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158 chapter seven of inner pangs of remorse: the hair shirt internalized.While plenty of preachers still cowed their followers with images of a very tangible Hell, the notion of a physical site of corporeal punishments was beginning to seem crude to enlightened theologians.The way was being prepared for the twentieth-century notion of Hell as a painful state of consciousness (Wheeler 1990: 179). The Persistence of Touch As charges of treason and tyranny were being brought against Charles I of England in 1649 the king rapped the prosecutor on the shoulder with his cane and called on him to stop.The cane broke, its gold tip falling to the floor.The prosecutor, heedless of the king’s command, carried on. No one bent a knee to offer the golden head of the cane back to the sovereign and Charles was obliged to stoop and pick it up himself. This seemingly trivial incident was taken to foretell the king’s own imminent beheading.However,it also seems to signify another loss,that of the power of the royal touch.The king—whose hand had grasped the scepter symbolizing his rule by divine right—had been stripped of tactile importance. By even submitting a monarch to trial the Parliamentarians showed their disregard for the monarchy as a divinely ordained institution.The power to rule could not reside within the body of any one individual, they claimed, it was an impersonal public office. As for the supposed healing powers of the royal touch, the Republican Henry Marten wryly suggested that sufferers from scrofula might touch the Great Seal of Parliament instead (K.Thomas 2005:357).The execution of the king brought the point home: his body was no different from the body of any other “enemy of the people.” As Milton’s work of political propaganda Eikonoklastes—“Iconbreaker ”—made clear, the king was but one more spurious icon to be smashed. In retrospect the failed touch of Charles I appears emblematic of a whole cultural turn away from the notion of tactile authority. A little over a decade after Charles’s execution, however, a change of fortune restored the monarchy in England and the son of the executed monarch became King Charles II. John Cooke,the Republican who had ignored the tactile summons of the former king, was hanged,drawn and quartered in the traditional fashion for traitors,together with a number of others accused of the crime of regicide. Even the corpses of Republican leaders who were already dead were exhumed and hung for having spilt the precious blood of a divinely ordained monarch. The new king did his part to restore faith in personal, hands-on authority by ritually touching thousands of people a year. (One sufferer from a “fungus nose,” went so far as to rub his nose in the royal hand, which, it was said,“disturbed the king but cured him” [Molloy 1885: 72].) Not only the scrofulous or ill wished to Classen_Text.indd 158 3/15/12 2:48 PM The ModernTouch 159 touch the king,but,it seemed,almost the whole populace.“The eagerness of men, women,and children to see his majesty,and kisse his hands was so great,”Evelyn wrote, “that he had scarce leisure to eat for some days” (64).This enthusiastic king-touching was accompanied by a general indulgence in tactile pleasures, as freedom from puritanical mores created a carnavalesque atmosphere of sensual exuberance.The power of touch, it seemed, was as great as ever. There can be no straightforward narrative of a decline in the cultural importance of touch accompanied by a corresponding rise in the cultural importance of sight.The sensory patterns of history are too complex. Older tactile practices long coexisted with the new emphasis on more disembodied modes of social interaction and religious practice. Indeed, the centuries in which religion was increasingly becoming a visual,or audiovisual practice,were also the centuries in which mystics were ardently clasping Christ to their breasts in visionary ecstasies. Some of the reasons for this heightening of mystical tactility in the later Middle Ages have been discussed earlier. It may also be the case that the rise in importance of individualism created a sense of alienation from both God and society and that consequently there was a greater perceived need to be enveloped in a cosmic embrace.Were these elaborations of mystical touch the last gasp,or rather, grasp of a dying tactile culture? Or were they evidence of a generally...

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