The Signifying Body:

Dismemberment, Body Parts, and Embodiment

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities awards financial support to interdisciplinary faculty and graduate student Reading Groups, which meet regularly throughout the year and frequently invite speakers to address the groups and the campus on topics of interest to a broad range of disciplines.

In 2004 the proposal to host a reading group of interest to medievalists in a variety of disciplines centered on the theme of the body was accepted. 

“The Signifying Body” group provides a forum for careful consideration of the cultural products of the medieval period which use the body and its parts as sign and symbol in a variety of interesting ways.  Our dynamic discussions of the language of the body and its parts also have allowed entry into the questions of how and why medieval thinkers built signs and symbols.  The readings for this discussion group pair medieval texts and images with current critical discussions, including works-in-progress by group members and visiting scholars. 

While the reading group was initially proposed as a forum for medievalists from all disciplines to come together, in fact the reading group drew interest from scholars working across the time periods as well.  Participants have been scholars of African-American literature, Native-American literature, Monastic history, a medical doctor, and many others.  This variety has spawned wonderful discussions.

We have had a great first year and look forward to continued thriving discussion with old friends and new acquaintances. 

We welcome anyone interested in any element of the areas under discussion to join us for our monthly discussions.  Please contact me to receive copies reading lists, readings, or with any questions or comments.

Valerie M. Wilhite

Department of Comparative Literature

vwilhite@hotmail.com

Meetings: Past and Future

Original Objectives:

While most non-specialists think of the Middle Ages as a period that rejected the body, the truth is that during the later Middle Ages the body and its parts were given a unique power to function as symbol.  The troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh sang that his heart was in the hands of his beloved; his biographer, writing decades later, literalized the metaphor: the jealous husband fed his unsuspecting wife the heart of her lover.  The tale traveled to the North of France where it was turned into a romance and to Italy where Boccaccio included a version in his Decameron.  The movement from the abstract and metaphorical understanding or use of body parts towards the physical or literal is a part of the phenomena of the changing meanings of body parts that this reading group will be examining.

Recent scholarship in medieval studies has often focused on questions of the soul or the notions of selfhood.  Research that does focus on the topic of the body seeks to define the understanding of the body that can be determined from medieval texts and iconography.  However, close examination of the cultural products of the medieval period call into question the idea that the body was simply “understood” in a certain way.  A consciousness of how signs mean and how symbols are created emerges along with testimony of a conscious manipulation of the signifying power of body parts.  The body’s meaning, it would seem, is not simply “understood” by medieval thinkers: it is carefully constructed.

Body parts are endowed signifying power in a number of medieval texts from theology to romance.  A number of romances deal directly with the power of a birthmark to signify and for its power as sign to be manipulated.  Images of body parts emerge along the margins of manuscripts or at the center of cloisters.  The genealogy of princes leads not to a hero, but to a hybrid fairy: Melusine.  Abelard feared his own identity was overshadowed by the body part he lost; his lack now his sign.  Pilgrims heal their woes by seeking out the appropriate saintly body part, often encased by the later Middle Ages in elaborate reliquaries depicting the body part it holds.  The wounds of Christ are depicted without his body often in the shape of a vagina in images intended to aid contemplation.   

This reading group should create a venue for careful consideration of the ways the body and its parts function as sign and symbol allowing for a better understanding of body as medieval concept.   More importantly however, this investigation should allow us to determine how and why medieval thinkers built signs and symbols.

Reading List

Readings and Issues

The readings for this discussion group will pair medieval texts and images with current critical discussions, including works in progress by group members.  We will first determine in what way we can discuss the body without imposing our own notions of body onto those of a period so distant in the past.  General introduction to understanding the body can come through a brief consideration of such texts as Schilder’s The Image and Appearance of the Human Body and Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. 

We will begin to explore the way body parts mean with the case of Guillem de Cabestanh’s heart.  Just as the significance of Guillem’s body part was usurped, Abelard’s signifying body part shifts from sign of his sin to sign of punishment when the body part itself is taken.  Sarah Spence discusses the relation between body, text, and self in her “Text of the Body: Abelard and Guibert de Nogent” in Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century. 

We then will turn to two romances in which birthmarks are made signs whose meanings are manipulated by sly deceivers.  The message is clear, as Christine de Pizan often warns; the sign is not to be trusted for it is dependant upon the one who has constructed it.

What this means for questions of gender will come up not only Christine de Pizan, but in the Roman de Silence where again the difference in body parts is seen to only mean in so much as one allows it to for a female makes her way through the world as a male performer.  We will here be able to turn to two recent works: Gwendolyn Foster’s Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and Performance and Literary Hybrids: Cross-dressing, Shapeshifting, and Indeterminacy in Medieval and Modern French Narrative by Erika Hess.

We can look to Spence again in discussing the Abbot Suger who, she claims, imagines the text as body.  Bernard de Clairvaux’s Apologia can provide us with a criticism of Suger.  Hybrid bodies sculpted on cornices and crawling up columns in cloisters meant something far different to each.  In some ways this is the perfect place to examine how these two very different aesthetics come from a theology in which body parts signify differently.

This in turn will lead us into the realm of the sacred.  The move to make reliquaries in the shape of the body part they hold and to use glass in order to allow the body of Christ or the saint’s body part to show illustrates a will to give the physical body more import.  Christ’s body is dissected and signifying impact doled out to his wounds and his heart, as in the fascinating images examined by Hamburger in Nuns as Artists and Cynthia Hahn’s Portrayed on the Heart.

This topic can best be examined only through exchanges between a variety of disciplines including History, Art History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Gender Studies, Literature, Architecture etc.  We hope to find a forum for stimulating conversations and exciting discoveries.