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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
FLESH, as a signifier, is fluid. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, both the act of flaying and the removed skin itself represent a vast range of signifiers, sometimes seemingly contradictory. When practised as a punishment, Larissa Tracy correctly asserts that flaying serves to ‘figuratively [excise] the crimes and the identity of the accused’. However, the significance of the flayed skin does not end at the removal of identity; the dehumanizing act also provides the opportunity for transformation. For the monsters depicted in medieval Icelandic sagas, the removal of skin ‘enables them to act in support of, rather than in opposition to, the heroes in each saga’, allowing them fluidly to shift their roles in the romances away from the monstrous. Yet, the victim of the flaying was not always the only one to undergo change. As Frederika Bain observes, for both the reallife Aztecs and the characters in literary works such as Salman und Morolf, the wearing of flayed skin is a way to undergo a personal metamorphosis, and ‘skin-wearing is assumed to facilitate passage to an alternative state of being’. Flaying has grave consequences for flayed and flayer alike, as Michael Livingston and Emily Leverett explain. Finally, as several contributions to this volume suggest, the representation of Christ and St Bartholomew's flayed skins in art and literature provide audiences with means to witness and better understand both the human and the divine. Skin is also the substance of texts themselves – cured, scraped, stretched – it is the surface upon which these narratives, and all their incumbent meanings, are inscribed.
The variety of meanings this sign takes on is exemplified in the process of anthropodermic bibliopegy – the act of binding books in human skin. Like the flayed skin that makes up their binding, the owners of the books used them in a plethora of ways – to construct their own social and religious identity, to strike out against and dehumanize those with competing ideologies and to situate themselves within a larger social tradition. Yet, despite its variety of uses and prevalence as a plot device in modern works of horror fiction, anthropodermic bibliopegy was a historically rare occurrence. The rarity of the act notwithstanding, consistently recorded instances of its practice range from the Middle Ages until the present day, with purported examples residing in public and private libraries in both Europe and the United States.