O r i gi n a l A r t i c l e

L e gi b l e s k i n s : A n i m a l s a n d t h e
e t h i c s o f m e d i e va l r e a d i n g

S a ra h Kay

Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, New Jersey.

Abstract

This essay explores the impact on readers of the fact that medieval books

are produced in a context involving the systematic exploitation of animals and written
on parchment that is made from their skins. Connections sparked between this
parchment support and the content of some of the texts copied on it can have uncanny
effects, notably that, as skin, it becomes in fantasy a double of the readers’ own skin –
for example, as an envelope, or as an opposing face. Texts discussed in this light
include the Boucher d’Abbeville, Ysengrimus, and Sedulius Scottus’s ‘Gloria nostra
redit.’ The suture between the reader’s skin and that of the text means that reading is
charged with affect, and undermines the categorical demarcation between human
beings and other animals insisted on by scholastic philosophy. An ethics of reading is
one that responds to this ethos of the medieval page.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2011) 2, 13–32.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.48

The starting point for this article is the historical fact that, during the Middle
Ages, books were copied on parchment, and parchment is a processed form of
animal skin. While today we may think of books as inorganic commodities – or
even as virtual, electronic ones – the whole of medieval book production
operates using what were once living things. The act of writing comprises the
touch of human skin on animal skin, goose feather pen in hand, oak gall ink in a
horn inkwell close by; and reading involves renewing this contact of skin on
skin, as the feather’s traces are deciphered. However refined the parchment, it

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still bears traces of the living animal from which it derives. One can tell the flesh
side from the hair side of the skin; the backbone remains perceptible as a ghostly
imprint, and the curve of the animal’s body persists in the natural curl of the
pages; tiny veins can often be made out, as can the random discolorations, scars,
and insect damage that marked the creature in life. The markers of parchment’s
organic nature are not solely visual; parchment feels like skin, and an animal
odor inheres in the folios still. Its animal origin is also perceptible in manifold
reminders of the processes of the skin’s manufacture; even high-grade parchment
has occasional holes, cuts, scrapes, tears, or stretch marks, which result from
flaying an animal and then cleaning, stretching, drying, and scraping the hide
(see, for example, Camille, 1998, 40–42; Durling, 2004; Kay, 2006, 35–36).

These observations are not new, but they take on new force in the light

of the current ‘animal turn’ in the humanities (compare to, for example, Mann,
1987, 36–37; Scheidegger, 1989, 267–275; Holsinger, 2009). It is common
to distinguish two directions in animal studies: one, animal activism and the
promotion of animal rights, the other, posthumanism in the sense of recon-
sidering human specificity in relation to (other) animals (Dekoven, 2009;
Lundblad, 2009). This distinction between advocacy and ontology is far from
robust, however; to take just one indication of its fragility, Deleuze’s concept of
becoming aims precisely to resituate metaphysics as an ethics: ‘Tout come on
e´vitait de definer un corps par ses organes et ses fonctions, on e´vite de le definer
par des caracte`res Espe`ce ou Genre: on cherche a` faire le compte des ses affects.
On appelle “e´thologie” une telle e´tude, et c’est en ce sens que Spinoza e´crit une
ve´ritable Ethique’ (‘just as we avoided defining a body by its organs and
functions, we avoid defining it in terms of the characters of Species and Genus:
we seek to take stock of its affects. This kind of study is what is called
“ethology” and it’s in this sense that Spinoza genuinely writes an Ethics’;
Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 314).

1

Pragmatically, too, the circumstances of

medieval literacy undo any clear separation between concern for animal
suffering on the one hand, and the constitution of humanity as a genus apart on
the other. Books are simultaneously the product of animal exploitation and
the acme of human culture. While the fact of reading might be thought to draw
a category distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ this distinction is troubled by
the ways we read – how and to what extent are the main focus of this essay. The
term ‘ethics’ in my title is intended as a bridge between posthumanist inquiry
and concern with the treatment of animals in the Middle Ages. The parchment
book brings its own ethos along with it, and this article explores the ethics
of reading that the encounter with it involves.

B o o k s a n d A n i m a l s

Despite these manifestations of animals, the origin of parchment in animal
skin is easily overlooked. I am guilty of this oversight myself. Some years ago

1 All translations are

mine, unless
otherwise
indicated.

Kay

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I worked on the potential connections between texts about bodies that were
flayed (such as the Life of Saint Bartholomew) and the books made of flayed
skin on which these texts were transmitted (Kay, 2004, 2006). I used the
concept of suture to argue that, for the reader of narratives involving flaying,
the parchment support might cease to be a merely neutral writing surface and
resume its significance as flayed skin. By suture I mean a short-circuiting
between the usually distinct levels of text and book which might entirely escape
conscious perception, but which nevertheless obtrudes on the reader. The effect
of this short-circuiting is uncanny in the sense that it insinuates a disturbance
in the field of symbolization, even if this disturbance is not itself symbolized. In
the case of flaying narratives, I proposed that the uncanny conjunction of flayed
skin in the text with the flayed skin of the page served for readers and patrons as
an unconscious point of identification with the book whereby it came to serve
as a double of their own skin. This second skin could be conceived as being like
an envelope, an idea I developed using Didier Anzieu’s theory of the Skin Ego;
or it might be conceived as a surface connecting a series of orifices, an approach
inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens (Kay, 2006).

2

In this present essay

I return to Anzieu and Deleuze, but while I stay with Le Moi peau (Anzieu,
1995) I derive my Deleuzian perspective from the chapter on visage´ite´ (usually
translated ‘faciality’) in Mille plateaux which Deleuze co-authored with Fe´lix
Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 205–234). These two theoretical models
are not intended to exhaust the possibilities of reading medieval texts as skin
but serve as examples of how to do so.

For Anzieu, the Skin Ego is a developmental stage in which a child represents

itself for the first time as being contained within its own skin (Deleuze and
Guattari’s position will be presented later). This stage inaugurates a sense of
selfhood, an awareness of relation to the world outside the self, and the
possibility of communication between the self and this world. However, it is
also associated with fantasies about flaying since, to assume a skin of its own,
the child must progress from its earlier conviction that it shares a skin with its
mother; fantasmatically the Skin Ego can only be achieved by the child tearing
itself away from this shared skin (Anzieu, 1995). For Anzieu, the three
fundamental functions of the primitive Skin Ego are to act as a container for the
self, a marker of the boundary between the self and the world, and a recording
surface. The membrane that constitutes the Skin-Ego is grounded in the child’s
physiological skin, but it is also a psychic skin that, although it would be
premature to call it metaphorical, is poised on the threshold of figuration and
provides a basis for future symbolic activity. For Guillaumin, a follower of
Anzieu, the act of reading, even when the page is that of a modern book, is a
material experience which conjures up a psychic skin modeled on the earlier Skin
Ego (Guillaumin, 1980): the reader feels contained within the text, divided by it
from the outside world, and encircled by signification. Although Guillaumin
does not cite Augustine, a very similar view of the book as enveloping the reader

2 I simplify an

argument that also
drew on other
thinkers.

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like a second skin is also found in Confessions XIII.xv.16. God’s word, says
Augustine, covers humanity in the manner of a great book that is stretched out
like the firmament; it resembles the skins the first humans wore in Eden to cover
their nakedness but, as an eternal and authoritative skin, it counters and
redeems humanity’s earlier skin, which is carnal and mortal:

Who but you, O God, has made for us a solid firmament of authority over
us in your divine scripture? For ‘the heaven will fold up like a book’ (Isaiah
34:4) and now ‘like a skin [sicut pellis] it is stretched out’ above us (Psalms
103:2). Your divine scripture has more sublime authority since the death
of the mortal authors through whom you provided it for us. You know,
Lord, you know how you clothed human beings with skins when through
sin they became mortal (Genesis 3:21). So you have stretched out the
firmament of your book like a skin [unde sicut pellem extendisti
firmamentum libri tui] y . Indeed, by the very fact of their death the
solid authority of your utterances published by them is in a sublime way
‘stretched out’ over everything inferior. While they were alive on earth, it
was not stretched out to express this supreme authority. You had not
‘stretched out the heaven like a skin,’ you had not diffused everywhere the
renoun of their death [nondum sicut pellem caelum extenderas, nondum
mortis eorum famam usquequaque dilataveras]. (Augustine, trans.
Chadwick, 1991, 282–283)

As this and other passages in Augustine suggest, the medieval page qua skin is

especially well-placed to replicate (even if unconsciously) the juncture between
the material and symbolic realms that constitutes the basis of the Skin Ego
(compare with Pe´pin, 1955, especially 301–305). Depending on the quality of
the parchment, I argued earlier, the book might potentially serve its medieval
readers’ fantasy as a humble and abject skin, a masochistic flayed skin, a porous
or wounded skin; or, in the case of luxury codices, as a protective and eternal
skin, a sublime envelope.

Although this previous work on flaying was attentive to the materiality of the

medieval book and its potential impact on the subjectivity of the reader, I now
see that it in fact performed an enormous leap. Intent only on how the
parchment page could serve as a double of human readers’ skin, I leapt over the
animal. This jump was the less excusable as several of the texts included in my
research at that time concerned animals. In fact it is far easier to find medieval
stories about animals being skinned than to find stories about human flaying.
Most narratives involving human skin are antique, and were thus probably not
originally associated with parchment books at all, whereas there is a historical
concordance between the rise of book production and texts about animal skins.
The twelfth to fourteenth century vernaculars are prolifically productive of
fables, beast epic, bestiaries, werewolf tales, other stories of metamorphosis, or

Kay

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legends of human genealogies with animal ancestors. In this period too, the
Metamorphoses of Ovid are rewritten in French with renewed and minute
attention to the process and meaning of human-animal transformation. There
are reminders everywhere that animal skins are bearers of meaning that can be
assumed by speakers of human language or by selves that at other times inhabit
human bodies. The potential for human readers to assume the folios of their
books both as animal skin and as their own skin is inscribed in the language of
the period, since the same medieval Latin word pellis, as the passage quoted
from Augustine shows, can refer to both human and animal skin and to
parchment, as does the French word pel. For example, a clerk is criticized for
keeping his nose in his book: ‘Torne et retorne cel sautier; /torne et retorne cele
pel’ (‘He is forever leafing through that Psalter, he turns the skin/page again and
again’; Delbouille, 1936, ll. 166–167). The fragility of the divide between
humans and (other) animals is thus constantly exposed.

When now, instead of ignoring the animal origin of the page, I focus on it,

I see that the point is not to ask how medieval readers felt about parchment
acting as a double of their own skin. The questions are, rather, to what extent do
texts written on parchment give readers the sense of having an animal skin?
What kind of uncanny effects arise from feeling oneself momentarily thrown
into, or face to face with, an animal skin? And why are these effects so easy to
misrecognize that we overlook the animality of the page? The suture that
discloses the book’s uncanny covering of the reader in an animal skin is typically
accompanied by desublimation: by expressions of violence, crudeness, sacrilege,
or humor that insinuate the reader’s mortality along with that of the book (we
don’t need to keep company with Augustine to the extent of condemning this
process as sinful).

3

Its counterpart is a sublimation expressed as the impulse to

misrecognize the animal nature of the page and of the self – to envisage it
instead as a sublime and abstract signifying system, which, in its drastic
decorporealization, is no less uncanny. An ethics of reading addresses precisely
these uncanny effects and the affects that circulate round them to disclose the
indeterminate status of ‘the human’ in the Middle Ages.

After a section illustrating the phenomenon of suture, the two following sections

of this essay study moments of desublimation in which narratives about flaying a
sheep and a wolf might invite readers to assume the animal skin as their own
envelope or Skin Ego. The final two sections consider how this effect is de-
corporealized or sublimated by a different form of reading in which the page, rather
than enclosing the reader within its animal hide, offers itself as an abstract face.

S h e e p a n d S u t u r e

Although almost any sizable mammal from rabbits to cows could be used for
parchment manufacture, in Western Europe the animals employed were calves

3 For this

understanding of
the terms
desublimation and
sublimation in
relation to
corporeality, see
Kay (2004, 2006).

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and, even more commonly, sheep, because sheep were selectively bred for the
whiteness of their wool, and thus also presented evenly white skins for writing
on. Whereas early modernists have done much to explore the implications of
the advent of print technology, medievalists have been slow to address the
footprint of medieval book production (but see Stinson, 2009 and 2011;
Holsinger, forthcoming). Clearly, it formed part of the larger economy of
farming, alongside the production of meat, wool, candles, glue, and other
leather goods (Stinson, forthcoming, examines the extent of this integration);
and beyond that of other culturally significant social and commercial domains
such as transportation and hunting, and all the diverse trades and practices
arising from the use of fur. While the rise in medieval book production in
the fourteenth century is concurrent with a huge expansion in the wool industry,
parchment-making seems to be especially correlated with meat-production since
only young animals (usually lambs or calves), viz. animals that had not yet
bred, were routinely used for writing on (Stinson, 2011, 7).

4

Focusing on the medieval page as sheepskin enables us to contribute a quite

different interpretation to traditional images like the one of David and Goliath
reproduced in Figure 1. In this bas de page we see not just David the shepherd
boy, fending off with his sling Goliath the warrior, but also the psalmist-poet
with his sheepskins to hand, pitted against the aristocrat, his body marked with
the all too human script of wounds and blood. In this image, the sheep
are evenly stacked up as if already virtually a quire of the codex in which they

Figure 1: Bas-de-page image representing David in combat with Goliath from folio 224v of Johannes
Friburgensis’s Summa confessorum, Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts No. 82,
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Reproduced with
permission of Princeton University Library.

4 However, claims of

the mass slaughter
of animals for
book-production
are overstated;
parchment formed
part of a complex
agricultural
economy and was
not a luxury or
excessive
commodity (see
Stinson,
forthcoming).

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are drawn. The relation between the sheep and the bleeding warrior gives pause
for thought. Is the craft of writing to be preferred to brute force? Or is injury to
one warrior in fact less brutal than the slaughter of a quire’s worth of sheep?
Whatever the answer, this question, the unforeseen address, on the part of the
bas de page, to the production of the manuscript in which it occurs, is an
example of suture.

Clear evidence exists that some medieval authors were aware of this uncanny

potential for suture in their technology of book production. Among the riddles
included in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book are several concerning books and
writing. Most notable is Riddle 24, which begins,

Mec feonda sum feore besny“ede,
woruldstrenga binom, wætte si““an,
dyfde on wætre, dyde eft “onan,
sette on sunnan “ær ic swi“e beleas
herum “am “e ic hæfde. Heard mec si““an
snaq´ seaxses ecg, sindrum begrunden;
fingras feoldan.
[A life-thief stole my world-strength,/ripped off flesh and left me skin,/
dipped me in water and drew me out,/stretched me bare in the tight sun;/
the hard blade, clean steel, cut,/scraped, fingers folded, shaped me; quoted,
translated, and discussed by Holsinger, 2009, 621–622.]

Like its fellows, this riddle is spoken in the first person. It is pronounced first

from the point of view of the sheep, and then from that of the page that, later
in the same riddle, announces itself as part of an ornate Bible. This impossible
transition of the speaking ‘I’ from sheep to page captures the uncanny short-
circuit between animal, text, and book. Another medieval example is this
sardonic Latin verse from a fourteenth-century mortuary role: ‘Vilior est
huma[na] caro quam pellis ovina;/extrahitur pellis et scribitur intus et extra;/si
moriatur homo, moritur caro, pellis et ossa’ (‘Human flesh is viler than a sheep’s
skin. Its skin is taken off and written on inside and out. But if a man dies, flesh,
skin and bones die’; Delisle, 1866, 390). Unlike human beings with their
pretentions to eternal life, dead sheep really are enduringly useful; from this
pragmatic viewpoint, a dead human is merely meat. A great many other short
comic texts in Latin, French and English comment on the value of dead sheep,
particularly as a food source and writing surface, sometimes opposing their
value to that of other animals or items (Ziolkowski, 1993, 69–78, 133). One
of them, Sedulius Scottus’s ‘Gloria nostra redit,’ is discussed in the last section of
this essay.

The fiction of the eternal life of dead sheep is an irreverent counterpoint to

the familiar image of the Lamb of God. When the sheep’s voice addresses the
reader from the parchment folio, it directly burlesques a small number of texts

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in which the page is, indeed, identified with Christ as Lamb, for example in the
Middle English Charters of Christ (poems in the form of words issued from the
cross where the crucified Jesus is both the speaker and the parchment document
itself inscribed with God’s contract to redeem humanity). More broadly,
emphasis on the pragmatic value of dead sheep reacts to the eagerness elsewhere
in medieval culture to allegorize sheep as the Savior. Proponents of animal
studies are critical of the move to treat animals primarily as figures for human
preoccupations (see Braidotti, 2009), but perhaps medieval allegory should
at least be recognized as provoking and assisting in its own desacralization.

Starting from the fact that, in a book, what speaks or is legible about

an animal is its skin, we need to explore an ethics of medieval reading located
on the surface as opposed to in the so-called depths of a text. An Old French
fabliau about a butcher and a sheep, an example of desublimation which is
both coarse and sacrilegious, provides just such a focus on surface as it offers
characters and readers the possibility of assuming the sheepskin as a double of
their own.

A s s u m i n g a S h e e p ’s S k i n

The fabliau of the Boucher d’Abbeville (Butcher of Abbeville) is said to be by
an otherwise unknown Eustache d’Amiens (edited by Noomen and van de
Boogaard, 1986, 237–336).

5

A butcher returns empty-handed from market,

unable to afford the livestock on sale there. Needing lodging, he is directed to
the house of the village priest who is known to have a well-stocked cellar. But
the priest, who is sunning himself on his doorstep when the butcher arrives,
abruptly turns him away saying he cannot allow a layman to stay in his house.
The butcher walks off until he finds a flock of sheep guarded by an aging
shepherd. Ascertaining that this is the priest’s flock, the butcher waits until the
shepherd is distracted and then purloins a sheep. He then returns to the priest’s
house. The priest doesn’t recognize him from his earlier visit, presumably
because of the large live sheep draped around his shoulders, and agrees to give
him lodging; in return his guest will butcher the sheep and donate its meat to the
household. There follows a description of the butcher stunning the sheep,
removing its entire skin, and jointing it for the kitchen. That night he persuades
the priest’s servant-cum-mistress to sleep with him in return for the gift of the
fleece. In the morning, just before leaving, he cajoles the priest’s wife into giving
him a quickie in return for the same skin. He then goes to the church and easily
persuades the priest to buy the skin from him at the knock-down price of two
sous rather than three; delighted with his bargain, the priest presses the butcher
to return at any time. The priest goes home to find his wife and servant fighting
over which of them is entitled to the fleece. At this, his shepherd turns up to
report the theft of a sheep from the flock. When he assures them he could

5 All further

citations of the
fabliau are to this
edition, by line
number.

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recognize the missing sheep by its fleece, the skin is produced and the shepherd
identifies it as belonging to Cornuiaus (‘Little Horny,’ l. 518)

6

which, he affirms,

was his favorite in the whole flock. The priest, realizing how comprehensively
he has been ripped off – or fleeced, even – also demands the skin that he paid the
butcher for. The narrator defers to his audience: which of the three of them –
wife, mistress, or priest – has the strongest claim on the skin?

This text offers ample opportunity for orthodox allegories around such

themes as the good shepherd, the priest and his flock, and the sinner that was
saved, but it resists them. There is a fleeting brush with the biblical parable of
the lost sheep when the shepherd says of Little Horny that ‘you wouldn’t
find such a docile sheep in a hundred, there couldn’t be any one better than
him’ (‘N’avoit plus quoi mouton en cent,/mieusdre de lui ne poeit estre!’;
ll. 522–523). The reminiscence serves only to cement the fabliau’s disinvestment
from Christian allegory, since what the shepherd finds is not some precious lost
sheep, but its much trafficked skin. A literal butcher gets the better both of
a metaphorical shepherd (the priest) and a dozy real one, and butchering the
sheep means literally separating it into two unequal parts: its meat, which in this
story is quickly consumed and is never a subject of discussion, and its skin,
about which most of the story revolves and to which long-term value is clearly
ascribed. Analogously, the fabliau diverts interest from questions of morality
or sentiment, questions that are conventionally related to inward feelings or
inner value, and instead directs attention to the management of outer covering.
The characters, united in their general ordinariness – down-at-heel butcher,
inattentive shepherd, carnal priest, venal maidservant, unfaithful wife – are also
unanimous in their desire for the fleece. Here, in their everyday, pragmatic
world, surface is worth more than depth.

When the priest initially refuses to allow the butcher in his house, his division

of clergy from laity (or in medieval terms, of the literate from the illiterate) may
imply that one permanent value of the skin is as a medium on which to write. To
readers of the fabliau, the constant reiterations of the word pel (‘skin’) on
the pages of the manuscript might indeed trigger this implication, especially if
they associate the horn in Little Horny with its use in the manufacture of
inkwells. Textual insistence on skin serves, then, as an instance of the kind
of suture to which I referred earlier. Via suture, the sheepskin appears as the
recording surface for the characters’ behavior. Their claims to own it could be
seen as a struggle not over the meaning of the story, but over its material
transmission. When Eustache d’Amiens asks, of the priest, the wife or the
mistress, his concluding question, ‘Li quels doit mieus la pel avoir?’ (‘which one
of them has the best claim on the skin?’; l. 544) he can be heard asking which of
them has the most right to the pages we are now reading.

Given that the fabliau survives in five manuscript copies, the subsequent

circulation of pel has indeed produced variations in the ways the characters are
represented and thus in the extent to which, for each of them, it is their skin.

6 The name is surely

to be read as a wry
comment on the
sheep’s owner, the
priest, who is
cuckolded twice
over by the butcher
with women he
ought not to have
been sleeping with
in the first place.
Instead of being a
metaphorical
shepherd of his
flock, he is a
horned sheep.

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As well as constructing a critical edition of the fabliau based on all these
manuscripts, Noomen and van de Boogaard provide diplomatic transcriptions
of the text as it appears in each of them, thereby making the divergences
between the manuscript versions easy to identify. For example, in the scene
where the characters compete for ownership of the fleece four of these five
copies contain about 10 lines of additional recrimination between the wife
and the serving maid in which the latter protests that her habitual early rising
gives her the stronger claim (see the passages following the equivalent of line
337 in the critical edition in the diplomatic transcriptions in Noomen and van
de Boogaard, 1986, 288). Such spats between women are a misogynistic trope
of comic literature, and although the concubine may make a stronger case for
herself than the wife does, neither of them comes well out of the encounter. The
final claim to the fleece, lodged by the priest in lines 532–537 of the critical
edition, stays close to the more straightforward demands of the text as it is
transmitted in the manuscripts designated as A, O, and T, but diverges from
the more circumstantial one transmitted in manuscript H. In this manuscript,
the priest, by alleging his devotion to prayer, the Psalter, and the tradition
of St Peter as reasons why he is the person most entitled to the fleece (see lines
565–573 in the diplomatic transcription), ensures that he stands exposed for his
hypocrisy out of his own mouth. Depending on which manuscript one consults,
then, the pel (parchment) effectively registers the characters’ concern with the
pel (fleece) in a manner maximally damaging to themselves. The butcher’s
ability to make each of them claim possession of a text in which they feature so
badly underlines his role as master of the skin-transmission.

The story also records the characters’ uncanny kinship with the sheep in

a manner unbeknownst to any of them. By the end of the tale, the butcher has
more than compensated for his failure at the market. He has manipulated his
hosts like sheep, given that like Little Horny, they are docile (quoi, l. 522) by
temperament and easily led. More to the point, he has also engineered
an overlap that is not metaphorical between their bodies and that of the sheep
since they are replete with its meat and quarrelling over possession of its skin.
When we first see the sheepskin it is presented quite neutrally as l’escorche
(‘flayed skin,’ l. 160), and the butcher subsequently promises it to the priest’s
servant-cum-concubine as ‘de mon motony la pel’ (‘the skin of my sheep,’
l. 216). But it becomes his own skin, ‘ma pel,’ when he promises it to the priest’s
wife (l. 280) and again when he sells it to the priest (l. 306). The wife’s eagerness
to assume it as hers is implied by its juxtaposition with her body in the lines,
‘Por la pel dont il li fist don/li mist son cors en abandon’ (‘She delivered up her
body for the sake of the skin that he gave her’; ll. 291–292). Although there are
variations from manuscript to manuscript, the wife, the servant, and the priest
all refer to the sheepskin as their own skin.

7

For each of them, claiming it as his

or her own equates to admitting having been stolen from, tricked, lied to, and/or
sexually used by the butcher who, with his butcher’s mastery, is adept at

7 See lines 339, 340,

369, 405, 414,
415, 416, 417,

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escorchier (‘flaying’) them all. When we let ourselves be drawn into the story,
does the act of reading make us into sheep as well? Does it become our pel? The
uncanny effect of reading the text in a parchment book leaves the reader
vulnerable to assuming the sheepskin, perhaps from the preferred point of
identification, the butcher, but maybe also from that of one of his dupes. The
ethos of reading, unsettling the distinctiveness of the human, is also an
encounter with abuse.

A s s u m i n g a Wo l f ’s S k i n

The status of skin as a writing surface and of reading as acquiring a temporary
second skin are utterly explicit in the mid-twelfth-century Latin Ysengrimus
(edited by Mann, 1987).

8

This ambitious mock-epic poem opposes Ysengrimus,

a malicious but stupid wolf/cleric, and Reynardus, an extremely smart fox/
knight/mountebank, both of whom are members of a court presided over by
a self-regarding lion and ‘peopled’ by a variety of other animals (boar, bear,
goat, sheep, donkey, and so on). The wolf is regularly worsted by the fox in a
series of Tom and Jerry-style episodes. Most end with his being horribly
mutilated, but he always bounces back in time to be mutilated all over again in
the episode following. The text was composed in a monastic milieu in the Low
Countries, and manifests clerical humor in the broad medieval sense of ‘clerical’
that includes both holy orders and the school room; similarly to the Boucher
d’Abbeville we find irreverence and desublimation combined with coarse and
often violent imaginings. In Book 3, Reynardus the fox engineers a scenario
whereby Ysengrimus is to be flayed alive so that his skin can be used to cure the
sick king. (This narrative, dubbed by Ziolkowski ‘The Sick Lion, the Fox, and
the Flayed Courtier,’ has both Latin and Byzantine precedents, and is later
adapted in the Roman de Renart; see Ziolkowski, 1993, 61–66, 178–180.) In
the Ysengrimus, Reynardus’s motive is revenge for Ysegnrimus’s attempts to
goad the king to punish the unruly fox. His prescription specifies a young wolf,
and although Ysengrimus is far from young he is unable to prove his age
because he still does not know how to read elementary Latin. When asked what
‘nc’ with an abbreviation sign over it means, he cannot recognize it as the
standard spelling of Latin nunc, ‘now’; the result, his fellow animals jubilantly
inform him, is that he must lose his skin now (3.698). Even the naı¨ve (rusticus)
sheep can compose verses that join b and b (that is, baa baa), so Ysengrimus’s
inability to decipher the Latin nunc shows how juvenile he is (3.701). The wolf
also looks deceptively young because his skin is still growing back from its loss
in an earlier episode.

The flaying scene that follows develops the identification between skin and

the page by representing it as a process in which Ysengrimus is ‘read’ and, at the
same time, ‘dressed’ and ‘undressed’; in combination, these images imply that

425, 504, 532, 536
in the Nooman and
van de Boogaard
edition.

8 All further

citations of
Ysengrimus are to
this edition, by
book and line
number.

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the page qua skin encloses us like a garment (compare with Bureau, 1992, who
however does not make the association with reading). The bear, preparing to
remove the unfortunate wolf’s hide, offers to show him French etiquette in
removing one’s tunic (3.950). Whereas previously the wolf’s only language
was German (3.770–771), the bear pretends, as he slices from side to side,
that he is reading a fine vellum manuscript from Poitiers (that is, one written
in educated Latin?): ‘Clamauitque alacer: comites, hec lectio lecta est;/
Nunc melius, cui non complacet ista, legat./Sed sic Teutonice membrana
est nescia lingue,/ Tamquam Pictaui corpore rapta lupi./Carcophas, quid ais?
Uideor legisse venuster?’ (‘Cheerfully he called out, “Comrades, this Lesson has
been read: now anyone who doesn’t like it can read it better. But this vellum is
as innocent of the Germanic language as if it were torn from the body of
a Poitevin wolf. Carcaphas, what do you say? Do I seem to have read
pleasantly?” ’; 3.965–969 [trans. Mann, 1987, 351]). Underneath the wolf’s
hide/manuscript is revealed a glistening red surface, described as rich silk; its
noble appearance provokes a fresh round of taunting at Ysengrimus’s expense
for having covered up such princely garments under his coarse fur travelling
coat. The text thereby evokes the process of glossing, whereby a reader would
uncover a richer meaning under the cruder surface. However, this does not serve
to fix the ‘inner’ as opposed to ‘outer’ levels of the text but results instead in a
virtuoso proliferation of outer layers. Switching from court to church, the
narrator constantly rewrites the ecclesiastical garments that Ysengrimus is
allegedly wearing so that he is alternately defrocked and reinvested in a
succession of ever more exalted ecclesiastical offices. When eventually the
unfortunate wolf collapses bleeding in front of the king, he is interpreted by
Reynardus as throwing down his glove and cap – presumably the last bits of
skin still adhering to him are those around his face and paws – in what the fox
condemns as a presumptuous challenge to royal power (compare with
Ziolkowski, 1993, 124–125).

This scene presents an equivocal account of what reading involves. Despite

the evocation of glossing, reading is not presented as a practice that involves
discarding the surface. Rather, it is a process in which a second skin appears as
such: the fact of its removal is a way of implying that it was, in the first place,
assumed. This second skin that can be put on and off can also be exchanged
with others, like a garment. The treatment meted out to Ysengrimus is
undoubtedly painful and humiliating, but the fact of being flayed is not fatal
and certainly does not arouse anyone’s sympathy or concern. Moreover, the
outcome for the king is altogether positive, since the wolf’s skin does indeed
cure him. As for the reader, she or he is encouraged to find the reading
experience pleasurable (venustus, as the bear puts it), akin to the exchange
of increasingly prestigious garments – a cheerful and even decorous way of
producing ever new and pleasing surfaces. The pleasure of reading lies not in
renouncing skin for some supposedly deeper meaning, nor in stripping the text

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back to the ‘meat,’ but rather in enjoying the potential mobility and contingency
of skins that have been furnished for this purpose, and which the reader too can
play with assuming. As in Anzieu’s account of the Skin Ego, the fantasy of
flaying seems to contribute to the creation, not the destruction, of a self.

On the other hand, acts of reading and writing in Ysengrimus are also the

vehicles of hierarchy and power. In the run-up to the actual flaying,
Ysengrimus’s attempts to dodge his fate are foiled by the united efforts of the
goat and the sheep that would, of course, be the most likely suspects for turning
into books, and that therefore have every reason to ensure that he, and not they,
is the one to lose his skin. The text upends what we might think of as the food
chain, since the weaker animals that would normally be the wolf’s prey turn the
tables on him, the initiative coming from the fox against whom Ysengrimus is
trying to turn the king. The new power relations double as a book production
chain. Clever animals – Reynardus superlatively so – devise plots which they
write or read on the bodies of those less smart than themselves. An animal as
stupid as Ysengrimus, who is not at all good at thinking on his feet, inevitably
becomes the recording surface for the inventions of others. The choice of the
wolf as universal victim does not lack metaphorical implications. The wolf is
the opposite of a sheep in Christian allegory where the sheep is an image of
Christ, whereas the wolf represents the devil (Ziolkowski, 1993, 204). But the
sheep is also the contrary of the wolf in its mundane reality, since real wolves try
to write violently on the skins of real sheep, whereas no one in the usual scheme
would think of writing on a wolf-skin. The implied hierarchy is not one of depth
over surface, but arises from a quasi-Darwinian struggle for control of the
surface between writers and written upon in which the wolf’s proves after all to
be the most legible skin, because it is the one on which most of the other
characters are able to write, and from which, conversely, they can read. The
next few episodes of the Ysengrimus, supposedly written by the bear and then
read by the boar, also appear to be ‘read’ from the wolf’s skin, which thereby
becomes identified with the book in which all his misadventures are recorded.
Ysengrimus is more explicit than the Boucher d’Abbeville that control of the
skin is not only about meaning, food, and sex, but also about recording who
gets what of these resources.

That reading and writing are elements within, and vehicles of, the struggle for

power has implications for the readers of Ysengrimus (and related beast epics,
like the Roman de Renart). Under the effect of suture, the ‘pleasure of the text’
alleged by the bear may stray well beyond the bounds of the pleasurable. If
weakness means the possibility of being written on and read by those more
powerful than oneself, are human readers any more immune than Ysengrimus?
Moreover, and even more disturbingly, how secure are they in their humanity?
The indeterminacy of the ‘characters’ in beast epic can potentially undermine
the reader’s sense of identity: by turns creatures of the forest, clerics, or
courtiers, they enact porosity between human and animal domains (as an

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indication of this, it is impossible to settle whether to write ‘it’ or ‘he,’ ‘its’ or
‘his,’ ‘which’ or ‘who,’ when writing about them). As the animals, burlesque-
like, assume human clothing, readers may well see themselves as doing the
converse and assuming animal hide. The repeated suture between the animal
skins in the text and the pages of the book compounds this confusion. The
reader’s self, grounded in the original Skin Ego, is constantly at risk of being
modeled on that of the beasts. The very legibility of skin, given how mobile and
transferable it is, militates against any fixing of categories. The only existence in
these texts is that of undulating, circulating skin – a surface that ultimately is
not distinguishable from the material support of the text itself.

Such a radical reading of identity is unusual in beast epic studies. It is more

conventional to describe the Ysengrimus – like its French counterpart the
Roman de Renart – as essentially metaphorical in conception. The ‘characters’
in both texts are seen primarily as animals that are deployed, by virtue of their
similarity with humans, as a means of mocking human institutions such as
monarchy, justice, the church – and literature. While critics acknowledge that
the text admits continuity between humans and other animals, the tendency has
been to continue to regard human-ness as ontologically distinct from some kind
of animalness of all of the other animals lumped together (see, for example,
Leupin, 1993, 147–175; Simpson, 1996). In the next section of this essay, I will
suggest that this process of abstraction and de-animalizing may result from
what Deleuze and Guattari call visage´ite´ (‘faciality’).

Fa c i n g Wo l f

The English translation ‘faciality’ for visage´ite´ has the disadvantage of
eliminating the implications of facing down, facing off, and facing up to that
lurk in the French neologism. Deleuze and Guattari’s visage has no connection
with the use of the term by Levinas to signal how the Other discloses itself as
irreducibly Other, though it does share its communicative dimension. By
visage´ite´, Deleuze and Guattari denote the impetus to translate body into
significance by envisaging it as always already semiotic and subjectifying
surface (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 205–234).

9

Goliath’s face in Figure 1 is

also a face in this sense. A particularly clear example given by Deleuze and
Guattari is the episode of the drops of blood left in the snow by an injured goose
in Chre´tien’s Conte del graal (or, ‘Story of the Grail’). Perceval sees the red
marks on the white ground both as landscape and as the face of his beloved
(p. 212). At once the earth ceases to be a solid mass and is instead interpreted as
a surface invested with significance in relation to the viewing eye, while the
beloved’s face imprints subjectivity and passion on this surface. Although
Deleuze and Guattari do not say so (they refer to the visage as a wall), the face
thus produced is clearly also a page, one identified as a white skin (the beloved’s

9 This concept of

surface develops
that put forward in
Deleuze’s earlier
Logique du Sens,
discussed in
relation to
medieval reading in
Kay (2006).

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face) on which the goose’s dragging wing-feathers have written. In other words,
Chre´tien has produced a scene of medieval reading and writing, which Deleuze
and Guattari have further recognized as a scene of visage´ite´. In this and the
following section I shall consider the reader’s relation to the parchment text as
one of facing a surface made of skin. This will enable me to return to the
question posed earlier as to why readers misrecognize the animality of medieval
books: instead of assuming the page as an envelope they may instead respond to
it as an instance of faciality.

I have contended that the ‘characters’ in Ysengrimus and the Roman de

Renart are primarily composed of undulating three-dimensional surfaces that
constantly morph from animal skins into human garments and back, surfaces
that may enclose the reader in a containing skin modeled on that of the Skin Ego
but in which identity as human or as animal is undecidable. Sometimes these
surfaces enclose a solid mass, as when an animal body is battered to pulp;
extremities – paws, tails, and heads – are regularly noted, and also serve to
anchor the floating skin in an ever-changing human or animal corporeality.
Sometimes, however, the ‘characters’ are ascribed faces. When analyzing the
presentation of animals’ bodies in the Latin poem, Jill Mann places the mouth in
first place ahead of skin (Mann, 1987, 29–31). Connected at once to speech and
to eating, the mouth is a zone of high affect. It is also a key component of the
face enabling legibility. A striking example of this legibility of the face and
mouth is found in Ysengrimus, Book 4, the first of the stories supposedly written
by the bear and read aloud to the court by the boar, after the wolf was flayed
(and by implication read from the wolf’s skin).

This book narrates the aborted pilgrimage of a group of miscellaneous

animals. The roe deer, instigator of their journey, is persuaded by the fox (who
then assumes leadership of their group) to bring other animals with her for
reasons of security. Some of the participants have been chosen because of their
horns, including the goat and the sheep that helped to maneuver Ysengrimus
into losing his hide in Book 3. The wolf gains admittance to their lodging in the
guise of a hermit ‘gentler than a lamb’ (his own words, 4.153), and they go
through a pantomime of vainly looking for food for him, solicitously inquiring
if he eats meat. Clearly they are afraid that, given the chance, he would eat them
all; the food chain joke here, as elsewhere in the Latin poem (and also in the
Roman de Renart), takes the form of the intended dinner turning the tables on
the would-be diner (compare with Mann, 1987, 38). In this instance the smaller
animals’ scheme is unusually sophisticated. The only meat the pilgrims have to
serve Ysengrimus, they say, consists of white wolf heads (4.245). The sheep
dances in with a wolf’s head on a platter: in fact, we know it is the head of a
dead wolf Reynardus happened to have found earlier on a nearby gamekeeper’s
gibbet (4.97). Reynardus protests that Joseph should have brought in a larger
head, at which the sheep goes out and brings back the same head again, but with
its noticeable features (notitia, 4.277) changed and the addition of a tonsure. On

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a third showing the same wolf head is proffered with all its hair plucked out and
a twig propping its cheeks into a grin; the unlooked for death of this ‘Danish
prelate’ is attributed to the murderous violence of their companion, the goose,
said to have blown the wolf’s head off with a single puff. Each time the same
head is announced with identifiers that make it seem to have come from quite
different individuals, and with noticeable adjustments to the face. Ysengrimus,
horrified to find himself surrounded by ‘devilish lupicides’ (4.317), faints clean
away. When he tries to escape from this shocking company the other animals
use their bulk to trap him in the door and their heads to brutalize him.

The faces displayed in Book 4 present a scene of reading very different from

the flaying narrative of Book 3. The white wolf heads share, very precisely, the
features Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to visage´ite´ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980,
208). Each is envisaged as a system of surface and holes, unlike the billowing
three-dimensional surface of the body that is the object of reading in Book 3.
Instead of a skin enveloping the body like the Skin Ego it is a surface to be faced
off and deciphered. Although Deleuze and Guattari make it clear that the face is
neither human nor animal, and in some respects is ‘absolutely inhuman’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 209), the whiteness which they attribute to the
face reflects the fact that meaning and subjectivity are produced in the West
through the dominance of white human males; the abstract machine that
produces signification and subjectivity is at the same time a power machine.
The faces described in Book 4 of Ysengrimus are similarly signifying systems
that are not wholly either human or animal, but that provoke meaning and
affect within the context of a struggle for survival. We know that they come
from only one wolf’s body, but given the way they are produced as three
different faces, it is not surprising that the wolf (mis)recognizes them as three
different wolves. From his own position in the signifying machine, he also
perceives them as reflections of himself. Unlike the Conte del graal, where
a human (Perceval) sees a human face (his beloved) in the drops of blood in
the snow, here a wolf sees itself replicated in the surfaces brought to face it
down. This legibility of the face overlays and arrests the drift into multiplicity of
the undulating body. Ysengrimus’s identification of the faces as those of his
fellow wolves is accompanied by horror at the idea of eating one of them, and
terror that he might be killed and devoured himself. The would-be predator of
the pilgrims, utterly ‘faced down’ by this trick, is transformed by it into their
victim.

Like Deleuze and Guattari’s own example from the Conte del graal, this

section of Ysengrimus illustrates how well their notion of faciality operates as a
model for medieval reading, namely as a machine that generates meanings by
facing the reader off against a surface, rather than enclosing him within one.
The wolf-reader is duped and panicked by the faces he thinks he sees. If the
human reader follows the same model of reading, he may equally see, in the
white wolves’ grinning tonsured faces, a recognizable face staring back at him.

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The episode does not exactly humanize the white surface of the page, but
it distances it from its animal corporeality; in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, it
deterritorializes the animal by creating signs and subjects on a surface distinct
from an animal body. We could say that the very fact of turning an animal skin
into a manuscript facializes it in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use
the word.

Fa c i n g S h e e p

There are some grounds for making the same argument about the Butcher of
Abbeville, in which the sheep, Little Horny, is rendered recognizable among
a hundred others by the appearance of his horns and is the only ‘character’ to
be named apart from the fabliau’s author. If the sheep’s face answers to the
writer that does not make it human, because the face is not human as such. But
the hyper-legibility of the face offsets the assumption of an enclosing, animal
skin in favor of a more abstract negotiation of a face-to-face identity. Rather
than pursuing this argument with the fabliau, however, I shall instead address
another text featuring a sheep because in it the concept of the face is much more
dominant. The Latin poem in elegiac couplets beginning ‘Gloria nostra redit’
is a short address to a sheep that strikingly illustrates the potential for suture.
Composed by Sedulius Scottus (who also wrote a longer, more ambitious poem
about a ram), it was addressed to the bishop Hartgar of Lie`ge between 848
and 855 (Ziolkowski, 1993, 70). In the opening lines the speaker greets Daphnis
the shepherd and calls on Tityros to clap his hands (‘Tityre, plaude manu,’
l. 6).

10

Three sheep are then invited forward to the sound of a reed pipe. To our

astonishment we then learn that these three sheep are also one single sheep. The
eclogue careers off bizarrely in Trinitarian mode, as it combines the sheep of
delicious mutton, that of the fleece bringing warmth, and that of the skin which
can be written on. The poem is a jeu d’esprit, its language dense with the
repeated pun on multus, ‘wether’ (castrated male sheep) and multus, ‘much,
very,’ as Sedulius elaborately justifies, to the sheep, his demand to eat it. He
tempts it with visions of glory since, relieved of its flesh, its skin (pellis)
can become its means to everlasting fame (‘kartula famaque perpes,’ l. 13) as
its parchment will be spread across the heavens. He exhorts the sheep not to
care for mortal life but adopt an ovine form of contemptus mundi: ‘Despice sic
miseram, meliorem delige vitam/Multo, brevem vitam despice si miseram’
(‘Therefore despise this miserable life and choose a better one,/sheep, despise
this miserable transient life’; ll. 15–16). He exhorts the sheep to assume its place
in the Zodiac (‘mox Aries caeli fors eris astrigeri,’ ‘soon you will be Aries in
the starry heaven’; l. 18). In mock ecstasy at the prospect of lamb for supper,
the poet appeals to the ‘much embodied sheep’ and to the ‘triple wether
with six horns’ (‘tu multo corpora multusy cornua sena levans multoy

10 All citations and

translations of the
Latin poem
‘Gloria nostra
redit’ are from
Ziolkowski
(1993).

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triplex’; ll. 19–20). He asks God on high to raise Daphnis too to the stars with
his blessed horn (‘Sublevet altithronus sic nostrum Daphnin ad astra,/Felici
cornu sublevet altithronus’; ll. 21–22). The poem ends with the speaker
asserting that he is not strong enough to write any more until he has been
sustained by meat (‘Te sine, multo, fleo, scribere non valeo’; l. 24).

This text is centrally about the human exploitation of sheep. By representing

the sheep both as a source of warmth and as a writing surface, the poem invokes
reading and writing as covering for the body. When the speaker appeals to
the sheep’s desire for eternal life, its name celebrated on its glorious skin across
the heavens, he is alluding to the Biblical image of the sky as a scroll that will be
rolled up and put away in the last days (Isaiah 34.4, Revelation 6.14), the very
image commented on by Augustine in the passage in his Confessions that
I quoted earlier. Here, then, the sheepskin is jocularly brought into relation with
the divine book, identified as a sublime and eternal skin. In all of these moves,
the poem plays with the page as Skin Ego. But the representation of the skin as
a sublime envelope turns, from line 17, into one as a face. First, when likened to
a parchment in the sky, it becomes a surface marked by points of light (the
constellation Aries); next, it is addressed as an elaborate geometrical figure with
six horns – not a natural face but the semiotic and subjectifying apparatus of
‘faciality’ with two horns for each of the sheep’s three natures. Unlike in the
Butcher of Abbeville, eating the sheep’s meat is not going to insinuate the
speaker of these verses inside the sheepskin; rather, it will enable him to make
the sheep legible as a surface he can envisage. However, as in Book 4 of
Ysengrimus, the face in ‘Glora nostra redit’ is neither human nor animal.
Sedulius’s addressee, the bishop, depicted in the poem as Daphnis the shepherd,
seems to become himself like a sheep when the speaker asks that he should be
raised to the heaven ‘with his blessed horn’ (‘felici cornu,’ l. 22). The horn
presumably represents the bishop’s miter, but as an identifying feature it
connects him to the sheep more than it distinguishes him from it. One horn is
many fewer than six, but is still a horn nevertheless. Tityros, here (as in Vergil)
apparently the name of a fellow shepherd, is the name of the fabulous ram
in Sedulius’s other sheep poem, and so also admits some generic indeterminacy.
All creation, including the heavens, becomes all writing and all sheep-like in the
face of the hungry poet.

***

‘Gloria nostra redit’ is a good text with which to end, since its 24 lines

encompass all the themes of this essay. In the Middle Ages the acts of reading
and writing are located in the context of the systematic exploitation of animals,
and more generally of a power hierarchy in which the skins of weaker animals
may be used as a writing surface for the exploits of those that are stronger. Yet
at the same time the acts of reading and writing do not confirm the boundary
between humans and other animals so much as they unsettle it. The book, from
one point of view the very emblem of human distinctiveness, also troubles this

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boundary. It does so by virtue of its animal origin, the suturing of text to page
often reinforcing the mute insistence of the page itself on the proximity between
human and animal surfaces. One form that this proximity can take is when the
page, as skin, becomes a double of the Skin Ego that initially enveloped
the human reader; as such, it re-contains and re-signifies the reader’s self within
an animal covering. At other times the page takes on the more abstract value of
faciality, conveying meaning and subjectification in a way that decorporealizes
the animal nature of the page and allows us to misrecognize it. These
phenomena of reading have affective force as well as implications for identity.
As a response to the complex ethos of the medieval book, I am trying to theorize
an ethics of medieval reading that takes into account its basis in legible skins.

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Sarah Kay taught at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom before
joining the faculty at Princeton University. She has published widely on medieval
French and Occitan literature and theory (E-mail: [e-mail]).

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