The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Nina Taunton, Darryll Grantley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351893862
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and p

1
Introduction

Nina Taunton and Darryll Grantley

The late medieval and early modern body has been attracting critical attention for well over a decade now. Poststructuralism, evolving beyond semiotics (though never abandoning it altogether) has sent critics down paths which merge the semiotic with the somatic. Incorporating the principles of semiology as a means of interpreting varieties of discourses around the body, critics have increasingly resisted assumptions about the grounding of culture in language with its universal system of codes and structures (and therefore ultimately unifying objectives) towards the altogether more bumpy terrain of bodily signifying practices. On its journey from linguistic to somatic signification, the body has wound round itself a spiral of proliferating and competing discourses. To quote Keir Elam quoting Julia Kristeva:

[t]he reaction against the linguistic turn and its prophylactic sterilizing of the body has been what we might term the corporeal turn, which has shifted attention from the word to the flesh, from the semantic to the somatic' - a turn 'pre-announced in Julia Kristeva's notion of the preverbal and pre-semantic semiotic chora, the battleground of the subject's competing bodily drives which 'makes the semiotized body a place of permanent scission.' (1996, 143)¹

Cultural historians, literary scholars and feminist theorists, having rescued the body from the margins of critical attention and having intensively investigated it and its parts from the point of view (for example) of the material, the ludic, the carnivalesque and the grotesque, are now turning their attention to areas still unincorporated into the mainstream of poststructuralist studies of pre-modern corporeal materiality.² Indeed, the fertile field of studies on the body more traditionally associated with the human sciences - biology, anthropology, sociology, medicine - is now being thoroughly picked over for multiple and multilayered semiotic-somatic meaning, while the totalizing impulse of semiology has now more or less been superseded by theories which stress instability, plurality, scission and discontinuity - and which reinscribe the body into narratives of difference and otherness. In what he calls the 'body boom' in Shakespeare studies, Keir Elam lists a 'ghost army of early modern organisms to anatomize. The Shakespearean critical industry has become the Shakespearean Corps' (1996, 142, 144). The boom has extended way beyond the bodies in Shakespeare. Embracing interdisciplinarity and postmodernism, writers on the early modern body continue to make their own significant contribution to a corpus of works travelling full circle from rejection of totalizing philosophies which assume the universal in the particular to a deeper appreciation of the unstable, the discontinuous, the fragmented and the marginal in pre-modern culture. For example, as Jonathan Sawday has discovered, the early modern vogue for anatomies, both textual and corporeal, could betoken both an interest in the workings of the insides and outsides of human (and animal) bodies, and fears that textual/corporeal parts, once atomized and anatomized, never reassemble into the whole that they once were. In The Body Emblazoned, he explores the paradoxical function of dissection, which provided a means both of expanding knowledge of the body, and of breaking up the philosophical and religious body of knowledge whose goal was universality and completeness (1995, 1-15).

The present volume intervenes in debates such as these, with a collection of essays which demonstrate that work on the body continues to break new ground. In moving away from Shakespeare somewhat, the essays carry forward debates about grotesque, spiritualized, mortified, unaccommodated, sexualized, institutionalized, textualized, regimented, destabilized, demonized, dissolved bodies into areas reaching beyond existing Shakespeare criticism. Taking as its chronological starting point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume proceeds to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in literature. It then examines sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies and the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends in the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference.

The volume as a whole pushes forward postmodern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modem narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own particular forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes this knowledge? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them?

The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods. By way of illustrating these, it is useful to compare examples of the representation of the body in one genre - the drama separated by a century and a half. The mid- to late fifteenth-century play Wisdom, Who is Christ, is in many ways a traditional medieval morality in which the action consists principally of the corruption of the soul through sin, and its subsequent redemption.³ What makes the play a slightly unusual example of the genre is that the central protagonist, rather than being an embodied everyman figure, is represented in an abstracted way as a disembodied soul. The disembodiment of the soul has a particular point in the moral scheme of the play, since the piece incorporates (though it does not actually stage) reference to the medieval devotional trope of the debate between the soul and the body. This trope articulates a long medieval tradition of religious discomfort with corporeality which was to endure through the Renaissance and beyond, despite the advent of humanism. In Wisdom, Who is Christ, the corruption of the soul comes about precisely through the satisfaction of physical appetites. The body becomes entirely moralized and only exists in the play as a concept within a process of constant cosmic struggle, in a way that can be argued to be entirely consistent with the theocratic world-view of pre-humanist medieval culture.

Leaping forward some hundred and forty years to the early seventeenth century, an apparently rather different conception of the body is to be found at the centre of King Lear in the heath scene, where Lear says to and of the wretched beggar that Edgar has become: 'Is man no more but this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on 's are sophisticated, thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art' (3.4.92-7). The sensibility here appears to be at considerable variance with that found in the earlier play. Though this scene presents man as bereft of those dignities which distinguish him from the beasts, and might be considered to present an antithetic view to that of humanist aspiration, its humanism is evident in the way in which bodily reality is recognized, if not embraced. Whereas the fifteenth-century play advocates a disavowal of the body, a theological perspective that might be considered particularly medieval, here the body is brought into play as the only sure reality of human existence. 'Unaccommodated man' is somehow the real man or 'the thing itself', albeit that he is a 'poor, bare, forked animal', whereas in the medieval play there is a clearer separation between the soul and the body, the former being by implication what is real about human life (particularly in the context of cosmic moral struggle for the soul of man).

However, if this is the point of difference between the two visions, a similarity is also present in that both incorporate a tension between the attempt to validate the quality of humanity through distancing it from the physical or animal (either in circumstances of life, or in more spiritual and moral ways) on the one hand, and a recognition of the hard reality of human existence as being grounded in the corporeal on the other. In both visions can be discerned a conflict between the striving towards an ideal of humanity, whether in theocratic or in humanist terms, and an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that corporeal existence reduces man to far less than his aspiration would have him. It is the same opposition between the striving to god-like dignity and the reality of material existence that is the source of the anguish in Hamlet's impassioned speech: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god - the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?' (2.2.293-8).

Aside from the issue of corporeality as an aspect of human identity, both texts also use the physical body as a powerful signifier. In Wisdom, Who is Christ, though it is the soul rather than the body that is the topic of the play, it is by means of the actor's body on stage that the corruption of the soul is demonstrated. At the outset of this highly ceremonial play, the Soul (Anima) enters in a cloth of white and gold and there is a detailed direction for her magnificent dress. When, however, the Soul has been compromised by the corruption of its component parts, Mind, Will and Understanding, she re-enters in a state of physical defilement, and there is the direction: 'Here rennyt owt from wnder pe horrybyll mantyll of pc Soull seven small boys in pe lyknes of dewyllys and so retorne ageyn' (912 s.d.). Although it is done by different means and for somewhat different purposes, the way in which the decline into nakedness of Edgar in King Lear is used to parallel the stripping away of Lear's kingly pomp is a not wholly dissimilar use of a corporeal image.

Of course these texts are both works of drama, and the physical aspect of representation, particularly bodily reality, is ever present in a way that is not always true of other forms of writing. However, an interest in the human body might be considered a natural product of humanist interest in the material and philosophical realities of terrestrial existence. Renaissance humanism quite understandably propelled the contemplation of the human body to the centre stage of early modern culture, whether in respect of the human form in art, or the body as material for self-fashioning, as a source of metaphor, as a commodity of exchange, as a powerful dimension of gender conflict, as a site of contention over sexuality, as a source of political or magical power, or as a signifier of otherness, to name but a few facets of this potent focus of cultural discourse. The essays in this volume engage all these topics and more, but the historical remit of the volume has deliberately not been restricted to the early modern period. This has been in order to give recognition to the fact that, paradoxically within the theocratic and persistently anti-carnal discourses of the medieval period, the body had a powerful role to play. The humanist engagement with the body reposed on a long tradition of intense, if sometimes uncomfortable interest in corporeality. In the veneration of Saints and relics, the body had a major part to play as a signifier, commodity, object of worship and source of magical power. This was reinforced in the written culture in the Saint's legend, the most ubiquitous form of popular writing from the Conquest to the Renaissance. The body as a source of metaphor was also a recurrent feature in medieval writing. The body of the Virgin Mary - particularly as the human vehicle of the incarnation of Christ - was one of the more evident examples of this, as in some of the Marian devotional lyrics in which every part of the Virgin's body became loaded with some doctrinal significance.

It is thus with the acknowledgement that there are as many continuities as distinctions between medieval and Renaissance or early modern culture, that this collection attempts to straddle both, though beyond opening in the late Middle Ages and closing in the late seventeenth century, there has been no attempt to arrange essays chronologically. They are arranged, rather, in four broad topic areas defined by a focus on gender, on work, on the mystical and on otherness. The four essays grouped under 'Gendered Bodies' investigate aspects of the blurring of the semiotic-somatic dichotomy. It is Claire Marshall's contention that the disciplinary technologies of fasting and flagellation, originally designed to suppress and control the female body, evolved into strategies of empowerment, becoming a way of accessing the sacred whilst bypassing clerical authority. Thus the theme of bodily inscription is carried forward into the realm of gender politics. The religious life of women in the later Middle Ages was conceived as one of chastity and enclosure. Holy women were ideally sealed away from the world and silenced. These practices were intended to correct the female body's natural grotesqueness and its identification with the corruptions of the flesh. However, late medieval female piety, often expressed through extreme displays of emotion and violence which inscribed the female body by wounding and mutilation, blood, disease and self-starvation could be used to challenge the very structures that had first positioned these women. This bodily route to the sacred was enacted in the work of two late medieval mystics: Margery Kempe and St Bridget of Sweden, and Marshall's essay explores the manner in which their exemplary practices of affective spirituality, with its focus on the bodily, fed debates about the growth of lay piety at the end of the Middle Ages.

The second essay in this section, which deals with Marlowe's plays in terms of gender categories, responds to the semiotic-somatic tension by arguing that Marlowe's plays dismantle the seemingly stable, uniform and extralinguistic notions of masculinity and femininity, as represented by male and female bodies, in order to expose these conceptions as ideological and semiotic constructs - that is, as gendered bodies which signify and negotiate relationships of power. Feldmann looks at representations of 'manliness' and its bodily signifiers in these plays through the heroes' desire (as in Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris) to fix bodies in order to fix meaning and power. Yet textually, the body, and above all the female body, appears in excess of all classifying categories, as the vanishing point of legibility and authority.

Barry Taylor's contribution takes the disappearance of gender-defining boundaries a stage further. He considers Book II, Canto xii of Spenser's The Faerie Queene as symptomatic of the dissolution of binary classifications set up within the structure of the poem as a whole. He singles out the tableau of the naked, 'effeminated' body of the boy knight Verdant as a means of accessing the relationship between critical readings which express anxieties about the self-cancelling impulses of the poem as a whole, and the trope of fluid femininity. The essay negotiates the submerging of semiotic-somatic distinctions by an interrogation of the collapse of the seductive power of the bodily pleasures experienced by the reader in the Bower of Bliss episode into anxieties about dissolution of bodily boundaries. Taylor treats this collapse as an analogue of the poem's structural divergence from traditional (masculine) shape-defining epic forms.

Felicity Dunworth's work rounds off the first section's preoccupation with the embroilment of the semantic with the somatic. All four essays associate violence with the feminine - through self-mutilation, passivity, dangerous fluidity - and Dunworth contributes to this association by showing how complex concepts of maternity used and compounded the function of maternal corporeality as a material and emblematic signifier of violence. This violence, Dunworth argues, has the power to evoke multiple responses to the plight and suffering of the mother, and the essay considers the means by which these responses are harnessed together in representations of private outcomes to public friction. Represented both rhetorically and by means of dramatic spectacle, the mother's body, simultaneously inscribed as predator and victim, functions both as carrier of diegetic capability and multiple meaning as emblem of suffering.

In the next section, 'Occupational Bodies', knowledge of the body is arrived at in various ways, through sectioning (dissecting) social or cultural difference explored in new contexts: educational ones, gentle and non-gentle status, inscriptions of the body into institutional spaces that have the aim of securing regimes of power but have instead an undermining effect, obliterations of the body in scriptorial practices which in their anxiety to preserve the secrets of unspeakable and unthinkable crimes on the body have the effect of obliterating it altogether. The first essay in this section notably extends recent critical focus (begun by Francis Barker in The Tremulous Body) on the propensity of the corporeal in early modern writing to collapse into the textual. In his reworking of the papers relating to the infamous Overbury murder, Alan Stewart argues that the abused body of Thomas Overbury ('the body personal'), the focal point of the trials of Frances Howard and the servants involved in the murder, materially disappeared into a body of paperwork ('the body archival') which significantly proliferated in James I's reign. But while the material body of Overbury was jostled, in the indictment of Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, husband of Frances Howard and intimate friend of the murdered man, from centre stage by the body archival, the two bodies - the personal and the archival - continued to be bound together. Stewart argues that the intimate transactions of the secretaries in the secrecy of their closets away from the public sphere of political action were, along with the transactions which generated them, inseparable in the minds of contemporaries, because of their figuration as physically intimate, sexual relations. Stewart finds embedded in the Attorney-General Francis Bacon's plans for the prosecution a strategy which displaces the crime perpetrated upon Overbury's body onto a far greater crime against the body - that of sodomy. Thus one kind of bodily danger is averted through reports and letters, only to re-emerge, literally inscribed as a menace alarmingly multiplied in the proliferation and circulation of correspondence to do with the case.

Nina Taunton next looks at the relationship between the textual and the corporeal from another angle - the preoccupation with training and containing the bodies of soldiers textually in the military conduct books which proliferated in the war-torn years of the 1590s, Taking the regimentation of the fighting body as both an index of power and as an articulation of the anxieties of powerlessness, the essay examines in the manuals and an exemplary dramatic text the obsession with military spaces as a hallmark of a decade when the need to create a standing army was being most urgently pressed. In a discussion about military orderings of space, this essay examines the connection between the military camp's status as a 'territorial assemblage' (that is, as practised space, defined by the bodies of soldiers which inhabit it and the regulated activities performed within it) and its status as a written narrative capable of producing meaning in more than one medium.

Darryll Grantley's work explores the corporeal-textual contradiction from the standpoint of the relationship between the semiotics of elite status and the somatic practices involved in its construction. Mulcaster's 'bodie of presence' both draws attention to the actuality of the material body and underscores the elitist nature of the social conditions in which humanist education played such a crucial role in training the body. Inscriptions of the body onto the broader canvas of social identity emerged in debates between those theorists who sought to defend the position of the established landed elite and those who championed the cause of the 'new men' as educational challenges to notions of the innateness of the quality of nobility already being put into question by economic changes and social mobility. Grantley concludes that though the debates of the sixteenth century appeared at first sight to interrogate essentialist notions of gentility, Mulcaster's theories, in their articulation of the social foundations of the ethos of physical rigour in the education of boys illustrate the fact that what they did was simply change the terms of reference.

The essays in section 3, 'Mystical Bodies', continue the work of moving forward from existing publications on t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages
• 3 The Constructions and Deconstructions of Gendered Bodies in Selected Plays of Christopher Marlowe
• 4 Armour, Flows and Bliss: Liquefactions of Gender in The Faerie Queene Book II
• 5 'O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain': Violence and the Mother's Body in Elizabethan Drama
• 6 The Body Archival: Re-reading the Trial of the Earl of Somerset
• 7 A Camp 'well planted': Encamped Bodies in 1590s Military Discourses and Chapman's Caesar and Pompey
• 8 'A bodie of presence': Early Modern Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster
• 9 Regimen Animarum et Corporum: The Body and Spatial Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Magic
• 10 The Bodies of Demons
• 11 The Miraculous Royal Body in James VI and I, Jonson and Shakespeare, 1590-1609
• 12 'Seeing' Contagious Bodies in Early Modern London
• 13 'All protean forms in venery': The Textual and Apparitional Body in John Marston's Verse Satires
• 14 Travellers' Tails: Bodily Fictions in Early Modern Narratives of Cultural Difference
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index