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

One of the most vibrant trends in recent medieval and early modern studies is the focus on the cultural history of the senses. In the past ten years the number of works dedicated to the matter has skyrocketed, and the fascination with the senses—in particular with the so-called “lower senses” (smell, taste, and touch)—does not seem to be waning. Although framed from a historicist perspective, studies of the (lower) senses in the Middle Ages and early modern period are consistently characterized by being both interdisciplinary and transcultural. In this sense, Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, included in The New Middle Ages—the very prolific series published by Palgrave and directed by Bonnie Wheeler—constitutes a rich and very timely contribution to the topic.

Among the senses, the history of touch is without a doubt the one that twentieth-century scholarship has neglected the most. In the past ten years, this oversight has not only been noted, but also repaired to a great degree. Nevertheless, there are still vast expanses of unexplored territory waiting to be charted. As the organ of touch, skin is, indeed, one of these vital and undermined areas of inquiry. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture represents the most substantial attempt to undertake this issue in recent Anglo-American scholarship. Following the lead of La pelle umana/The Human Skin edited by Agostino Bagliani and published in the series Micrologus (no. 13 [2005]), but also influenced by more general recent works by the likes of Nina Jablonski and Steven Connor, Walter’s edited volume gathers essays that deal with skin in medieval culture, juxtaposing disciplines such as medicine, natural philosophy, literature, cultural history, the history of the book, visual culture, and others.

The approach to skin as a primal metaphor for mediation runs through the volume and gives the collection a sense of conceptual harmony that testifies to the proficiency of its editor. Such conceptual harmony, however, should not be confused with homogeneity; the essays contained in this volume cover a wide thematic spectrum, since the authors’ shared understanding of skin as a liminal space helps them read a variety of cultural phenomena from a very unique perspective. As Walter herself says in the introduction, Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture attempts to “meditate on the significance of skin for expressing the human condition as well as attending to questions of the relation of the human to the other in its various guises: the divine, the cultural or racial other, the animal, the monstrous, the inanimate or dead” (3). Walter adds that one of the aims of the collection is to engage twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural theories, such as those of Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roberto Esposito. This is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the project, and most of the essays that do try to establish a dialogue between medieval texts and contemporary theory fall short of justifying the interpretative advantages of doing so.

The first essay, Lara Farina’s “Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmye’s Touch,” constitutes the strongest contribution in the volume. Farina finds in the image of a Blemmye—a headless body whose face is on its torso—from a manuscript copy of Wonders of the World, an illustration of a uniquely medieval way of understanding the sense of touch, which derives from contemporary readings of Aristotle. According to Farina, the monstrosity of the Blemmye, “an imaginative representation of a body organized by the sense of touch,” challenges ocular perception and forces the spectator to ponder human sensation as a tactile, rather than as an ocular, phenomenon. Among other things, Farina stresses the connections among reading and touching, skin and parchment. Susan Small’s brilliant essay, “The Medieval Werewolf Model of Reading Skin,” likewise engages the question of monstrosity and skin, this time from a linguistic perspective. Small argues that the werewolf is...