Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page

Orifices on Folios 61 v –62 r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20

Bibliographic Data

ID12358372
AuthorsSarah Kay (0000-0002-5973-5891, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume26
Issue2-3
Pages127-147
Publication date2014-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueExemplaria (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1041-2573 • E-ISSN: 1753-3074
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1041257314z.00000000046
OpenAlexW1965496962
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

This essay explores how a “surface reading” can at the same time be a “symptomatic reading” when the surface in question is skin. Via a close reading of a double page containing the chapters on the weasel and the aspic in a fourteenth-century French copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20), it examines the treatment of bodily orifices in the text and the copy, including uncanny parallels between them and the parchment of these pages. The skins in question — those of the bestiary creatures, their readers, and the facing pages — are not flat but marked with recesses and gaps that function as symptoms of anxiety about excess as animal and that become overlaid with fantasy, which, however, remains informed by this anxiety. The bestiary page both jars bodily origins against cultural aspirations and exposes their collision, processes that the writings of Didier Anzieu can help to illumine

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Bestiary · Confusion · Creatures · Fantasy · Linguistics · Literature · Natural (archaeology · Parallels · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · French Literature and Criticism · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology

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