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Once more with feeling: Tactility and cognitive alterity, medieval and modern

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Abstract

This essay compares medieval and modern narratives of abnormal sensory perception with a focus on ‘phantom’ tactility. After considering the ways in which tactile perception is represented and managed in recent neuroscientific literature, particularly in Ramachandran and Blakeslee's popular work, Phantoms in the Brain, it turns to an account of extraordinary tactility in the Life of the twelfth-century English anchorite, Christina of Markyate. It argues that the medieval text can point to some of the sensory biases and disabling practices of current medical discourses about abnormal perception.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, the ‘Patient Voices’ section of the New York Times website (2010). The written works of Temple Grandin evidence the wide popularity currently achievable for memoirs written from the perspective of a minoritarian medical identity (see, for example, Grandin, 2010).

  2. For a discussion of the nineteenth-century emergence of ‘medical semiotics’ alongside Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes, see Ginzberg, 1989, 96–125.

  3. Caroline Walker Bynum's reflections on the cultural specificity of anorexia nervosa (Bynum, 1992, 141–143) were very influential in this regard.

  4. See also Hacking (2002).

  5. ‘There is no other sense than the five already listed – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching’ (Aristotle, 1957, 107).

  6. See, for example, Avicenna (1952, 27).

  7. CRPS involves mysterious pain and motor disability after relatively minor trauma (Bultitude and Rafal, 2010, 409). While mirror therapy has caught the attention of researchers, it is not the only (or even preferred) treatment for these conditions.

  8. For St. Cecilia's vita, see Aelfric (1900, 357–377); for lives of Catherine and Margaret written for early thirteenth-century religious women readers, see Seinte Katerine (d’Ardenne and Dobson, eds., 1981) and Seinte Marherete (Mack, ed., 1934).

  9. The relationship between Christina and Geoffrey has been much discussed, and not all readers see it in an entirely positive light. Dyan Elliott, for example, argues that it subordinates women's spiritual careers to men's well-being (Elliott, 2005, 177).

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Farina, L. Once more with feeling: Tactility and cognitive alterity, medieval and modern. Postmedieval 3, 290–301 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.16

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