Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (review)

Visuality, violence, erotic pleasure, religious feeling: Georges Bataille was not the first to exploit and thus render visible the many contiguities between these domains of experience; and with his aid, together with that of other theorists, the authors of this book show how they are already multiply interwoven in medieval hagiography. Pornography is thus to be understood here not as a squalid practice or an exploitative industry, but as a fully theorizable field that can sustain intellectual comparison with the literary features of medieval saints’ lives and with the pictorial richness of many of the manuscripts that transmit them. According to the authors, neither pornography nor hagiography claims to show heightened bodily excitement ‘as it really is’, but rather suggests how, in its undefinability, it is disclosed in its effects; it is never experienced straight on, but always, as their title puts it, ‘on the verge’. Readers of this book who can emulate its authors’ boldness and set aside traditional pieties and beliefs in ‘medieval didacticism’ will find it not only provocative but learned, informative, and, in its own way, improving: if hagiography and pornography both interpellate their consumers into certain patterns of subjectivity, their combination in the pages of this study summon us to be more responsive to, and more understanding of, topics that are usually taboo in academic writing. Although their Introduction asserts co-authorship, the approaches of the two authors are distinct in this respect, and indeed each writes as ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ as they alternate through the book’s six chapters. Burgwinkle’s contributions show an enthralled discovery of the potential for convergence between medieval images of sanctity and modern pornographic photography and film, particularly in their treatment of violence or domination. Exuberantly researched and illustrated, their emphasis is on the always already consensual, intersubjective, and social implications of what may appear to be violent acts, or private sexual or religious experience. Howie’s chapters, by contrast, are more captivated by the sensual touch, and by more amateur contemporary productions such as films of masturbation taken with mobile-phone cameras. In the first two of his chapters the medieval texts appear somewhat loosely connected with the pornographic materials, and relatively lightly analysed; but his intellectual vibrancy is unmistakable, and his concluding chapter, ‘On the Verge’, on the temporality of expectation (and the risk of boredom) in hagiography and pornography is excellent. Medieval studies has repeatedly shown in recent years how receptive medieval texts are to queer reading, and this book proposes yet further advances in this direction. Its claim for the convergence between hagiography and pornography is sometimes overstated, however. I couldn’t help noticing that, among its lavish illustrations, none of the very many pictures of penises, and almost none of the rather less numerous images of naked women, are credited to medieval sources.