Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture ed. by Katie L. Walter (review)

Katie Walter’s volume brings together a range of fascinating contributions regarding skin in medieval European cultures. The predominant focus here is principally on insular texts, though to regret that a broader range of language areas was not considered is in effect to wish this particular collection had contained more parchment rather than different matter, offering as it already does a great deal to those interested in issues of representation, embodiment, ethics, reading, writing, subjectivity, pain, desire, exoticism, limits, justice, and much more besides. As will be well understood by those conversant with recent discussions of the body in medieval studies, skin has been the focus of noteworthy contributions on the relation between embodiment and subjectivity. These have followed in the wake of Didier Anzieu’s highly influential 1985 study, Skin Ego (Le Moi-peau). In Anzieu’s work and elsewhere (for example, in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida’s reflections on touch), skin contact problematizes oppositions between inner and outer and thereby disturbs and rewrites all apprehensions of selfhood, especially ‘cephalous’ ones. The elevation of skin and touch thus form the basis of a critical and cultural decapitation—or perhaps, to use Asa Simon Mittman’s term, ‘recapitation’ (p. 15; cited by Farina)—in which thought about subjectivity is beheadingly decentered and problematized and in which the subject of skin constantly refolds and erases as it tests attempts to touch on it. (In that respect, one silent partner here is Jacques Lacan’s later commentary on the topology of the psyche, not least his use of the Möbius strip.) Although some quarters have argued for the modernity or early modernity of what one might term the ‘skin-turn,’ contributions from medievalists such as Sarah Kay make plain that the question has particular bearing in textual cultures so intimately dependent—whether in material fact or as metaphor—on parchment’s place in cultural production and dissemination. Relations between written testimony, truth and voice are laid bare in the connections between reading and flaying exemplified in Antiquity by Apollo’s punishment of the satyr Marsyas or in early Christianity by the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. Indeed, from Karen Walter’s epigraph from Bridget of Sweden, ‘skyn bytokens lufe’ (‘skin betokens love,’ p. 1) onwards, this volume pays elegant and persuasive attention to the subtlety, intimacy and cruelty of medieval skin-work. Although skin may betoken self-evidential surface, it is also profoundly revealing of the issues of identity, disguise and hybridity exemplified by skin-turners such as the werewolves featured in Susan Small’s incisive examination of lycanthrope tales. Victoria Langum likewise highlights the important confluence of spiritual and medical discourses in twelfth- and thirteenth-century practices of reading penitents’ complexions when evaluating strategies for pastoral intervention. Philosophical engagements considered comprise medieval re-interrogations of Aristotle’s problematic observations on the senses as well as relations between sensation and understanding and between language and sound. The relation of skin’s fabric to that of time is explored illuminatingly by Isabel Davis and Elizabeth Robertson. As is apparent in Robert Mills’ elegant unpeeling of justice and violence in Havelok, a key interlocutor here is Giorgio Agamben (especially his examination of ‘bare life’ in Homo sacer): the flaying of traitors and tyrants betokens the liminal/ interstitial space of the limit of sovereign mercy that is the ‘ban.’ The productivity of the central focus is apparent in the challenges brought to our previous understandings of seemingly well-known materials, not least in Lara Farina’s savvy re-interrogation of the frame-shaking Blemmye of London, British Library Cotton MS Tiberius B.v., fol. 82r. Here, even as skin may offer intimations of surface truth, it can also be a site of baroque folding and parallax, as is apparent in Julie Orlemanski’s insightful probing of the non-recognition scene that is the encounter between Troilus and his leprous former paramour in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid...