Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Skin is the parchment upon which identity is written; class, race, ethnicity, and gender are all legible upon the human surface. Removing skin tears away identity, and leaves a blank slate upon whichlaw, punishment, sanctity, or monstrosity can be inscribed; whether as an act of penal brutality, as a comic device, or as a sign of spiritual sacrifice, it leaves a lasting impression about the qualities and nature of humanity. Flaying often functioned as an imaginative resource for medieval and early modern artists and writers, even though it seems to have been rarely practiced in reality. From images of Saint Bartholomew holding his skin in his arms, to scenes of execution in Havelok the Dane, to laws that prescribed it as a punishment for treason, this volume explores the ideaand the reality of skin removal - flaying - in the Middle Ages. It interrogates the connection between reality and imagination in depictions of literal skin removal, rather than figurative or theoretical interpretations of flaying, and offers a multilayered view of medieval and early modern perceptions of flaying and its representations in European culture. Its two parts consider practice and representation, capturing the evolution of flaying as both an idea and a practice in the premodern world.
Larissa Tracy is Associate Professor, Longwood University.
Contributors: Frederika Bain, Peter Dent, Kelly DeVries, Valerie Gramling, Perry Neil Harrison, Jack Hartnell, Emily Leverett, Michael Livingston, Sherry C.M. Lindquist, Asa Mittman, Mary Rambaran-Olm, William Sayers, Christina Sciacca, Susan Small, Larissa Tracy, Renée Ward
THE idea of flaying in the Middle Ages looms much larger in the mind and the literature than it seems to have in real life and law. Flaying as an answer to treason was the ultimate rejection, disassociation and erasure of identity and, as such, highlights the deeply culturally damaging acts for which it was used as a punishment. The crime of treason held particular power, being ‘as much a social as legal breach and one rooted in the viciousness of character’. In late medieval romance, such viciousness is often attributed to the enemies of Christianity, particularly Saracens. Flaying captured the imagination, and incidents of flaying are often moments of excessive, even fantastic, violence. As such, it should not be surprising that flaying appears in two examples of flamboyantly violent late medieval romance: the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem (hereafter Siege) and Richard Coer de Lyon (hereafter RCL). Both are found in the mid-fifteenth century manuscript British Library, Add. MS 31042, also known as the London Thornton Manuscript. However, in these fourteenth-century Middle English romances, flaying is performed by Christians invoking ‘in a single shocking image, the primitive significance of treason’, rather than by the Saracens against whom they fight and with whom such actions were often associated.
Flaying of animal flesh was commonplace in the Middle Ages. It has been applied not only in cooking, but also in parchment making, in the construction of the very connections we have to that moment: books. Medieval manuscripts themselves carry symbolic value just as much as the words on their pages. In the hands of a reader (or perhaps in the hands of a critic hundreds of years later), the manuscript can at once represent the immortality promised through salvation – the persistence of the body after death – while at the same time creating that message through a still-used piece of skin. Books offered the opportunity to connect flaying both with the animal itself and with salvation; the heart of the saved and the body of Christ are compared to a stretched animal skin turned to parchment. Sarah Kay notes that ‘flayed skin can be conceptually detached from the life that once was and serve, instead, as a means to immortality’