Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture ed. by Katie L. Walter (review)

Abstract

Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture KATIE L. WALTER, ed., Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 248. ISBN: 978-0-230-33870-8. $85.Katie Walter's volume brings together a range of fascinating contributions regarding skin in medieval European cultures. The predominant focus here is principally on insular texts, though to regret that a broader range of language areas was not considered is in effect to wish this particular collection had contained more parchment rather than different matter, offering as it already does a great deal to those interested in issues of representation, embodiment, ethics, reading, writing, subjectivity, pain, desire, exoticism, limits, justice, and much more besides. As will be well understood by those conversant with recent discussions of the body in medieval studies, skin has been the focus of noteworthy contributions on the relation between embodiment and subjectivity. These have followed in the wake of Didier Anzieu's highly influential 1985 study, Skin Ego (Le Moi-peau). In Anzieu's work and elsewhere (for example, in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida's reflections on touch), skin contact problematizes oppositions between inner and outer and thereby disturbs and rewrites all apprehensions of selfhood, especially 'cephalous' ones. The elevation of skin and touch thus form the basis of a critical and cultural decapitation-or perhaps, to use Asa Simon Mittman's term, 'recapitation' (p. 15; cited by Farina)-in which thought about subjectivity is beheadingly decentered and problematized and in which the subject of skin constantly refolds and erases as it tests attempts to touch on it. (In that respect, one silent partner here is Jacques Lacan's later commentary on the topology of the psyche, not least his use of the Mobius strip.) Although some quarters have argued for the modernity or early modernity of what one might term the 'skin-turn,' contributions from medievalists such as Sarah Kay make plain that the question has particular bearing in textual cultures so intimately dependent-whether in material fact or as metaphor-on parchment's place in cultural production and dissemination. Relations between written testimony, truth and voice are laid bare in the connections between reading and flaying exemplified in Antiquity by Apollo's punishment of the satyr Marsyas or in early Christianity by the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. Indeed, from Karen Walter's epigraph from Bridget of Sweden, 'skyn bytokens lufe' ('skin betokens love,' p. 1) onwards, this volume pays elegant and persuasive attention to the subtlety, intimacy and cruelty of medieval skin-work. …