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

O n c e m o r e w i t h fe e l i n g : Ta c t i l i t y
a n d c o g n i t i v e a l t e r i t y, m e d i e va l
a n d m o d e r n

L a ra Fa r i n a

Department of English, West Virginia University, West Virginia.

Abstract

This essay compares medieval and modern narratives of abnormal

sensory perception with a focus on ‘phantom’ tactility. After considering the ways in
which tactile perception is represented and managed in recent neuroscientific
literature, particularly in Ramachandran and Blakeslee’s popular work, Phantoms in
the Brain, it turns to an account of extraordinary tactility in the Life of the twelfth-
century English anchorite, Christina of Markyate. It argues that the medieval text can
point to some of the sensory biases and disabling practices of current medical
discourses about abnormal perception.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2012) 3, 290–301.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2012.16

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

epigraph in V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee,

Phantoms in the Brain

Popular nonfiction loves medical narratives, and medical narratives, in turn,

love alterity. Readers of the New York Times Magazine, for example, can now
find a regular ‘Diagnosis’ column, in which strange symptoms provide mysteries
for physician-protagonists to solve (Sanders, 2010). The culprit is often a little-
known condition affecting a minority of the population or, at least, a
combination of conditions that make the case highly unusual. As Oliver Sacks’s

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work has amply demonstrated, physician chroniclers of unusual medical
conditions can achieve a level of recognition to rival that of popular novelists.
And, owing no doubt to recent movements in health activism, nonfiction
representations of patients’ perspectives about being physically or mentally
different (that is, living with AIDS, autism, fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder
and so on) are proliferating in print and online.

1

This gravitation toward alterity

is perhaps the predictable result of a health-care system that is remedial in
nature, one that focuses on treating the body out of sorts, the body in distress.
It is also sustained by the generic conventions of the case history, a form of
representation that found its present contours at about the same time as – and in
dialogue with – the mystery novel.

2

Whatever the cause of its success, the

nonfiction medical mystery is now a particularly important genre for
confronting and interpreting somatic and psychological alterity. As I wish to
argue here, historians of the body can offer both intellectual and ethical
challenges to the ways in which psychosomatic alterity is understood and
managed in these narratives and thus possibly to the medico-scientific research
that they present to the public.

Toward this end, I will discuss a medieval account of physical impairment and

sensory alteration alongside a recent collection of case histories displaying
sensory disability. The latter work, V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s
highly regarded and well-known Phantoms in the Brain (1998), is a vehicle for
Ramachandran’s explanation of recent developments in neuroscientific resea-
rch, including his own, to a popular readership. It features a roster of patients
who suffer from perceptual anomalies, mostly, though not entirely, unhappily,
and whose conditions provide access to ‘the mysteries of the human mind’
outlined in the book’s subtitle. The medieval narrative is also an account of
wonders, largely in the form of unusual perceptions, though here the mysteries
are said to result from divine grace rather than from neuropathy. The twelfth-
century Life of Christina of Markyate is intriguing for some of the more unusual
dimensions of its heroine’s ‘visionary’ experience. Christina’s altered sensory
perceptions are not out of keeping with the miracles customary to medieval
hagiography, a genre centered on wondrously changed bodies. But their
particular character, especially as regards Christina’s altered sense of touch,
invites us to rethink the way in which sensory perceptions are ranked and
organized to support normative imaginings of the able body.

My goal in this essay is thus to think about the potential that medieval ‘case

studies,’ in the form of hagiography, may have for challenging ‘disabling’
modern practices of medical diagnosis and treatment, at least in so far as they
are represented in the popular literature of neuroscience. I deliberately shy away
from reversing the direction of critique and so using the discoveries made by
recent neuroscience to explain or dislodge medieval representation. Contem-
porary medical knowledge and the written texts that support it already occupy
the privileged position in most meetings of the medieval and the modern.

1 See, for example,

the ‘Patient Voices’
section of the New
York Times website
(2010). The
written works of
Temple Grandin
evidence the wide
popularity
currently
achievable for
memoirs written
from the
perspective of a
minoritarian
medical identity
(see, for example,
Grandin, 2010).

2 For a discussion of

the nineteenth-
century emergence
of ‘medical
semiotics’
alongside Arthur
Conan Doyle’s
creation of
Sherlock Holmes,
see Ginzberg,
1989, 96–125.

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Anyone who teaches medieval devotional literature is doubtless aware that
students (and sometimes scholars) have modern psychiatric diagnoses readily
available for its characters: thus, Margery Kempe suffers from post-partum
depression, Marie d’Oignies and Catherine of Siena are anorexic, and various other
holy women and men are masochists, bipolar, schizophrenic, and so forth. While
most medievalists are aware of the historically adverse consequences of applying
modern medical categories to describe premodern conditions,

3

the wider public

discourse among nonspecialists favors modern definitions of psychiatric disability
over historically contextualized interpretations of ‘symptoms.’ I thus think it
undesirable to recruit medieval literature to a modern medical project of
‘homogenizing the way the world goes mad’ (Watters, 2010, 2), particularly if
the mad (or disabled or different) find ourselves that much worse off for it.

4

Co m m o n S e n s e ( s ) : ‘ B y t h e E x c e p t i o n s , We M a y D i s c e r n t h e
R u l e s ’

Ramachandran is fond of epigraphs. Beside the one quoted at the beginning of
my essay (attributed to the physicist John Archibald Wheeler), Phantoms in the
Brain includes another: ‘by the exceptions, we may discern the rules’ (attributed
to the psychologist Laurence Miller). The catchphrases’ combined emphasis on
strangeness and exceptional phenomena reflect the degree to which ‘difference’
permeates neuroscientific literature. But from what does ‘strangeness’ differ?
The cases in Phantoms demonstrate divergence from psychosomatic norms and
do not include a profile of a normative individual. Rather, the normative
standards are set by ‘a short guided tour of the human brain’ (Ramachandran
and Blakeslee, 1998, 7), by, that is, a very brief discussion of an abstracted
anatomical model representing an average of human brains rather than a
particular one. Visual illustrations of the model brain and its neurons, drawn by
artists, accompany Ramachadran’s explanation. The brevity of the description
and its reliance on visual aids suggest the author’s impatience or discomfort with
his discipline’s grounding in these abstractions, and Ramachandran is eager to
get to ‘colorful cases y taken from the older neurological literature’ before
moving on to discuss his own patients. In fact, his explanation of model
anatomy is concluded with the distancing remark, ‘These anatomical facts have
been known for a long time, but we still have no clear idea how the brain works’
(Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998, 10). Both researcher and physician,
Ramachandran is clearly drawn more to narrating what Carlo Ginzberg would
term the ‘art’ of medicine (since medicine must work with individualized,
variable, ‘colorful’ bodies) than he is to the ‘science’ of research, which aims
toward reproducibility and the elimination of variables (Ginzberg, 1989, 106).

However, Phantoms is at the same time a record of attempts to pursue a

‘science’ of the senses, as Ramachandran indicates with his comparison of

3 Caroline Walker

Bynum’s reflections
on the cultural
specificity of
anorexia nervosa
(Bynum, 1992,
141–143) were
very influential in
this regard.

4 See also Hacking

(2002).

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neuroscience and disciplines such as physics (Ramachandran and Blakeslee,
1998, 4–5). The Western origins of an effort to understand sensation
scientifically lie in Greco-Roman philosophy, particularly in the works of
Aristotle, and the normative models developed by its practitioners are often still
in place. Most significant of these lasting paradigms is our division of sensation
into five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching), rather than two
or 20 or no division at all.

5

Like the philosophers, we do this still, even though

plenty of people perceive a variety of things in a synaesthesic manner (Sacks,
2008, 177–200), making the five categories a little messy, and even though there
are other sensations (like the sense of balance, for example) that seem to merit
their own ‘sense’ distinction.

This division into five has never been an easy model to maintain, though it

has been naturalized to the point of common sense. The sense of touch, in
particular, has always proved difficult for accounts of the five parallel senses, as
Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007) has argued. The problem of sensory location is a
good example of the excess of tactility, noted by Aristotle and continually faced
by his medieval and early modern explicators. For example, Aristotle argues
that every sense must have a sensing organ. Sight, hearing, smell and taste are
easy to attach to the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, but touch is less bounded, since
it is a property of the whole body, inner as well as outer. At one point, the
philosopher suggests that ‘flesh’ is the organ of touch (Aristotle, 1957, 129), yet
he also believes that we must sense things though a medium of some kind, like
air or water (Aristotle, 1957, 107). This works for vision, hearing, smell and, to
a lesser extent, taste. But touch requires direct contact, without an intervening
medium. To cope with this disparity and keep his model intact, Aristotle
suggests that ‘flesh’ itself might be the medium for touch. He is then forced to
propose that the organ of touch must be some mysterious thing with deeper
interiority, but he ends up acknowledging that there are several ways (the
problem of location being one of them) in which the sense of touch is crucially
different from the other senses.

Medieval commentators on the senses would inherit Aristotle’s observation

that ‘it is difficult to say whether touch is one sense or more than one, and also
what the organ is which is perceptive of the object of touch’ (Aristotle, 1957,
129).

6

Yet they stuck to the model of the parallel five senses, even if it meant

skipping over the discussion of tactility entirely (Salmo´n, 2005, 63). Their own
major contribution to the philosophy of sensation was to rank the five senses
according to spiritual and moral worthiness. Here, they modified Aristotle’s
theories to stress the senses’ place in schemes of micro/macro correspondence,
with the result that vision emerged as the noblest and subtlest sense, ‘of primary
importance in perfecting human beings’ intellectual capacities’ (Salmo´n, 2005, 64).
Touch fell to the bottom of the sensory order, even though medieval
scholars continued to acknowledge Aristotle’s claim that touch was the one
sense necessary for life (that is an organism can do without the other senses,

5 ‘There is no other

sense than the five
already listed –
seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting,
and touching’
(Aristotle, 1957,
107).

6 See, for example,

Avicenna (1952,
27).

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but without any sense of touch, it must be considered lifeless) (Avicenna,
1952, 201).

Neuroscientists and doctors, just like the rest of us, continue to inhabit a

culture wherein vision is prioritized over other forms of sensation. We use
‘seeing’ as a metonym for understanding; we worry about how we look; our
communicative media and our scientific instruments are all about the visuals.
Through the use of neuroimaging, medical science has raised the possibility that
personality may be assessed from a scan, as anthropologist Joseph Dumit has
argued in his work on biomedical identity (2003). We have lots of aids for
improving sight and some for improving hearing. The prostheses for improving
smell, taste and touch are less evident, as are terms naming lack of those
sensations (non-smellers, for example, do not approach the recognizable status
of the blind or deaf).

An understanding of our ongoing historical elevation of sight and devaluation

of touch gives us a slightly different way of thinking about some of the
neuroscientific breakthroughs portrayed in Phantoms in the Brain. Take, for
example, the fascinating case of Phillip Martinez. An amputee, Phillip suffers
from phantom limb syndrome, which causes him to feel intense pain in the
joints of his missing left arm. Doctor Ramachandran asks Phillip to look at
himself in a mirror box that makes the image of his right arm appear on the left
side of his body, so Phillip can see himself once again with a functioning left
arm. When he does this, Phillip is ecstatic, stating ‘It’s as if I’m in the past.
All these memories from so many years ago are flooding back into my mind.
I can move my arm again’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998, 47–48). After
three more weeks of using the mirror box for about 10 minutes a day, Phillip is
‘cured,’ his phantom limb suddenly disappears (except for the fingers). Like
other researchers working in the area of ‘embodied cognition,’ Ramachandran
is interested in the ways in which bodily sensation is able to ‘remap’ itself under
new conditions, and, although he doesn’t know exactly why the mirror box
works, he discusses possible ways in which the brain might, in Phillip’s case, be
renegotiating various sensory messages, switching through some neural
alternatives for being in the world (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998,
50–52). But which of these alternatives should we consider a sensory ‘alterity’?
Is the pain in his phantom limb really cognitive ‘difference’ or simply a
preservation of normal feeling? Or is the return to feelings of movement (which
Phillip says is like being in the past) a return to normal despite there being no
‘real’ limb? Or is the acceptance of the visual image of the arm as absent a
return to normal modes of sensing?

One thing we can say is that Ramachandran’s experiment puts vision back at

the top of the sensory hierarchy. How do you cure a patient who suffers from a
freakishly overactive tactility? Use a visual trick to get the brain to return to
accepting what it sees over what it feels. Ramachandran’s interest elsewhere in
visual illusions (2009, 2010) makes one suspect that Phillip’s kinesthetic and

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tactile experiences are actually being recast as problems with visual information,
leaving some possibly important sensations to the margins of the case study. The
first thing that Ramachandran learns about Phillip, for example, is that, despite
his condition, Phillip has come to excel at playing pool, earning the nickname
‘one-armed bandit’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998, 47). This is mentioned
briefly when Phillip is introduced as a character and then dropped; we never
learn how he fares with tactile skills like playing pool after the experiment.
Rather, it is the visual contrivance of the mirror box that takes off in the book’s
narrative, as it has done in medical research on phantoms limbs and Complex
Regional Pain Syndrome

7

since (Russell, 2008; Moseley and Wiech, 2009;

Bultitude and Rafal, 2010).

But what if the ‘cognitive alterity’ involves not just an estrangement from

the normal sensory hierarchy, but a challenge to it? Because Ramachandran is
a physician, he sees patients who suffer, and they, of course, make up his case
studies. ‘[Pain] is a great source of frustration to patient and physician alike,’
he writes as he reflects on his patients’ perceptions of their uncomfortably
clenched phantom fists (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998, 52). His
approach to such symptoms is to eliminate them; he even jokes that his
mirror box successfully ‘amputated’ Phillip’s phantom limb (Ramachandran
and Blakeslee, 1998, 49). Since pleasure is seldom considered a symptom in
the literature of medical curiosities, there is little discussion of phantom limb
sufferers who feel good about their ghostly appendages and don’t care if the
phantoms are imperceptible to others. Yet such ‘super-sensors,’ as we might
call them, populate medieval devotional literature as thickly as ailing patients
do the popular literature of medical curiosities. And it is to this literature that
we might turn for alternatives to narratives about abnormal sensation that
are structured by the need to cure.

P h a n t o m M u s c l e a n d S a c r e d Ta c t i l i t y

Christina of Markyate was a twelfth-century English recluse who, because of
her affiliation with the monastery at St Albans, had her Life written by one of its
monks. The text is something of a ‘case study,’ in that it is clearly a bid in
support of Christina’s canonization and thus attempts to collect evidence of her
sanctity. Consequently, many of the work’s elements are fairly formulaic for
hagiographic accounts of popular female saints, particularly virgin martyrs, and
Christina is even portrayed as consciously emulating their saintly examples.
Early in the text, for example, Christina signals that she intends that her life
follow those of virgin saints by reciting the story of St. Cecilia to her suitor,
Burthred. Although she is not martyred, as Cecilia and other legendary saints of
the early Church are in their vitae, Christina’s forced betrothal to Burthred
and her subsequent persecution by family members and corrupt authority

7 CRPS involves

mysterious pain
and motor
disability after
relatively minor
trauma (Bultitude
and Rafal, 2010,
409). While mirror
therapy has caught
the attention of
researchers, it is
not the only
(or even preferred)
treatment for these
conditions.

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figures are scripted to echo the tribulations of Cecilia, Catherine of Alexandria,
Margaret of Antioch and others.

8

Not surprisingly, then, we see Christina undergo physical deprivations that

are comparable to the confinement and torture visited on the earlier saints by
their pagan persecutors. After she is harassed and beaten by her parents for
refusing to marry, she escapes their house, only to go into painful hiding in a
small closet in the dwelling of a sympathetic hermit, Roger:

Thus confined, the handmaid of Christ sat on a hard stone until Roger’s
death, that is, four years and more, concealed from even those who dwelt
together with Roger. O what trials she had to bear of cold and heat,
hunger and thirst, daily fasting! The confined space would not allow her to
wear even the necessary clothing when she was cold. The airless little
enclosure became stifling when she was hot. Through long fasting, her
bowels became contracted and dried up. There was a time when her
burning thirst caused little clots of blood to bubble up from her nostrils.
But what was more unbearable than all this was that she could not
go out until evening to satisfy the demands of nature. (Talbot, ed., 1959,
103–105)

While imprisonment and feats of asceticism are regular hagiographic tropes,

what is unusual here is the level of detail describing the cell and its discomforts.
There is an almost medical turn in the graphic specificity of Christina’s physical
symptoms. Since Christina was most likely still living when her vita was written,
there is a good chance that she herself provided this information to her
biographer.

The medical turn of the Life is further expressed in the particular spiritual

abilities Christina acquires after her confinement and resulting illness. While
the young Christina experiences miraculous visions, her painful enclosure
seems to result in an additional ability to heal the sick. She reluctantly
performs her first cure when she blesses water and gives it to an epileptic
woman to drink, putting an end to the woman’s seizures (Talbot, ed., 1959,
119–123). Christina’s repertoire of miracles expands further after she falls
horribly ill herself. For 5 days, she is paralyzed in half of her body (from head
to toe and including blindness in one eye); she is swollen and feverish, and
the skin on her face flickers ‘without stopping, as if there were a little bird
inside it striking it with its wings’ (Talbot, ed., 1959, 123). Her condition
confounds physicians, who give her up for dead, but she not only recovers,
she feels from then on ‘so strong in health that never afterwards did she feel
the slightest twinge from those maladies which had afflicted her early
on’ (Talbot, ed., 1959, 129). Shortly thereafter, she has a vision of the ghost
of Alvered, a former monk of St. Albans, who tells her that she must oppose
the secret plans of its abbot, Geoffrey. Again, she is extremely reluctant to

8 For St. Cecilia’s

vita, see Aelfric
(1900, 357–377);
for lives of
Catherine and
Margaret written
for early
thirteenth-century
religious women
readers, see Seinte
Katerine
(d’Ardenne and
Dobson, eds.,
1981) and Seinte
Marherete (Mack,
ed., 1934).

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exercise her spiritual authority, but she does so anyway, meeting with
resistance from Geoffrey, who is nonetheless shocked that Christina ‘should
be aware of something that was only in his own mind’ (Talbot, ed., 1959,
137). That night, Geoffrey is visited by three demons, who beat him
severely, and by the ghost of Alvered, who scolds him for not listening to
Christina. This ‘vision,’ one that begins with Christina but is transferred to
Geoffrey, then takes an unusually interactive turn: when Geoffrey wakes up,
he is covered with ‘real’ wounds, and he humbly accepts direction from
Christina. Oddly, this nocturnal visitation is the beginning of a political
and personal partnership between Geoffrey and Christina, in which
Christina repeatedly reads Geoffrey’s mind to the extent that Geoffrey
alters his behavior, reaping not just spiritual but also pragmatic rewards
in the process.

Again, Christina’s physical ordeals and miraculous recovery do echo the

tortures visited upon martyred saints, whose sanctity is often signaled by
not only their stoic resistance to pain but also their post-mortem corporeal
transformations. Martyred bodies are sense-sational ones: powerfully
fragrant or radiant, gushing milk instead of blood, more vital and vibrant
after death than before it. Christina does not die, yet she certainly emerges
from her debilitation transformed. Might we say that, after a long period of
sensory deprivation/alteration and a traumatic illness (resembling what
we would call a ‘stroke’) Christina has acquired different powers of
sensation? I am thinking not only of the clairvoyance, which is not really
clairvoyant as much as it is clairaudient, but of the beating Geoffrey gets
when he rebuffs her. Could it be that Christina’s phantom limbs have reached
out and given the abbot a good thrashing? Her touch definitely seems to have
acquired extraordinary dimensions, as we see in her ability to cure the
sick (though the Life’s author is careful to say that she ‘obtained’ cures for the
sick). Another, quite peculiar, testament to the power of Christina’s touch
comes when Geoffrey, facing a particularly dangerous political mission, asks
to take two of the holy woman’s undergarments with him. We are assured
that this is ‘not for pleasure but to mitigate the hardship of the journey’
(2001, 161). If this is truly so, it seems that Christina’s protective power is
conveyed not only by her touch but even by that which has touched her. Like
a living relic, Christina illustrates C.M. Woolgar’s claim that touch ‘was one
of the most common ways by which moral or intangible qualities might
pass between beings or to and from objects’ in the Middle Ages (Woolgar,
2006, 29).

There are, of course, some significant differences from modern-day

accounts of phantom limbs here. The most important of these concerns the
persons affected by the condition. We would probably say that phantom
limbs can only be sensed by the individual who supposedly possesses them:
by Phillip, for example, but not by the doctors who treat him or by anyone

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else. The felt impact of a phantom blow by someone else would surely
relegate a case into the category of fiction for Ramachandran, who
distinguishes between entertaining ghost stories and narratives that
‘dispel the real mystery of phantom limbs’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee,
1998, 24).

Yet some scholars in disability studies argue that this view of sensory

limitation to the individual is the product of a ‘modernist discourse of
separation that devalues our most basic sensation’ (Price and Shildrick, 2004, 71).
This ‘discourse’ is a way of being that naturalizes bodily and subjective
discontinuity with others. In so doing, it belies the ways in which our embodied
selves are continually mutually reconstituted in their intersubjective relations,
and it discards much of the information carried by ‘our most basic sensation,’
the sense of touch, which is a sense of continuity with others. It is thus a cultural
practice that instills not only a type of subjectivity but also a regimen for
ordering the senses. According to Janet Price and Margit Shildrick, disability
provides some salient moments in which we can witness the mutual
reconstitution of embodied subjects when the usual ‘discourse of separation’
is upended. Practices of touching – impacting not only the disabled person but
also his or her caregivers, doctors, and others – have to be renegotiated in
particular:

In adult years we are extremely cautious about whom we may touch,
precisely because an unwelcome touch seems to threaten the integrity and
ontological separation of the other y . It is scarcely surprising that the
disruption of our expectations of touch in many disabling conditions is
highly significant. What occurs – if there are problems of mobility for
example – is that the disabled person may find herself being touched by
others in ways that far exceed normative contact, especially between
strangers; or if she is deaf or vision impaired, she may equally need to
touch others to gain attention or for orientation and recognition. The
clinical encounter itself is a paradigmatic site illustrating the power
relation between physicians and disabled people, where – possibly even
more than the medical gaze – it is the touch of the doctor that represents
the exercise of a power that disrupts all the standard practices of intimacy.
(Price and Shildrick, 2004, 70)

It should not surprise us that, in monastic communities, with their

emphasis on the mutual, interdependent training of bodies, the severe
alteration of one body should be felt by others. And in Christina’s Life, the
revelations she experiences often affect or even involve her physical relations
with others, particularly the caregivers who provide her with shelter and
spiritual support. Interestingly, we are told that the beating of Geoffrey is
God’s solution to the problem of Christina’s poverty; so it is a renegotiation

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of bodily boundaries that provides the ‘differently-abled’ person better forms
of support, and this becomes a mutually beneficial relationship.

9

T h e S e n s e s , A l t e r i t y a n d I d e n t i t y

Whenever we come up against difference, be it in the doctor’s office or at a shrine
of a miracle-working saint, questions about identity are inherently part of our
recognition of otherness. In Christina’s Life, there is some ambiguity about
whether her sensory alterity is a response to her ascetic practice or a pre-ordained
gift. We are told that Christina’s sickness is the result of her harsh confinement, and
her miracles are placed immediately after her physical trials, but there is no explicit
causal connection between illness and newfound abilities. Further, her ‘visions’ are,
from the start, highly tactile in nature. She is inclined toward extreme touching
even as a child: when she was ‘still too young to see the difference between right
and wrong,’ we are told, ‘she beat her own tender body with rods’ (Talbot, ed.,
1959, 37). She is even marked out for sanctity before her birth with a divine sign
emphasizing touch: her pregnant mother is visited by a dove that shelters in her
sleeve, ‘allowing itself to be stroked with her hands’ as it nestles in her bosom
(Talbot, ed., 1959, 35). Like romance heroes and their saintly hagiographic
counterparts, Christina seems to be special, different, and perhaps a born ‘feeler’
from the beginning of her story. If the ‘little bird’ under her skin during her illness
reminds us of the prophetic dove held by her mother, then these representations
suggest a circular fulfillment, a sense that it couldn’t be otherwise.

Pointing to predetermination would not be a doctrinally orthodox reading,

however, and indeed such an interpretation would flout the very logic of
hagiography. Nor would it be a desirable strategy for thinking about sensory
alterity today. The last thing I’d want to offer is a bodily determinism that
emphasizes the cognitive limitations of individuals who use the senses
‘differently.’ Fortunately, Christina’s story is one that revels in sensory possibility
and expanded ways of being in the world; it’s not about what she can’t sense but
what she can. Rather than focus on the need for or superiority of spiritually
animated vision, the revelations of Christina’s life prove the adaptability of
hagiographic narrative in giving meaning to a variety of sensory perceptions and
subjectivities. Most provocative are the multiple ways (and I’ve only had time to
discuss a few here) in which the perceptual anomalies of Christina’s experience
circulate among and redefine the embodied subjects of her spiritual community.

Price and Shildrick argue that we need both an epistemology and an ethics

that support ‘the disintegrity and permeability of bodies, the fluctuations and
reversibility of touch, the inconsistency of spatial and morphological awareness,
[and] the uncertainty of the future’ (Price and Shildrick, 2004, 74). Can
hagiographic narratives, with their wondrously reconfigured and reconfigurable
bodies, help to support such understandings? If so, they may productively

9 The relationship

between Christina
and Geoffrey has
been much
discussed, and not
all readers see it in
an entirely positive
light. Dyan Elliott,
for example,
argues that it
subordinates
women’s spiritual
careers to men’s
well-being (Elliott,
2005, 177).

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engage the stories that are currently being told by the literature of popular
neuroscience. My hope is that, if taken seriously – and not written off as credulous
fables or religious propaganda – saints’ lives may help us think about the
dynamism and shifting potential of bodies in general. This task is germane to
theories of embodied cognition, which emphasize neural flexibility and rapid,
radical adaptation to conditions of embodiment. However much of the research
into these theories, like the case studies that describe it, is driven by the need to
restore the ‘common sense’ organization of the senses. If we want to open our
selves to sensing differently and to creatively empowering a variety of sensory
practices, we must be mindful of our perceptual biases. And we may need to
relinquish the desire to rid ourselves of our phantoms.

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

Lara Farina is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. She
is the author of Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006) and numerous articles on medieval women’s reading practices,
devotional literature and queer theory. She is currently working on a history of
the sense of touch (E-mail: [e-mail]).

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