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

Suzanne Conklin and Jill Ross’s edited collection on the productive capacity of the body as individual and collective in medieval cultures addresses current preoccupations about embodiment, space, time, community, and self in response to developments that have evolved over the past two decades. Charting an inventive and useful framework through this momentous topic, The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, Conklin, Ross, and their contributing writers focus on space and place to locate, explore a teleology of the medieval body as the preeminent symbol of community. In this exploration, the book traces the materiality of the body against the performative expressions of meaning that the medieval body affords. In light of this critical departure, the editors crucially note the conceptualization of ‘the ends of the body’ as a marker of limitation. As the collection maintains, marker(s) of limitation can be analyzed in terms of both limit and constraint as well as against the unlimited potential for growth. That is, through materiality and the performative expressions of meaning, the idea of the body as a timeline forges a history of the body that seeks to reassert the preeminence of the body in its traditional critical modes of engagement, both simultaneously limited and limitless.

At this juncture, the collection is effective in engaging with the existing discourse of the body in the humanities and “to work against the distorting philosophical and cultural orthodoxies that subordinate body to mind or soul, a new history of the body in the Middle Ages has emerged” as outlined by the editors in the introduction. History and temporality began to be seen in conjunction with social spaces. Ranging from personal, private space of the individual to the public, shared space of the community, to the larger spaces of nation and religion, each spatial engagement, draws into question issues of materiality and meaning concerning the body. These in turn, derive from the historical work on the body that engages the more typical religious and philosophical discourses that permeate medieval scholarship. As Danielle M. Westerhof effectively reminds us, in her chapter, “Amputating the Traitor: Healing the Social Body in Public Executions for Treason in Late Medieval England”—“In the past twenty years or so, the ‘historiography of the body’ ha become increasingly popular[…]medieval scholars have also turned towards the study of the body” (177).

Serving as a site of transcendence, performance, and community, the essays are divided into four sections: “Foundations” (Three Essays), “Bodily Rhetoric” (Three Essays), “Performing the Body” (Three Essays), and the “Material Body” (Three Essays). In the first section, authors Anna Taylor, Christine Kralik, and Amy Appleford center their essays on the way bodies become the cornerstones upon which communities are built. Of note is, Appleford’s piece on “The Good Death of Richard Whittington: Corpse and Corporation”, in which she analyses the image of the dying body of London’s most famous mayor, as an enquiry into the cultural work his historical death performed for the city and its merchants, as his death engineered the reorganization of public space, as well as the late influence his dying body had in what Appleford identifies as the incorporated body of the Almshouse itself. Anna Taylor looks at the treatment of space, text, and religion through the ninth-century relics of Dionysius coupled with a manuscript, establishing a connection between saint and devotee. Christine Kralik develops an art-historical essay on the devotional function and element of death. She looks to the illuminated manuscript, of the Berlin Hours, where the theme of the “Three Living and the Three Dead” appear in a local prayer book.

The second section is based on the exploration of Latin and vernacular texts that that attempt to link together meaning and body. Emphasis is heavily placed on the body serving as a vehicle for meaning in physiological processes and performative actions. Notably, Sylvia Parsons...