald Pecock survive, these extant works—which comprise a schematic program for religious instruction and a riposte to lollardy—mark him simultaneously as a central figure in the reading practices of fifteenth-century London and as marginal to them.1 A zealot in the cause of orthodoxy, Pecock envisaged a radical program of reform through reading, one that ultimately came to play a role in his own downfall.2 Partly through his insistent emphasis on the powers of human reason and logic in questions of faith and ethics, Pecock’s works laid him open to the charge of heresy, and in 1457 the books he authored were burned in front of St Paul’s Cross.3 The reform through reading that Pecock envisaged is predicated on an inner book, the “book of reason,” which God has inscribed in man’s soul and which, when the intellect is trained to read it, allows man to discover truth.4 Reform would therefore be achieved through training readers’ intellects, in Kirsty Campbell’s (2010: 152) words, to think “along the lines of logical discourse.” In this regard, syllogistic reasoning—a key tool of logic—is central to Pecock’s method;5 so too, as Ian Johnson has recently argued, are the related practices of ordinatio (“a setting in order”; Lewis & short, s. v. ordinatio).6

The Form of the Formless: Medieval Taxonomies of Skin, Flesh, and the Human

In recent philosophies of the human, skin has been posited as the “ground of grounds, or the form of forms.”1 Open to the world, the skin is “readable”; it is that which inscribes the interior on the exterior and manifests the self. Didier Anzieu’s influential psychoanalytical theory, for example, understands skin to function as the background or screen against which the self emerges: skin is thus “a basic datum that is of both an organic and an imaginary order, both a system for protecting our individuality and a first instrument and site of interaction with others.”2 Number fifty-four in French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s Fifty-Eight Indices on the Body asserts: “The body, the skin: the rest is anatomical, physiological, and medical literature … But the truth is skin. Truth is in the skin, it makes skin: an authentic extension exposed, entirely turned outside while also enveloping the inside.”3 Coincident with the body, the truth-telling of skin, in Nancy’s terms, makes it the very stuff of discourse. Likewise, Steven Connor in The Book of Skin claims: “The skin is always written: it is legendary.”4