Legible skins: Animals and the ethics of medieval reading

The Lacerated Body of the Book: Bloody Animation of the Passion in a 15th Century Devotional Book

“…In the prayer texts and rubricated instructions, the biblical scenes were pondered, ruminated on, evaluated, contemplated, and turned over, again and again, to instruct and align the devout mind to a holy way of sensing, feeling, cogitating, acting, and moving (Skinnebach 2015). Materially the skin of the pages, the red ink, and the occasional perforations offered a very real presence of the living body of Christ whose body was, in medieval theology and mystical writing, fleshed out as the book of life, his lacerated skin as the parchment on which suffering and salvation were written in wounds and blood (Gellrich 1985;Hennessy 2013;Jørgensen 2012;Kay 2011;Spalding 1914). The relation between book and owner was one of hagiosensory and hagiokinetic reciprocity, that installed a circumstantial and potential openness and susceptibility towards divine encounters.…”

“…Touching or kissing it-skin against skin-would feel like kissing the real body of Christ, what may be termed derma devotion, as if the skin of the book is the scourged or even flayed (a commingling of terms often made in medieval sources) skin of Christ himself (Jørgensen 2019;Dent 2017). The material significance of depictions of Christ's body on parchment should not be underestimated: the painted surfaces of the pages are after all merely a palimpsest upon an already mutilated-animal-body (Kay 2011;Turner 2018). As medievalist and new materialist Bruce Holsinger has stated, "The dead animal is the "con-text" of medieval literary production in the most immediate way: that with which writing is joined or woven inseparably together in and as text" (Holsinger 2009, p. 619).…”

Where are the wild things? Animals in western medieval European History

“…He asks us to consider the manuscript as a stack of animal parts, produced by the suffering and death of actual animals. Kay (, ) draws on philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and Critical Animal Studies to describe how bestiaries, written on animal skin, also implicate the medieval reader. Through the close reading of text, image, and material, she examines how the juxtaposition of the medium and the message complicates human identity and elides the human and animal.…”

“…explores the implications of the fact that medieval literature "survives to us primarily on and as animal" (p. 219). He asks us to consider the manuscript as a stack of animal parts, produced by the suffering and death of actual animals Kay (2011Kay ( , 2017…”

Skin in the Game? Legibility, Sovereignty, and Human Animals

“…While the conception of human skin as a site of inscription, of course, borrows in part from the use of animal skins to make parchment, as this volume recognizes, the question of the human-animal relation is a more marginal interest to it. The volume's one exception is provided by Pax Gutierrez-Neal, who, drawing on Kay's (2011) explication of "suture," argues (in line with both Kay and McCracken) that the conflation of human and animal identity in medieval romance, effected through wearing animal skins, can call into question what "separates…'self' from the 'other'" (188). The overlaying of human skin with animal skins, armor, and clothing in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William of Palerne results in an excess of symbols, "making identity vulnerable to misinterpretation."…”