Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries by Sarah Kay (review)

Sarah Kay’s Animal Skins explodes the image of the bestiary as a marginal, if quaint, medieval genre. By revealing a bestiary that challenges the twenty-first-century critical imagination, Kay restores its medieval status as a vehicle for speculative thought and instruction. Crucial to the success of the undertaking are her mastery of philology, deep knowledge of manuscripts, command of medieval literature, and expertise in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Animal Skins takes its departure from the medieval view of animals as doubly nourishing to humans. According to Thomas of Chobham, “[t]he Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful to us in the body, but also what may be useful in the soul” (1). The intellectual nourishment Thomas mentions could be found in books called bestiaries: compilations of short chapters that offer a physical description of a creature and an explanation of its purported nature, conceived as illustrating an aspect of Christian doctrine or moral teaching.

To see bestiaries as simply significant because of their content, however, is to ignore the lessons to be gleaned from their phenomenal substance. Bestiaries were written on parchment made from animal skins, and for Kay this makes parchment “a space of ambiguity. Stripped on one side of flesh, and on the other of the hair that made the creature it came from recognizable in life, parchment is a refined form of animal skin whose resemblance to human skin is obvious to anyone who has looked at medieval manuscripts” (3). Not surprisingly, then, she takes the first clause of Thomas of Chobham’s sententia at its word— “[t]he Lord created different creatures with different natures”—to remind us that bestiary manuscript, bestiary content, and bestiary reader, whether medieval or modern, constitute an animal continuum. Indeed, even before a cognitive bridge to the manuscript content can be made, the reader, consciously or unconsciously, feels the skin-on-skin contact of finger to folio.

Skin is not a neutral word for Kay. Calling it “both a surface of inscription and an envelope of identity,” (4) she begins by showing its medieval connotations and then pivots to fold contemporary concepts of skin theory into her analysis. Noting that parchment and human skin are both vulnerable to wounds, she reminds us that, as early as the sixth century, Isidore of Seville associated skin with incision: “The skin— cutis—is that which is uppermost in the body [. . .] because in covering the body it is the first to suffer from an incision, for in Greek κυτις means ‘incision’” (87). Kay continues: “Skin’s essence is to be vulnerable and to expose to injury the body which it covers. The scrapes, cuts, and tears in manuscript folios are what make apparent their essence as skin” (87).

Kay presents skin as a bridge linking the somatic and the psychic. It is the axis facilitating cognitive perceptions from the material skin of the inscribed parchment, whose words attest, in one direction, to an inner self of the scribe who recorded them and, in the other, to the mind of the person who reads them. Here Kay draws upon “the small but lively field of skin studies,” (2) particularly as represented by the work of the French theorist, Didier Anzieu, who sees the skin as a center of psychic consciousness that he terms the Skin Ego. He models the skin ego on “the experience of the tactile sense organ, as well as on the experience of the auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and visual sense organs” (Marc Lafrance, “From Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope”).These experiences give rise to what he calls psychic envelopes, defined as “sensory experiences that have been transposed from the somatic onto the psychic plane where they function as ‘envelopes’ or ‘skins’ of the psyche” (Ibid.). Anzieu describes the skin...