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  • Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation ed. by Larissa Tracy
  • Susanne M. Arthur
Flaying in the Pre-modern World: Practice and Representation. Edited by Larissa tracy. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017. Pp. xviii + 406; 62 illustrations. $99.

As the title of the volume suggests, the articles in this anthology deal, on the one hand, with the practice of flaying (Part I, five contributions), and, on the other, representations of flaying in literature and other art forms (Part II, nine contributions). The authors' focus is on evidence from the eleventh century to the early seventeenth, and cultures under discussion include, for example, Ireland, England, France, Italy, and Scandinavia. The editor explains in her Introduction that "articles in the first part have counterparts in the second" (p. 6). The volume is the result of a special session at the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan.

In the Introduction (pp. 1–18), Tracy provides a brief summary of research on the topic of flaying to date, explaining how the current volume fits in with earlier studies, but, more importantly, how the volume contributes to a better understanding of flaying by offering readers a multidisciplinary approach, showing the various ways in which the removal of skin "tears away identity and leaves a blank slate upon which law, punishment, sanctity or monstrosity can be inscribed" (p. 1).

Jack Hartnell ("Tools of the Puncture: Skin, Knife, Bone, Hand," pp. 20–50) illustrates differences as well as similarities between flaying as a medical and a punitive practice, the greatest similarity being the surgical tools used during the process. Kelly DeVries ("A Tale of Venetian Skin: The Flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin," pp. 51–70) provides a detailed account of the historical background surrounding the flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin, whose (assumed) flayed skin remains were found preserved in his tomb. Using the late sixteenth-century account [End Page 132] of the serial killer and rapist as well as assumed werewolf Peter Stubbe in Bedburg (Germany), Susan Small ("Flesh and Death in Early Modern Bedburg," pp. 71–90) illustrates how the three sixteenth-century similarity models conventientia, aemulatio, and analogia were utilized during Stubbe's trial, torture, and execution. Mary Rambaran-Olm ("Medievalism and the 'Flayed-Dane' Myth: English Perspectives between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries," pp. 91–115) examines how the myth of the "flayed Dane," a Viking whose skin was used to cover the doors of early medieval English churches, came into being. Rambaran-Olm, moreover, shows how the legend—based on the anachronistic view of the brutal medieval Dark Ages—survived from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, being both used "to perpetuate the narrative of a savage past" and "to promote an English nationalist agenda" (p. 102). Frederika Bain ("Skin on Skin: Wearing Flayed Remains," pp. 116–37) uses the Middle High German verse narrative Salman und Morolf and the sixteenth-century English Merry leste of a Shrewde and Curst Wyfe Lapped in Morrelles Skin for Her Good Behauyour accounts of skin-wearing in Germany and Italy as well as early modern Icelandic folk traditions to show how these varied examples of skin-wearing "enact—or provoke—transformation" (p. 136), even though these transformations remain "partial, incomplete or limited" (p. 137) in all instances.

Asa Simon Mittman and Christine Sciacca ("Robed in Martyrdom: The Flaying of St Bartholomew in the Laudario of Sant'Agnese," pp. 141–72) illustrate how the fourteenth-century artist Pacino di Bonaguida drew from a variety of both written and visual sources to create his depiction of "the flaying of Bartholomew, his subsequent preaching, his beheading, the elevation of his soul to Heaven and the lowering of his body into his sarcophagus" (p. 143). The authors show how in this representation Bartholomew is elevated by his physical transformation (that is, flaying and beheading) into something exceeding humanity (that is, posthuman). The early fifteenth-century Belles Heures, which Jean duc de Berry commissioned from the Limbourg brothers, is the topic of Sherry C. M. Lindquist's contribution to the volume ("Masculinist Devotion: Flaying and Flagellation in the Belles Heures," pp. 173–207). Lindquist demonstrates how the depictions—including examples of flaying and...

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