Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-26028-6, 978-3-030-26029-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxxii
A Clash of Theories: Discussing Late Medieval Devotional Perception (Pablo Acosta-García)....Pages 1-17
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
Touching the Page and Touching the Heart: Manuscript Culture and Affective Devotion in Late Medieval Flemish Communities (Barbara Zimbalist)....Pages 21-42
Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond (Olivia Robinson, Elisabeth Dutton)....Pages 43-68
Front Matter ....Pages 69-69
Sacralising Perception: Rosary-Devotion and Tactile Experience of the Divine in Late Medieval Denmark (Mads Vedel Heilskov)....Pages 71-93
Haptic Prayer, Devotional Books and Practices of Perception (Laura Katrine Skinnebach)....Pages 95-122
Skin Christ. On the Animation, Imitation, and Mediation of Living Skin and Touch in Late Medieval Contact Imagery (Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen)....Pages 123-148
Front Matter ....Pages 149-149
The Making of Queer Visionary Discourses (David Carrillo-Rangel)....Pages 151-201
Queer Touch Between Holy Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Visitation (Laura Saetveit Miles)....Pages 203-235
ConTact. Tactile Experiences of the Sacred and the Divinity in the Middle Ages (Victoria Cirlot, Blanca Garí)....Pages 237-265
Back Matter ....Pages 267-276

Citation preview

Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages Edited by David Carrillo-Rangel · Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel Pablo Acosta-García

Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages

David Carrillo-Rangel  •  Delfi I. Nieto-­Isabel • Pablo Acosta-García Editors

Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages

Editors David Carrillo-Rangel Universitetet i Bergen Bergen, Norway Pablo Acosta-García Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf Düsseldorf, Germany

Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain

ISBN 978-3-030-26028-6    ISBN 978-3-030-26029-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26029-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 Chapter 3 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Innis, who came with the book.

Fig. 1  Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. Candies individually wrapped in multicoloured cellophane; endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 175 lb. Image courtesy: Imaging department at the Art Institute of Chicago. Installation view: Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 25 Jun.–19 Sep. 2010. Cur. James Rondeau. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres Courtesy of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Preface: What Did and Does It Mean to Say ‘I Touched’?

Five hundred years of science, the sum of which is that we still don’t know what light actually is. But then I realise. And the answer comes directly from the moonlight on the faces of my twins. Light is touch. Peter Høeg, The Susan Effect (2014)

Light is linked to mystical and religious experience, and yet it is part of everyday life. More often than not, it is linked to visual experience. But, as Peter Høeg says through Susan in his novel The Susan Effect, light is touch. The effect described in the title of the novel is that the mere presence of the character makes people trust her, confess their secrets, being affected by her or they are touched by her. In a similar way, any affective or mystical experience, should be understood in these terms. A mystical experience produces the same effect as that of the light in the passage quoted above: it is the light touching the faces of her sons that illuminates them and makes them visible in the darkness and, at the same time, activates an affective response. By juxtaposing what historians of the middle ages call affective piety with affective responses to the artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in this preface I will explore the role of touching, broadly understood, in the transmission of affects, and the role that perception through the senses plays in this process. This approach allows me to break free of the chrononormative frame, discussed below, and allows me a freer analysis of the role of touching in the medieval sensorium, understood as atmosphere construed both psychovii

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logically and socially, and as a materialisation of affect in different media and discursive formations. In a corner of a room in the museum there is a pile of candy, wrapped in multicolour cellophane. The visitors are invited to take one and eat it there and then or take it with them. The visitors are given the choice to take one and eat it there and then or to take it with them. The visitors can do just that, or they can read the description of the artwork or listen to it on the audio-guide. The weight of the pile of candy is not random, rather it is defined by an ideal weight: 175 lbs. The audio-guide specifies that this ideal weight corresponds to the person who is represented, bracketed in the title piece: “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. (Fig. 1). Ross was the partner of the artist behind the work, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and he died from AIDS-related complications. The references to Ross in the bracketed section and the idea of the total weight represented by candy diminishing as the candy is taken has been traditionally understood in correlation with Ross Loycock’s healthy body and the deterioration suffered as a consequence of HIV. It was, however, the artist’s intention that new meanings should develop in tandem with new installations and negotiations of how to prepare them. In fact, 175 lbs. can be considered the ideal weight of a healthy person, and the same weight was used on a similar piece, “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad), 1991. In both cases, the weight is given as an indication of ideal body weight, but the actual weight of the pile of candy is negotiated each time the installation is presented in a different setting. It is my interpretation that this process, this fluidity of the work, changes the subject of the artwork by becoming an object embodied in different interpretations of the beholders, and thereby mirroring to an even greater extent the myriad of opinions, reactions, and behaviours to specific situations. In this context the piece “Untitled” (Public Opinion), 1991, a pile of black-rod liquorice candy presented in different formats, arranged in corners or across floors, in my view articulates the displacement that happens when the audience is confronted with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy sculptures. Even if the candy sculptures contain references in the bracketed sections, they cannot be simply understood as portraits or representations of a reality, but rather an intentionally ambiguous departure point from which the action or lack off develops and from which specific subjective interpretations unfold without distinguishing between right or wrong.1 1  These candy sculptures and their participatory characteristics were not only a denunciation of AIDS, as they have often been interpreted. At the beginning of the 1990s, GonzalezTorres also ‘began to make sculptures that consisted of stacks of endlessly replaceable paper

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Gonzalez-Torres candy sculptures work in such a way that  when ‘inviting viewers to take pieces of candy, he invokes his audience’s desire and pleasures’, encompassing different discursive formations in collective memory and imagery.2 ‘Inviting’ in this context might need further explanation: here it is in fact giving the audience the choice to engage with the artwork, since they are never explicitly requested to interact with the sculpture. If they decide to do so, this can be the sensory experience of touching, unwrapping, and tasting. Perhaps the well-known warning not to accept candies from strangers. The idea of stealing from a museum.3 The search for a particular colour, introducing hands and arms into the pile. The idea of not knowing how the candy will taste, or if it is candy at all, and the risks linked to consuming something that is queer, strange. Gonzalez-Torres said: ‘I’m giving you this sugary thing, you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies. It’s very hot.’4 The word ‘hot’ in this context might seem to be used in a superficial way, but the dictionary definitions of the word reflect different meanings that play with the topic(s) that the artwork deploys in a very specific way: ‘having a high temperature’, ‘spicy’, ‘causing disagreement’, ‘exiting’, ‘skilful’, ‘likelihood’, ‘to think that a particular thing is very important and to demand

sheets’. These are premised on ideal weights and change according to the installation site. There are several strategies at play here that include the space in which they take place (see S.P. Hudson, ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’, October, no. 104 (2003): 115–130). It is also worth noticing the way in which these sculptures of endlessly replaceable paper sheets sometimes use the concept of interaction with participants, precisely by not allowing them to remove individual sheets from the stacks. 2  Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves. Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 196. 3  This was, for example, the experience described by Sandra Umathum, who wanted to take a candy but before doing so was scanning the space looking for surveillance cameras. She also states that it is not obvious that the candy installations made their availability clear to would-be participants, and she introduces the concept of seduction, rather than of offering. However, I argue that affect is the force that moves the visitor to participate in the artwork. They are propelled by the aesthetics of the form, which is defined by aspects such as the colour of the cellophane and the arrangement of the candy, and by playing with discursive formations. Sandra Umathum, ‘Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at Our Disposal’, Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011): 94–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.606032. 4  Quoted in Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves… 197.

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that it is done well or correctly’, ‘being angry’, and ‘sexually attractive’.5 What lies beneath the surface, what is only found beyond the cellophane, are different materialisations of that word and its role in the AIDS epidemic: disease, disagreements about how to address the issue, anger for the loss of loved ones and the discrimination by and lack of action on the part of governments, and the very affect that works as a carrier of the virus: desire. ‘Hot’ can also be used to define an atmosphere, a shared space, public or private, and individual experience that can be shared in the course of small talk in elevators about the weather: at any level it is a participatory act: ‘One enormous collaboration with the public. (…) The pieces just disperse themselves like a virus that flows to many different places—homes, studios, shops, bathrooms, wherever.’6 In my interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres’s artwork and its meaning enacted by inter-action if the visitor passes by the pile of candy and does not even interact with it, the sculpture becomes a performance of the indifference of the public to the AIDS epidemic, perhaps as one of those people who considered the disease to be punishment for immoral desires, those of gay people and those of drug addicts.7 If another person decides 5  All definitions from ‘HOT | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’, Dictionary. Cambridge.Org, 2019, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hot. 6  ‘Feeling the atmosphere’ is defined by Teresa Brenan as the space in which the transmission of affects happens, and, I would argue, equals the idea of the sensorium that is unpacked in the following pages. See below for how touching plays a role in the completion of this transmission. For Brennan’s analysis of the transmission of affect, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). For the concept of sensorium see below and Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015). Quotations from Felix GonzalezTorres are taken from Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (repr., New  York, NY: Guggenheim Museum Publication, 1995), 58. 7  This association was contested, in my opinion, by David Wojnarowicz in his artwork ‘Untitled (Genet after Brassaï)’, as well as in other artworks. The art piece features at its centre a portrait of Jean Genet used on the cover of one of the editions of Funeral Rites, a 1948 novel that explores a love story across ideological, political, and social divides. In the background, there is a bombed church, on the altar of which an image of Christ shooting-up has been placed. The interplay between different temporalities guides my interpretation, by liking different moments, symbols and imagery. Firstly, showing Jean Genet and what he represents for a gay imagery that is indebted to works like Querelle. Secondly, the plot of the novel Funeral Rites, for which the photo was used, seems to parallel the divisions and conflicts among the gay community during the AIDS epidemic. Thirdly, the image of the Christ shooting-up detail reminds us that this epidemic was targeted both the gay community and drugs users. The artwork is dated to 1979, but context matters: for many years it was only

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to take a piece, and does not read the description, or does not listen to the audio-guide, s/he becomes accomplice of the silence by being part of the consumer and capitalist society, merely enjoying the sweetness of the candy without acknowledging its context—a person who never addressed the issue properly, for example by allocating more funds to prevention than to researching a cure, aligning with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. The audio-guide at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, reveals that the pile of candy is a portrait, that the gesture of taking one piece parallels the weight loss experienced as consequence of suffering from HIV, and that Felix Gonzalez-Torres stipulated that the pile should be continuously replenished, thus granting perpetual life to a work that memorialises the loss of a loved one.8 However, somehow this is a misleading interpretation and a simplification of the complexity of affective reactions and operations. The sculpture, as it has been noted above, is not a portrait, and the gesture of taking one piece of candy making the weight diminish is one interpretation among many. In my analysis, the departure point in which by objectivising the subject the meaning of the artwork remains open. Moreover, it is the decision of the owner of the art piece, or its borrower, whether or not to replenish the pile of candy, and how often and to what extent to do so, thus transforming curators, owners, and institutions in an essential part of the process of generating new meaning. Perhaps, in my interpretation,  if visitors stop, participate, and listen to the audio-guide, they will be affected by becoming aware of a series of issues that were not—and are not—at stake in the public arena and it would drive them to do something, to act.  But affect is by definition something that cannot be put into words, that cannot be driven by any specific message, and that acting itself can relate to other things chosen by the affected person. If the person knows nothing about the specific context or the references in the title, does not listen to the audio-guide, but is affected all the same, the consequent action will depend on how the subject returns to his original standpoint after this experience of displacement. known by a photograph that appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s 1990 retrospective at Illinois State University, Tongues of Flame. It does not seem coincidental that the image makes its first appearance during the years of the AIDS epidemic. 8  The audio-guide explanation can be listened to online at the institution website: ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) | The Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a.

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‘Affect’ and ‘being affected’, that is the transmission of affects, are concepts that need further clarification, especially because they are, I argue, entangled with the senses and specifically with touching. ‘Affect’ is a curious word; it means ‘to do something that produces an effect or change in something or in someone’s situation’ or ‘to make someone feel strong emotions’.9 The word comes from the Latin verb afficere, meaning ‘to influence’, ‘to do’, and became integrated in the vernacular languages in the Late Middle Ages (possibly as a result of the use of the term in theology), but was integrated with a twist in the way it was used. For Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), affectus is a dimension of experience and love so overwhelming that it ‘simply cannot contain itself within the bounds of mundane speech’ after the experience of mystical union with God.10 Words matter: union implies contact, the satisfaction of desire by touching, either physically or metaphorically. For Bonaventure (1221–1274), affectus ‘plays at the boundary of body and spirit and names a force that is more fundamental than the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal’ in mystical union and longing for God’s love.11 His development of the concept draws in the concept of eros as a way of affecting and as effect as a union, that is, of desire, and in its conception the body appears as a boundary, suggesting that affect is neither self-contained nor restrained by it. These conceptions of affect are in fact related to our understanding of the term, articulated in the dichotomy between cognition and feeling or emotion, echoing that of intellect and affectus. It is not by chance that one of the most influential books on affect theory, written by Charles Altieri, uses the word ‘rapture’ to define an aesthetics of the affects.12 More to the point, Ernst van Alphen opens his article ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’ with the reaction of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to the sculpture Gold Field by Roni Horn in Los Angeles.13 Van Alphen contextualises the 9  “Affect | Meaning of Affect in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE”, Ldoceonline.Com, 2019, https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/affect. 10  Philip Liston-Kraft, ‘Bernard’s Belching Bride: The Affectus That Words Cannot Express’, Medieval Mystical Theology 26, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 57, https://doi.org/10.1 080/20465726.2017.1321201. See below for a more detailed discussion of the term. 11  Robert Davis, “The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure.” (PhD, repr., Harvard University, 2012), ix. See below for a more detailed discussion of the term. 12  Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 13  Ernst Van Alphen, ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54, no. 1 (2008): 20–30.

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artist’s reaction as shifting from the ‘sloganeering art that appropriated the media towards a more personal voice’ as new ways of contestation.14 A closer examination of how Gonzalez-Torres described his reaction and what happened in that exhibition room might be needed: 1990, L.A. The Gold Field. How can I deal with the Gold Field? I don’t quite know. But the Gold Field was there. Ross and I entered the Museum of Contemporary Art, and without knowing the work of Roni Horn we were blown away by the heroic, gentle and horizontal presence of this gift. There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company, it didn’t need anything. Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly. A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination. This piece is nothing more than a thin layer of gold. It is everything a good poem by Wallace Steven is: precise, with no baggage, nothing extra. A poem that feels secure and dares to unravel itself, to become naked, to be enjoyed in a tactile manner, but beyond that, in an intellectual way too. Ross and I were lifted.15

The first thing to note is the questioning with which the description of this encounter begins, doubting its own ability to transform what has happened into language. A description of the space and of the piece follow together, expressed almost as if a camera were navigating over the surface of both the environment and the artwork, which matches with the description of ‘haptic’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the smooth space.16 That is, a space in which we move by continuous reference to the immediate environment: ‘[I]t seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile).’17 By continuously referencing the context and surroundings, the object and the subject touch, the space becomes a lived space, permeating memory, inspiring change. Gonzalez-­  Van Alphen, 21.  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’, in Julie Ault (ed.) Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York and Göttingen: The Felix Gonzales-Torres foundation, 2006), 150. 16  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500. 17  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 493. 14 15

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Torres continues his description with the aftermath of the encounter: ‘Ross and I always talked about this work, how much affected us. After that any sunset became The Gold Field.’18 The encounter took place in 1990, when the imminent death of Ross triggered a series of reflections that were first published in 1996.19 These notes make clear that the experience became entangled in memory and experience allowing a further discursive formation: to be affected by something means to do something, to react, even if these are not shown and remain in the thoughts of the affected person. When considering affect, a much-used buzzword in different fields of research, I do not mean personal or subjective affect, but rather the dialogue between the personal and subjective and the social or the context that contributes to the atmosphere or space in which one is affected by something. In this regard, I adapt and follow what Laura U. Marks calls haptic criticism: ‘The haptic critic, rather than place herself within the “striated space” of predetermined critical frameworks, navigates a smooth space by engaging with objects and ideas and teasing out the connections immanent to them.’20 I understand these connections as not only defined by the intention of the artist or the user, but also by social reality, rather than the critical reality, in which the object was created, and extend that idea to the present in which the subject interacts. In fact, ‘affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and to be acted upon’, which implies that specific contexts matter in the formation of the atmosphere in which affect happens, both psychological, physical, and social: ‘affect is in many ways with force or forces of encounters’.21 Having taken into account the multitude of meanings that these candy sculptures can generate, in the remainder of this preface I want to focus specifically on one. Imagine that the person interacting with the sculpture belongs to a community that the AIDS epidemics hit, if they know someone who died, or simply if other people are standing by the artwork and show their feelings, then s/he would probably be affected in that particular direction. The affect will produce an outcome: it will be integrated in their memory-discourse, and will in fact break chrononormative practices of  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’, 150.  In Amanda Cruz et  al., Earth Grow Thick by Roni Horn (The Ohio State University: Columbus, 1996), 65–69. 20  Laura U Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xiii. 21  Gregory J.  Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25. 18 19

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memory and collective memory. I use chrononormative in a double sense. The first sense is the parcelling of history into periodisation in such a way that deems any attempt to treat events that are distant to an understanding of time as linear and anachronistic. This privileges a narrative of progress indebted to applications of Darwinist theory, although out of context and benefiting views that align with the normative and power structures. The second sense follows Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of the term as ‘the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’ or the imposition of rhythms through calendars, schedules, or even the tendency to feel collectively at certain events.22 The transmission of affects has to do with atmosphere, setting, and space, and can put objects and subjects of different times in touch. This creates affective modes that escape organisation by time, not only in the domestic sphere as Freeman suggests, but also when decontextualising and recontextualising what Ernst van Alphen calls affective operations.23 A good example of this can be seen in the way  in which  Felix Gonzalez-­ Torres names some of his works: pieces untitled ‘with subtitles that, when strung together, constitute a sort of linguistic portrait juxtaposing the deeply personal and the actively, anonymously political context in which such events occur’.24 I would add that this naming strategy allows the piece to be decontextualised and recontextualised in affective ways by linking two moments in time and out of line with the chrononormative. In making it timeless, it becomes affective. In my interpretation of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), the bracketed section of the title refers not only to the moment of the encounter with the Gold Field, but also to the last days of Ross’s life. This makes the alterations in the weight of the pile of candy by virtue of the participation of the public acquire a new meaning. But this new meaning can also be generated in the decision of where to place the sculpture, and in the negotiations taking place to that particular end. In both cases, these actions create a kind of intimacy that falls outside of a timeline and allows instances of interaction with the artwork to be linked to or distanced from the first time the piece was displayed or with the time this chapter was written or is read. 22  Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–7. For the shared time in events as performative, Freeman follows Homi Bhabha and refers to how these events can be linked to narratives of belonging, for instance in a nationalist way of watching the Olympics. 23  Freeman, xxii–xxiii. Van Alphen, 22. 24  Hudson, 126.

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We aim for a similar disruption to the chrononormative in the pages that follow by the experience of reading through a detailed analysis of that affective atmosphere, one that needs to be understood and connected to the sensorium, devotional practices, and visionary experience of the Late Middle Ages in what has been defined as ‘affective piety’.25 Both the artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and some of his experiences show that the transmission of affects materialises in textures, as an intermedial category between the smooth and the striated, lived or imagined, and linked to memory and discursive formations. ‘Sensorium’ is here understood outside of any specific theoretical frame that prevents the application of other theories or ideas. If the Middle Ages can be understood as an ‘age of the medium’, as Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen suggests, ‘medieval practices offer a plentiful reservoir of strategies for combining, blending, and fusing media modalities into rich and abundant wholes not forced into a priori categorisations’.26 The tactile plays a fundamental role as an intermediary between the senses and the perception in both devotional practices and in visionary experiences. Jacqueline Jung in her pioneering essay about the tactile and the visionary points out not only the relationship between visionary experience and sculpture, but also the role of touching in devotional practices that frame the visionary experience of Hedwig of Silesia or Gertrud of Helfta, showing how these are ‘rich in their evocations of multisensory modalities of divine communication, and sometimes explicitly reflect on the tensions between visual and tactile perception’.27 This is a tension similar to that created by the encounter of anonymous visitors with ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) and with Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ross’s encounter with the Gold Field in the ways in which these deploy affect and reposition in both subjects and contexts.

25  For a reflection on the misuse of this term, see my essay ‘Inside the Frame: the Making of Queer Visionary Discourses’ below. 26  Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium. Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages’, in The Saturated Sensorium… 9–10. 27  Jacqueline E. Jung, ‘The Tactile and the Visionary’, in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art & History, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 203–240.

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This exploration of touching and being touched, of affect and perception, frames the essays that this book includes. The volume explores theoretical frameworks, specific visionary experiences, and devotional practices, and tries to dig holes in history to permeate and change preconceptions and to expose new perspectives for future research. Bergen, Norway

David Carrillo-Rangel

References Artworks Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 Horn, Roni. Gold Field, 1980–1028. Wojnarowicz, David. Untitled (Genet after Brassaï), 1978–1979.

Secondary Sources Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Castiglia, Christopher and Christopher Reed. If Memory Serves. Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Reprinted, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Cruz, Amanda, et al. Earth Grow Thick by Roni Horn. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1996. Davis, Robert. ‘The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure’. Reprinted, PhD, Harvard University, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York and Göttingen: The Felix Gonzales-Torres foundation, 2006. Hudson, S.P. ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’. October 104 (2003): 115–130.

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Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach. The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015. Jung, Jacqueline E. ‘The Tactile and the Visionary’. In Looking Beyond : Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art & History, edited by Colum Hourihane. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Liston-Kraft, Philip. ‘Bernard’s Belching Bride: The Affectus That Words Cannot Express’. Medieval Mystical Theology 26, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 54–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/20465726.2017.1321201. Marks, Laura U. Touch  : Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. In The Affect Theory Reader, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Spector, Nancy. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Reprinted, New  York, NY: Guggenheim Museum Publishing, 1995. Umathum, Sandra. ‘Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at Our Disposal’. Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011): 94–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.606032. Van Alphen, Ernst. ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54, no. 1 (2008): 20–30.

Online Resources ‘Affect | Meaning of Affect in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE’. Ldoceonline.Com, 2019. https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/affect. ‘HOT | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’. Dictionary.Cambridge. Org, 2019. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hot ‘Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) | The Art Institute of Chicago’. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/ untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a.

Acknowledgements

This book has been some journey. It has survived disease, changes of country, and other misadventures which have now become oddkin. Many people have helped in many ways during this process. We would like to thank our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their infinite patience and professional manners shown at all times, especially Molly Beck and Maeve Sinnott, and also to Oliver Dyer, Carmel Kennedy, and Emily Russell. We also want to express our gratitude to the anonymous readers at Palgrave for their invaluable feedback and constructive reviews, and of course to all of the contributors of this volume whose enthusiasm has matched our own as editors. We have discussed this project with many colleagues in one way or another and each of them has made our work better: Sabrina Corbellini, Liz Herbert McAvoy, David Morgan, Henning Laugerud, Vincent Gillespie, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Hildegard Elizabeth Keller, Sarah Brazil, Juliette Vuille, Jonas Wellendorf, and Sergi Sancho Fibla. In the following pages the reader will find a wealth of images, and we would like to thanks artists, individuals, and institutions for making this possible: Holly McHugh, at The Felix Gonzalez-Torres foundation; Diana Zilotto at the Archivio fotografico e dei restauri Servizi e concessioni Beni Culturali; Alexandre Brodard and Daniela Lurman Lange; Marie Finsten Jensen at The Royal Danish Library; Lee-Anne Wielonda at The Art Gallery of Ontario; Anne Mette Hansen, at The Arnamagnæan Institute; Dulce Estévez López at agefotostock; Erinç Seymen and everyone at Zilberman Gallery; Liz Kay at Brasenose College in Oxford; Ji Mary Seo xix

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at Walters Art Museum; Samantha Sherbourne and Emma Stanford at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; the Imaging Service staff at the British Library; and Giacomo Floris, who mediated between us and the Italian archives in many occasions. Special thanks go to the English proofreaders for non-native speakers for their professional work at all times, even when pressed for time, specifically our fellow editor Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, who also organised a workshop that allowed editors and contributors to meet and discuss the volume. This would have not been possible without the support of the Monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès, and especially Lluís Campins and Alba Rodríguez. A lot of our work as editors consisted in reading and exploring previous research on the senses and the sensorium. In that regard, we would like to thank the Biblioteca/CRAI of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, who diligently acquired the essential bibliography we needed, especially to the head of the Unit of Social Sciences and Humanities (Biblioteca/CRAI de la Ciutadella) and his director (cap de unitat) Xavier Brunet Sahún for his work and availability regarding our enquiries. This project was born as a spin-off  of the Second ARDIT International Congress of Medievalists, Senses and Sensuality in the Middle Ages. We would like to thank its organiser Carme Muntaner Alsina, and all those involved in editing a volume out of that event: Pau Castells Granados and Anna Fernàndez Clot for their generosity in allowing us to pursue and touch new directions. This is an independent project, completed in our free time, without any funding. In that regard, we are greatly indebted to the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS). As the funding body of the project Medieval Convent Drama (FNS grant no. 100015_165887), they made it possible for the chapter ‘Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond’, by Elisabeth Dutton and Olivia Robinson, to be available as Open Access. When we were designing this project, we realised that as an edited volume, it needed to work as a monograph, coherently linking the different essays of which it was composed. We believe we have achieved this, but regardless, we, as editors, would also like to give our thanks individually. Pablo: This book has been a long and enriching road and, as every real journey full of ‘adventures and knowledge’ it contained all the elements listed by Constantine P. Cavafi in his immortal poem. First of all, I want to also thank my co-editors, David Carrillo-Rangel and Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, and I appreciate their invitation to participate in this project which has been

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both challenging and rewarding; this book would have never been possible without their hard work. I have discussed this project with different colleagues, whose help has been precious: Victoria Cirlot (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), José Antonio Ramos Arteaga (Universidad de La Laguna), Eduardo Carrero Santamaría (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Mercedes Pérez Vidal (Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf), Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Eva Schlotheuber (HeinrichHeine-Universität-Düsseldorf), Hildegard Elizabeth Keller (Universität Zürich), Sean L. Field (University of Vermont) and Gorka López de Munain, among others; my gratitude goes to all of them. I would also like to thank the Associació d’Amics de la Biblioteca Haas and its Research Group (2017 SGR 276) and the research project ‘La conformación de la autoridad espiritual femenina en Castilla’ (FFI2015-63625-C2-2-P, MINECO/FEDER); they greatly supported me in completing and discussing the necessary list of readings required to write the introduction to this volume. Finally, I would like to deeply thank the never-ending support from my family and friends. I’m particularly indebted to two irreplaceable women in my life, Olga Serra Pujol and Carmen Luz Acosta Martín. Thanks for the hours. Delfi: I would also like to thank Louisa A.  Burnham (Middlebury College), Claire Taylor (University of Nottingham), Justine Trombley (University of Nottingham), and David Zbíral (Masaryk University) for their continued support, and Sean L.  Field (University of Vermont), Cecilia Gaposchkin (Dartmouth College), Walter Simons (Dartmouth College), Anne E. Lester (Johns Hopkins University), and Lester K. Little (Smith College) for their invaluable feedback on my work. This book has come at a very special time in my life. While we were working on it, I finished my dissertation, I was hit by a car, and also gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who will hopefully grow up knowing that women in academia are not an oddity any more. Needless to say, this would not have been possible without the help and kindness of my fellow co-editors David and Pablo, to whom I feel deeply indebted. Finally, I would like to thank my most staunch supporter, Carlos López-Arenillas, for always believing and going through thick and thin with me. David: First and foremost, I want to thank my parents, Antonio Carrillo and Josefa Rangel, because after every manifestation of the tempest, they have been there supporting me. Delfi and Pablo, the co-editors of the volume, have done a wonderful job both professionally and personally; it is not always easy to be caught on fire. I have worked in many waiting

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rooms of clinics and hospitals; my gratitude for their kindness and help to doctors, nurses, and staff. I have been away from home many times, and I’m lucky enough to have friends who have hosted me and have listened to my circular monologues while working on this project; a thousand thanks to Vincenzo Piscioneri, Alberto Valdivieso Vico, and Christoph Baumann. Extra gratitude and love to my friends Patricia Méndez Ávila, who rescued my computer when I forgot it at security in Barcelona Airport, Karo Moret Miranda, for our discussions over coffee and jazz, Araceli Rosillo-Luque, for the conversations over dinner, and the many friends who through their kindness have made things easier in a very difficult time. I would also like to thank Aidan Keally Conti, Pål Bjørby, Roberta Magnani, Åslaug Ommundsen, and Mieke Bal for their support and feedback. And finally, I owe thanks to my favourite person, Helen Leslie-Jacobsen, for being there, always.

Contents

1 A Clash of Theories: Discussing Late Medieval Devotional Perception  1 Pablo Acosta-García

Part I Unbinding the Body  19 2 Touching the Page and Touching the Heart: Manuscript Culture and Affective Devotion in Late Medieval Flemish Communities 21 Barbara Zimbalist 3 Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond 43 Olivia Robinson and Elisabeth Dutton

Part II Wounding the Spiritual Self  69 4 Sacralising Perception: Rosary-Devotion and Tactile Experience of the Divine in Late Medieval Denmark 71 Mads Vedel Heilskov xxiii

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CONTENTS

5 Haptic Prayer, Devotional Books and Practices of Perception 95 Laura Katrine Skinnebach 6 Skin Christ. On the Animation, Imitation, and Mediation of Living Skin and Touch in Late Medieval Contact Imagery123 Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen

Part III Seizing Nothingness 149 7 The Making of Queer Visionary Discourses151 David Carrillo-Rangel 8 Queer Touch Between Holy Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Visitation203 Laura Saetveit Miles 9 ConTact. Tactile Experiences of the Sacred and the Divinity in the Middle Ages237 Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí Index267

Notes on Contributors

Pablo Acosta-García  is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the HeinrichHeine-Universität-Düsseldorf, where he is developing his project Late Medieval Visionary Women’s Impact in Early Modern Castilian Spiritual Tradition. In his PhD thesis he analysed the devotional culture of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, and additionally, he has edited the marginalia of its manuscript tradition (2017). His latest book is the edition and Spanish translation of Angela da Foligno’s Memoriale (Siruela, 2014). He has been a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). David  Carrillo-Rangel  is a PhD fellow at the Institutt for lingvistiske, litterære og estetiske studier, Universitetet i Bergen. His dissertation is titled Performing Visions: Queer Visionary Discourses, Materiality and Authority in Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations in the 14th and 15th Centuries, in which he applies queer theory to manuscript studies. He has published various articles on medieval spirituality, comparative literature, and circulation of manuscripts as circulation of knowledge. He has co-edited the volume Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages. His research interests range from Medieval Latin, cultural analysis, manuscript studies to queer studies. He has a special interest in research dissemination and has been involved in different activities to engage with both the contemporary culture and a broader audience.

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Victoria Cirlot  is Professor of Romance Philology. Her research focuses on Arthurian romance, Late Medieval women mystics, and comparative studies between medieval and twentieth-century aesthetics. She is a founding member of the Institut Universitari de Cultura (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), a founder of the research team of the Bibliotheca Mystica et Philosophica Alois M. Haas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and editor of the collection ‘Árbol del Paraíso’ (Siruela). She has authored numerous books, critical editions, translations, and papers. Elisabeth  Dutton is Professor of English Medieval Language and Literature at the Université de Fribourg, and heads, with Liv Robinson, the Medieval Convent Drama Project (www.medievalconventdrama.org), as well as Early Drama at Oxford (www.edox.org.uk): both projects combine literary and historical approaches with performance research. Her published work includes a range of books and articles on medieval women’s writing and early theatre. Blanca  Garí is Professor of Medieval History at the Department of History and Archaeology at the Universitat de Barcelona, and a member of the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures. Her scientific interests mainly lie in the history of mysticism and female monasticism. She is the author of numerous publications, including books, critical editions, and papers. Mads Vedel Heilskov  is a medieval historian with a background in visual culture. He obtained his PhD degree from the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2018. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Centre de recherches historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, with a project called ‘Animated Materiality in the Medieval Catholic West’, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. His work focuses mainly on medieval religious practices and experiences, and the role played by materiality in medieval Christianity features prominently among his research interests. Hans  Henrik  Lohfert  Jørgensen, PhD,  is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Aarhus Universitet. His research focuses on developing a theoretical and historical model of animation for various visual media in the Latin Middle Ages. Relevant publications include The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (2015); ‘Live Matter and Living Images: Towards a Theory of Animation in Material Media’ Journal of Art History (86/3, 2017); ‘The

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Image as Contact Medium: Mediation, Multimodality, and Haptics in Medieval Imagery’, The Locus of Meaning in Medieval Art (2019). Laura Saetveit Miles  is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway, with a PhD from Yale University. She researches religious literature in medieval England, with publications on women’s literary culture, visionary and devotional texts, the manuscripts of Birgittine and Carthusian monastic communities, and modern feminist, gender, and queer theory. Her monograph The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England is forthcoming from Boydell & Brewer. She is embarking on a project examining St. Birgitta of Sweden’s influence on medieval English culture, with the support of a Young Research Talents grant from the Norwegian Research Council for 2019–2023. Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel  holds a BSc in Physics, a BA in History, an MA and a PhD in Medieval Cultures from the University of Barcelona. Her dissertation was entitled Communities of Dissent: Social Network Analysis of Religious Dissident Groups in Languedoc in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. She is an associate researcher at the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures of the University of Barcelona and has spent research stays at St Andrews University (UK) and at the Centre for the Study of Religions in Brno (Czech Republic). She was selected as one of the 2018 Fellows of the Dartmouth Historical Institute on New Directions in Religious Studies. She has extensively presented her research on dissident networks in several international conferences. Her published work on this topic includes several book chapters, and she has several book chapters in preparation. Olivia Robinson  is Lecturer in Late Medieval Literature at the University of Birmingham and Senior SNSF Researcher at the Université de Fribourg, where she is part of the Medieval Convent Drama Project (www.medievalconventdrama.org), researching the performative and theatrical cultures of medieval women religious through archival and performance-based methodologies. Her published work focuses on medieval Anglo-French literary interrelationships, cultures, and exchanges. She is the author of a forthcoming monograph on Franco-English translation and the Chaucer canon (Contest, Translation and the Chaucerian Text, Brepols: f­ orthcoming 2019), in addition to a range of articles and book chapters on drama in the medieval convent.

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Laura Katrine Skinnebach  is a research assistant at Department of Art History, Aesthetics & Culture and Museology at Aarhus Universitet. Her main research interests are medieval and early modern devotion, materiality and the sensorium, as well as theories of images, perception, and interaction. She has recently received a research grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark to work on medieval animation and images in collaboration with Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen from Aarhus Universitet. She is a member of the international research network European Network on the Instruments of Devotion. Her published work includes ‘Transfiguration. Change and Comprehension in Late Medieval Devotional Perception’, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe. Images, Objects and Practices, edited by Salvador Ryan, Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (2016, 90–103) and ‘Devotion. Incorporating the Immutated Sensorium in Late Medieval Devotional Practice’, in The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, edited by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (2015, 152–179). Barbara  Zimbalist is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture at The University of Texas at El Paso. She works on the intersection of gender and religion in late medieval England, France, and the Low Countries. Her project traces the evolution of Christ’s speech as a literary trope in women’s visionary literature from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 5.1

Triptych of St Wilgefortis,  central panel, 104 x 119 cm, inv 76109. ©  Archivio fotografico G.A.VE su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali. Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia 45 Image of 2017 Fribourg performance of Huy Nativity play, showing female performer playing Joseph in a drawn-on beard. Photo: © Alexander Brodard 55 Beginning of the rosary, Anna Brade’s prayer book, Denmark, 1497, AM 75, 8, 71v. The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Photo by Suzanne Reitz 77 Maria in Sole, Aarhus Cathedral, Denmark, c. 1500. Photo by author82 The rich and the poor man’s prayer, Tingsted Church, Denmark, fifteenth century. Photo by author 84 Mary and Elisabeth, Marine Jespersdatter’s prayer book, Denmark, 1514–1517, AM 421, 12 MO, 44v-45r. The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Photo by Suzanne Reitz 87 Prayer-nut with Queen of Sheba Visiting King Solomon; Adoration of the Magi, 1500–1530, boxwood with metal fitting. Overall Closed: 54.9 mm × 63.6 mm (5.5 × 6.4 cm). The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. AGOID.29458. Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo taken by author at the exhibition Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures at The Met Cloisters 89 The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Thott 553, 4°, fol. 9r. Photo: The Royal Danish Library. The illustration shows the first xxix

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 6.1

page of the long rubric for the cross prayer  in Anna Brade’s bønnebog. The book is richly illustrated in the margins, but here the accompanying images seem to have been cut out. The reason is unknown. One may speculate whether the image could potentially have served a haptic purpose. According to the rubric, performance of the prayer would give 1000 days of indulgence, but the particular sentence referring to indulgence was erased at some point after the Danish reformation in 1537  101 The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Thott 553, 4°, fol. 9v. Photo: The Royal Danish Library. Each time the cross prayer mentions the word cross, a small red cross has been inserted into the text. According to the rubric (see Fig. 5.1) devotees should cross their body every time they encountered the word/image of the cross in the text  102 The Arnamagnean Collection, Copenhagen, AM 421,12°, fol. 1r. Photo: Suzanne Reitz. First page of the long rubric accompanying the multifunctional and haptic devotion from Marine Jespersdatter’s prayer book  105 The Arnamagnean Collection, Copenhagen, AM 421,12°, fol. 2v-3r. Photo: Suzanne Reitz. A page was cut from Marine Jespersdatter’s prayer book between fol. 2 and 3, perhaps in order to be carried on the body, as the rubric prescribes 106 The Merode Altarpiece. The Metropolitan Museum, New York. CC: Public Domain. Attributed to the workshop of Robert Campin in the Netherlands, is a rich source to information on different devotional props. On the table between Gabriel and the Virgin Mary lies a prayer book, a silken pouch and a prayer roll or bede108 The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Gl. Kgl. Saml. 3423, 8°. Photo: The Royal Danish Library. A girdle binding facilitated constant presence of one’s prayer book. It could be opened and read while still hanging from one’s belt. This particular specimen was light and handy. Although only few girdle books are still extant, visual culture indicates that they were extremely popular well into the sixteenth century 109 El Santísimo Cristo de Burgos, a wooden crucifix with a ‘soft sculpture’ of the crucified body composed of mixed media, mobile members, and organic materials to exemplify the notion of Skin Christ: a prevalent late medieval mode of depicting, embodying, and envisioning the incarnate Saviour as a contact image, a sensorial conception of skin-mediated religious experience, tactile devotion, and sacred dermatology.

  LIST OF FIGURES 

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9

Fourteenth century, Cathedral of Burgos, Spain. Rights Managed NON EXCLUSIVE © [age fotostock] Cristo de Burgos: detail of a close encounter with the medium of skin, or Skin Christ, in the shape of a highly haptic crucifixus dolorosus, transmitting its fluid interior as a palpable token of corporeal presence through ostentatiously sculpted wounds— conduits of an animated flux of blood, power, and grace— protruding like ulcerous craters in the permeable surface of the overflowing crucifix. Fourteenth century, Cathedral of Burgos, Spain. Rights Managed NON EXCLUSIVE © [age fotostock] Erinç Seymen Alliance. 2009. Embroidery on fabric. 150 × 112 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery) York, York Minster Library, Inc. 5–9, woodcut facing Rev. IV, 70, unnumbered, signature n viij verso. Hand-coloured. Woodcut of the Crucified Christ in the first printed edition of The Revelations, in Lübeck: Bartholomaeus Ghotan commissioned by the Bridgitmonastery of Vadstena in 1492. Reproduced by permission of the Chapter of York Oxford, Brasenose College MS 16 f. 87r. Full page and detail. This psalter belonged to the Brigittine monastery of Syon Abbey, the coat of arms of the previous owner has been erased and replaced by the five wounds, it happens again on f. 149r. Reproduced by the kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford Imhoff-­ Tetzel-­ Holzschuher Epitaph, church of St. Sebald, Nuremberg: detail showing Katerina Lemmel as Birgittine nun. The crown with the five red dots symbolises the five wounds. Photograph by Volker Schier. CC BY-SA 3.0 Illuminated Manuscript, Book of Hours, Five Wounds of Christ, Walters Art Museum Ms. W.165, fol. 110v. The Five Wounds are represented in all likelihood like in the banner. Image: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. CC BY-SA 3.0 Erinç Seymen, Homo Fragilis, 2016, Lightbox, 42 × 54 cm, ed. 2 + 1 A.P. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery) Erinç Seymen, Sangoi 2012. Installation view. Drawings, cards, table and video. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery Erinç Seymen, Shoes 1, 2012. Drawing and card of a deck of cards used in the table and in the video-art piece in the installation. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery) Erinç Seymen, Shoes 1, 2012. Detail. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery)

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135

140 156

166

167

168

169 179 187 188 189

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.10 Fig. 7.11

Fig. 7.12 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1

Erinç Seymen, Birds 12, 2012. Drawing and card of a deck of cards used in the table and in the video-art piece in the installation. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery) 190 Erinç Seymen, Sangoi. 2012. Video still from the piece screened at the exhibition, in which how the table looks when the players are seated is shown. (Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery)191 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. D 403, fol. 3v. Woodcut. Currently bounded as part of the manuscript. (© The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford) 195 The Visitation. Historiated initial for Lauds, Hours of the Virgin. The Neville of Hornby Hours. London, British Library, MS Egerton 2781, f. 62r. (© The British Library Board) 223 Vita Beatae Hedwigis, Hedwig codex, fol. 12v, The J.  Paul Getty Museum. (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) 248

CHAPTER 1

A Clash of Theories: Discussing Late Medieval Devotional Perception Pablo Acosta-García

Vere fidelium experientia probat, perspicit et contrectat de Verbo vite incarnato.... Angela da Foligno, Memoriale (2013), 3

Christian devotional practices are of a very ambiguous nature, they encompass the passage from the realms of the body to the realms of the mind, and, in the case of involved revelatory phenomena, even to the states beyond the intellectual.1 In Late Medieval Christianity, these practices can initially be described as conscious, culturally oriented performances that use different media in order to mobilize the devotee’s affect (affectus)

 This ubiquitous, interperceptual and transperceptual character of Low medieval devotional activity is exemplified, for instance, by the discussion of ‘image’ by Jeffrey Hamburger, St. John the Divine. The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 186. 1

P. Acosta-García (*) Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Carrillo-Rangel et al. (eds.), Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26029-3_1

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through the use of her/his senses.2 Therefore, facing devotion may be coherently understood as studying human perception in its relationship with a multimedial contextual frame.3 If this perspective is right, the initial question may be: how can processes that are hardly documented and which, by definition, involve the devotee’s inexpressible experience of the sacred, be approached and done justice? From a modern critical perspective, every conception of the human sensorium is mediated by cultural assumptions in which the number of senses, their supposed hierarchy and their possible interactions related to religious practices, present great variation, depending on the source used to interpret them.4 Therefore, recreating processes from the past that encompass perception, experience and/or a revelation is an extremely problematic issue, at least from the point of view of historical hermeneutics. For instance, the precise, critical significance of ‘affection’ in religious contexts that imply the aforementioned passage from the physical to the numinous must be discussed. When the expression ‘affective practices’ is inserted into the ­academic discourse, are we emphasizing the media used to cause the experience, the effects of these media on the user, the experience itself or the whole process? Pointing to this affective character could be, but should not be, a sympathetic method with which to approach our understanding of meditative processes in a scholarly but patronizing way. In 2  Affectus will be an object of critical enquiry in the following pages. For a general description of the anthropological religious context in which the affectus is seen as the centre of Christian devotion, see Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagi, Sensible Moyen Âge. Une histoire des emotions dans l’Occident medieval (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015), 257–301. For a theological historical study of the term, see Pierre Pourrat, ‘Affective (spiritualité)’ and Michel Dupuy, ‘Oraison’, esp. ‘Oraison affective’, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Doctrine et Histoire, ed. Marcel Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937), vol. 1, 240–246 and vol. 11, 831–846, respectively. For the word’s diachronic semantics from philosophical and theological sources, see Damien Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au Moyen Âge. Autour de l’anropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx (Caien Publications du CRAHM, 2005). 3  See Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, ‘Into the saturated sensorium’, in The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, eds. Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnenbach (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015), 9–23. 4  We use the concept ‘sensorium’ as in Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated’, 17: ‘the perceptual system as a whole, in its social situation, cultural construction, and historical formation’. For a culturally oriented perspective on medieval senses, see the chapters in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, eds. Jerry Toner et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and the bibliography included in Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Christian Spirituality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8, no. 5.

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fact, most of the times, the synchronic perception of the devotee conveys the idea that what s/he underwent was a real, sacred experience, wheter it was caused by an external input or caused by the process itself. From the point of view of modern scholarship, the most common avenue for recovering a precise functioning of the senses from a religious standpoint is to reconstruct the conceptions of intellectually oriented texts, which, in the case of Late Medieval devotion, were usually authored by (mostly male) theologians.5 These are the first theories traditionally faced by literature in a quête for the functioning of religious processes: frequently complex discourses used to frame historical depictions of devotional living practices or to fit the function of a devotional tool into a certain system of references. Again, some questions arise here: how do these texts, mostly written by upper-class intellectuals, help us to understand actual devotional practices, mostly undertaken by lay, frequently illiterate, people? Were they used by devotees? If so, following what channels? Are the links normally established by scholars between, for example, Saint Augustine’s classic passage on the three types of vision and later visionary experiences such as that of Angela of Foligno modern links constructed ad hoc or links actually known to devotees?6 These questions point to what I call a first clash of theories. Frequently when a scholar faces theological discourses on the senses and the sacred, the main issues are not only to establish a concrete hierarchy and to define specific interactions between different senses, but also to establish a coherent, systematic vocabulary that works for the study of devotion in Late Medieval Christianity. And this is far from being an unambiguous task. For example, it is easy to understand the extreme complexity that characterizes Christian exegetical tradition just revisiting the 5  On the theological consideration of the Christian senses from a historical perspective, see Éric Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2014), 59–90. For a thorough review of the different conceptions of the ‘spiritual senses’ by Christian theologians, see Gavrilyuk and Coakley, The Spiritual Senses. 6  For the three Augustinian levels of vision, see Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, XII, 7, 16. In this sense, see also Eugene Vance, ‘Seeing God: Augustine, Sensation and the Mind’s Eye’, in Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage/Fascinations/Frames, eds. Stephen G.  Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, and Alison Calhoun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 13–29. For Mechthild von Hackeborn, see the new translation which includes a comprehensive introduction with an overview of the state of the art, Mechthild von Hackeborn, The Book of the Special Grace, trans. Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist Press, 2017).

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chapters contained in the 2014 volume titled The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, which chronologically reviews the concept in a variety of Christian authors. As its editors, Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, put it in the introduction to the volume, the only way to produce a book like this is to use the expression ‘spiritual senses’ like an ‘umbrella term’ or, in other words, as an operative concept that covers different uses (in fact, very different uses) in different systems of thought from different periods of time; that is to say that the medieval theoretical approaches to the senses could not only be diverse, but also contradictory.7 Following this, the approach used in this volume, on the one hand, separates the vocabulary taken from a variety of modern, interdisciplinary hermeneutical frames from the constructions of the theological exegetical practice of the period and, on the other, studies very specific devotional practices from the complex perspective of the performer of those practices. Regarding the terminology of modern hermeneutics and the construction of devotion as a historical category, we need to review the boom of visual studies during the 1990s, especially in the fields of Art History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, which rapidly developed a strong branch in the History of Christian Devotion.8 Ground-breaking works such as those by Hans Belting or Jeffrey F.  Hamburger, on ‘images’ as necessary visual media to lead the devotee from the material to the immaterial, opened a wide range of new avenues for understanding not only religious acts, but also the conception of the artistic objects used to accomplish contemplation.9 These studies were also extremely useful in  Gavrilyuk and Coakley, The Spiritual Senses, 2–3.  The bibliography on visual culture, image and its relationship with devotion is enormous: as examples of three case studies which directly derive from Belting and Hamburger’s perspectives, see Pablo García-Acosta, ‘Come insegnare a non vedere Dio: Visibilitá e negazione della imagine nella opera di Marguerite dicta Porete (m. 1310)’, in La Visione, ed. Francesco Zambon (Venezia: Medusa, 2012), 107–130; Pablo Acosta-García and Anna Serra, ‘Apophatic Mountains: Poetics of Image in Marguerite Porete and John of the Cross’, Viator 48, no. 1 (2017): 253–274 and Sergi Sancho Fibla, Escribir y meditar. La obra de Marguerite d’Oingt, cartuja del siglo XIII (Madrid: Siruela, 2019). 9  By Hans Belting see, for instance, Das Bild und sein Publikum in Mittelalter: Form n. Funktion frührer Bildtaf. d. Passion (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981) and Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990). By Jeffrey F.  Hamburger see, for instance, The Rothschild Canticles. Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland c. 1300 (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1990); Nuns as Artists. The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); The Visual and the Visionary (New York: Zone Books, 1998); and the volumes jointly edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne Marie Bouché, The Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological 7 8

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beginning to grasp the life of the religious ‘stuff’ not exclusively as works of art, but rather as very functional tools designed to be used in specific environments and as part of a visual culture that achieved meaning through the way in which their users interacted with it.10 From the 1990s onward, the contextual frame is seen as an integrated part of the performance and, therefore, of the meaning-in-use of the object. Although these perspectives have been enormously important, lately it has been pointed out that they reinforce a tendency in Western thought to focus on sight as the primary sense in the theory of knowledge. In this way, what is a naturally complex process of bodily and cognitive functions is reduced to the perception of just one sense: sight. This is what has been called ‘ocularcentrism’, a term that highlights a Eurocentric preconception that understands sight-as-the-main-sense-to-know as a universal, anthropological characteristic of every civilization.11 This position has been widely contested. In fact, the conceptual metaphor ‘understanding/knowing is seeing’ should also be reviewed in Christian anthropology.12 For my discussion, let me use the example proposed by Éric Palazzo in his L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge. There, he states that it is ‘essential to think about the biblical foundaArgument in the Middle Ages (New Jersey: Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University and Princeton University Press, 2006) and Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, Crown and Veil. Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 10  For instance, Hamburger’s studies on late medieval convents: Hamburger, Nuns as Artists. 11  The term ‘ocularcentrism’ is used, exemplified and discussed in depth in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1994). For a critique of ‘ocularcentrism’ as a perspective see Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). For a complete bibliography on ocularity in the Middle Ages, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011), 37, no. 1. 12  An example for the Middle Ages  is given by Javier E.  Díaz Vera  who, studying the semantics of the vocabulary of perception in Old English, starts his chapter by stating that there is an absolute need to study in depth the dichotomy of ‘senses as basic tool for universal human knowledge’ versus ‘senses as cultural constructions’. As he concludes in his chapter: ‘What these languages show is not only that “understanding/knowing is seeing” is far from being universal, but also that the omnipresent Western perspective somehow “pollutes” conceptual reality in the perception domain’. See Javier E. Díaz Vera, ‘Coming to Past Senses: Vision, Touch and Their Metaphors in Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture’, in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England, eds. Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse, and Wietse de Boer (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2016), 37.

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tions of the Christian sensorial culture’ (my translation).13 When he starts to discuss the hierarchy of the senses, he quotes directly from the famous beginning of the passage of the First letter of John14: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested: and we have seen and do bear witness and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us.

As Palazzo states, this is the typical biblical quotation that medieval theologians used to value human perception, thereby establishing a hierarchy of senses. Specifically, the incarnation of the Logos is here determined by its perceptual qualities, and the senses of hearing, sight and touch (in this order) are privileged. Therefore, the Word is conceived of being experienced not only by sight, but also (and sometimes primarily) by hearing and touch:  this is exactly the main implication of the quote from the ‘Prologus’ to Angela of Foligno’s Memoriale that heads this chapter. If we survey the theories of perception (spiritual perception included) by theologians from the origins of Christianity until the Late Middle Ages, most of them privilege sight, despite evidence of an alternative tradition involving touch.15 Without any doubt, the systems of thought that take sight as the primary sense form the core of a second clash of theories. Were medieval devotions primarily sight-based? Did the other senses interact with sight? If the answer is affirmative, how was this interaction codified? Were the devotional objects designed to be used visually or, on the contrary, were they conceived of in a multisensory fashion from the point of view of reception? How can we retrace the invisible link between the perceptive, the visionary and the apophatic way that champions void, nothingness and imageless experience? Clearly, ocularcentrism can be imagined as a sort of watchtower through the whole history of Western thought. It is easy to understand the thought of very different philosophers, theologians and later scientists in this tradition, one that has transformed inputs from the outer world to purely intel Palazzo, L’invention, 31.  The Biblical passage is 1 Jn 1:14 (Douay-Rheims). See Palazzo, L’invention, 39. 15  See Paterson, The Senses, 1 and Gavrilyuk and Coakley, The Spiritual Senses, where they note that there exists a secondary tradition in which touch is the chief sense. This tradition is studied in Chapter 9 of this volume by Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí. 13 14

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lectual visible terms since ancient times.16 Using a locus classicus, Aristotle in the third book of De anima (III, 429) claims that sight is the ‘chief sense’ and that it is linked with human capacity for knowledge, in opposition to touch and taste, senses that are ‘essential to animals’ and ‘more involved in desires and passions’.17 In general, it can be stated that this idea was shared by Christian exegetes, who mainly based it on the biblical sections that imply a passage from the material to the immaterial related to sight: verbi gratia, the often-quoted passage that contrasts our vision of God ‘per speculum in aenigmate’ with the facial vision, ‘facie ad faciem’.18 In this sense, it is easy to understand why most exegetes privileged sight in their texts: Platonic theoria survived in Christian views of existence and in most cases was transformed into the—extremely—direct consciousness of the presence of God.19 To relativize the centrality of the eye as the organ that conveys knowledge and, in our case, the visionary experience, is not to deny its role in a more comprehensive picture of how perception worked in the devotional experiences of the Late Middle Ages.20 Despite all this theoretical framework pointing in one direction, if we carefully check the evolution of Christian theology, it seems easy to identify a ‘perceptual turn’ around the twelfth century that was related to the mendicant ideas of Love, caritas, affection and, therefore, touch and the haptic as essential categories.21 As Bernard McGinn states, the Cistercian authors Bernard of Clairvaux and  This is the main point of Paterson, The Senses.  On this passage, see Paterson, The Senses, 16–18. 18  1 Cor 13:12. The importance of biblical texts such as this is clear when we read the medieval elaborations of theories about the ‘visio beatifica’ or the ‘visio Dei’. For the late medieval period, see Christian Trottmann, La vision béatifique des disputes scholastiques á sa définition par Benoît XII (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995). 19  On Platonism and Western Mysticism, see Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), esp. 24–54. 20  It is clear that, for instance, Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s work on the use of devotional statuettes initially highlighted the relationship between sight, touch and visionary experience (The  Visual, 432–440) and that this evidence was used and developed later by different scholars. For instance, see Jacqueline E. Jung, ‘The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in the Medieval Religious Imagination,’ in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, 2010), 203–240. 21  We use ‘haptic’ in the sense given by Paterson, The Senses, following the Aristotelian definition (