Abstract
This essay explores the impact on readers of the fact that medieval books are produced in a context involving the systematic exploitation of animals and written on parchment that is made from their skins. Connections sparked between this parchment support and the content of some of the texts copied on it can have uncanny effects, notably that, as skin, it becomes in fantasy a double of the readers’ own skin – for example, as an envelope, or as an opposing face. Texts discussed in this light include the Boucher d’Abbeville, Ysengrimus, and Sedulius Scottus's ‘Gloria nostra redit.’ The suture between the reader's skin and that of the text means that reading is charged with affect, and undermines the categorical demarcation between human beings and other animals insisted on by scholastic philosophy. An ethics of reading is one that responds to this ethos of the medieval page.
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Notes
All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
I simplify an argument that also drew on other thinkers.
However, claims of the mass slaughter of animals for book-production are overstated; parchment formed part of a complex agricultural economy and was not a luxury or excessive commodity (see Stinson, forthcoming).
All further citations of the fabliau are to this edition, by line number.
The name is surely to be read as a wry comment on the sheep's owner, the priest, who is cuckolded twice over by the butcher with women he ought not to have been sleeping with in the first place. Instead of being a metaphorical shepherd of his flock, he is a horned sheep.
See lines 339, 340, 369, 405, 414, 415, 416, 417, 425, 504, 532, 536 in the Nooman and van de Boogaard edition.
All further citations of Ysengrimus are to this edition, by book and line number.
This concept of surface develops that put forward in Deleuze's earlier Logique du Sens, discussed in relation to medieval reading in Kay (2006).
All citations and translations of the Latin poem ‘Gloria nostra redit’ are from Ziolkowski (1993).
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Kay, S. Legible skins: Animals and the ethics of medieval reading. Postmedieval 2, 13–32 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.48
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.48