Havelok’s Bare Life and the Significance of Skin

Abstract

The points of departure for this chapter are twofold. First, I wish to explore the significance of skin in the context of its removal. When does flayed skin provide a support for symbolic activity, say in the context of medieval viewing or reading practices or by virtue of its deployment as a judicial penalty? When, conversely, does it operate only as an abject, material residue? As Sarah Kay has demonstrated in a series of recent articles, medieval narratives about flaying potentially trouble the practice of reading. The coincidence of flayed skin as a textual motif with the skin of the parchment on which the text is inscribed may even have served for readers and patrons as an unconscious point of identification with the book itself, whereby the book’s pages uncannily functioned as a double of the reader’s own skin (or, in the words of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, as an enveloping “Skin Ego”).¹ Furthermore, moving beyond the implications of flayed skin for human identity, Kay has sought to foreground ethical questions raised by medieval book production. Much as medieval accounts of flaying tend to be invested in maintaining a distinction between humans and (other) animals, there is also something profoundly unsettling about this process of constructing artifacts of human culture from the skins of slaughtered livestock.²