The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture ed. by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (review)

Encouraged by the increasing range of theoretical approaches embraced by medievalists, studies of the symbolic and textual dimensions of the body have become important to scholars working across the Middle Ages. In their fine contribution to this ongoing conversation, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross posit a novel double frame for approaching the medieval body, considering it both as a potent symbol of individual and communal identity and also as something that operates always along temporal and spatial lines. These two foci unite the essays in The Ends of the Body and distinguish it favourably from similar critical studies.

The collection is divided into four parts. The first, “Foundations,” considers how bodies – both physical and representational – were crucial to the construction of medieval community, a focus particularly well articulated in Anna Taylor’s exploration of how the bodily and literary remains of Dionysis the Areopagite combined to become a spiritual locus for the monastic community of Saint-Denis. Christine Kralik moves to a pictorial representation of the body, showing how the popular image of The Three Living and the Three Dead was adapted for private devotion in one fifteenth-century Book of Hours. Amy Appleford concludes the section with one of the collection’s highlights, a careful analysis of how the bodily, literary, and artistic remains of the merchant Richard Whittington were deployed to perpetuate the collective body of the Mercers’ Guild and the civic body of late-medieval London.

The essays in part 2, “Bodily Rhetoric,” take up the relationship between body and word, each examining how the body is invested with meaning in vernacular and Latin texts. Sylvia Parsons and Jill Ross focus predominantly on the latter: Parsons explores how the theological significance of the body emerges at the intersection of epic and parody in the eleventh-century Eupolemius; Ross traces the figure of “the dazzling sword of language” from Roman antiquity through the late Middle Ages to link the almost physical potentia of speech with the power of the male body itself. Sarah Sheehan also considers male bodies – both whole and mutilated – in the saga Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó, arguing that honour in Irish warrior culture was fundamentally linked to the physical abilities of the material body.

The third section, “Performing the Body,” deals not with the body in the text but with the body as a text, one that creates, maintains, and sometimes heals the social corpus. Drawing heavily on John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, Danielle Westerhof’s fascinating chapter shows how public executions for treason simultaneously staged the amputation of a diseased limb from the body politic and figured the traitor’s body itself as corruption. The remaining two essays focus on connections between body and mind, albeit in very different ways. Catherine Rider surveys views on male impotence from Augustine to Duns Scotus, limning the physical, psychological, and “magical” causes of sexual dysfunction in theological and legal terms. Linda Jones turns to Islamic sermons to show how Muslim views on the unity of body and soul encouraged the literal physicalization of religious virtue in the faithful.

“Material Body,” the fourth section, considers the body oscillating from life to death, and from decay to redemption. Emma Brenner’s sensitive analysis of the Mont-aux-Malade leper house refutes prevailing understandings of lepers as monolithic objects of fear and disgust in the Middle Ages. Wendy Matlock considers how the female corpse in one fifteenth-century debate poem functions as a devotional aid, even as it reifies connections between the feminine and the corporeal. Finally, Suzanne Conklin Akbari unpacks the polysemous term vertu in two of Christine de Pizan’s allegorical works, arguing that death – here, the death of Charles V – figures not simply as rupture but as a moment of Christological renewal for the body politic.

The Ends of the Body in an impressive collection, and, as the above survey suggests, it...