Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture

By Elizabeth D. Harvey

This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism, knowledge, and art. For the early moderns, touch was the earliest and most fundamental sense. Frequently aligned with bodily pleasure and sensuality, it was suspect; at the same time, it was associated with the authoritative disciplines of science and medicine, and even with religious knowledge and artistic creativity.

The unifying impulse of Sensible Flesh is both analytic and recuperative. It attempts to chart the important history of the sense of touch at a pivotal juncture and to understand how tactility has organized knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The contributors examine in theoretically sophisticated ways both the history of the hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it.

The essays consider such topics as New World contact, the eroticism of Renaissance architecture, the Enclosure Acts in England, plague, the clitoris and anatomical authority, Pygmalion, and the language of tactility in early modern theater. In exploring the often repudiated or forgotten sense of touch, the essays insistently reveal both the world of sensation that subtends early modern culture and the corporeal foundations of language and subjectivity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780812293630

Book preview

Sensible Flesh

Sensible Flesh

On Touch in Early Modern Culture

Edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sensible flesh : on touch in early modern culture / edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey.

p.    cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8122-3693-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8122-1829-9 (pbk. : paper)

1. Touch.  2. Senses and sensation.  I. Harvey, Elizabeth D.

BF275 .S46 2002

Contents

1        Introduction: The Sense of All Senses

ELIZABETH D. HARVEY

2        Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch

MARGARET HEALY

3        Handling Soft the Hurts: Sexual Healing and Manual Contact in Orlando Furioso, The Faerie Queene, and All’s Well That Ends Well

SUJATA IYENGAR

4        The Subject of Touch: Medical Authority in Early Modern Midwifery

EVE KELLER

5        The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope

ELIZABETH D. HARVEY

6        As Long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the Enlarged Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy

BETTINA MATHES

7        New World Contacts and the Trope of the Naked Savage

SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

8        Noli me tangere: Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England

ELIZABETH SAUER AND LISA M. SMITH

9        Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance

CARLA MAZZIO

10      Living in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure

MISTY G. ANDERSON

11      Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Sensual Ethics of Architecture

REBEKAH SMICK

12      The Touch of the Blind Man: The Phenomenology of Vividness in Italian Renaissance Art

JODI CRANSTON

13      Afterword: Touching Rhetoric

LYNN ENTERLINE

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Sense of All Senses

Elizabeth D. Harvey

Everything is given to us by means of touch, a mediation that is continually forgotten.

—Luce Irigaray "Divine Women," Sexes and Genealogies

Pain lays not its touch / Upon a corpse.

—Aeschylus, Frag. 250.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Touch occupies a complex, shifting, and sometimes contradictory position in the representation of the five senses in Western culture. Sometimes depicted as the king of senses it was equally likely to be disparaged as the basest sense.¹ Of the five senses, touch is the most diffuse and somatically dispersed, and because the organ associated with it—the skin or flesh—covers the whole body, it is closely associated with corporeality. Neoplatonic thought, for example, relegated touch (along with taste and smell) to the lower, more bodily senses. Indeed, the sense of touch perhaps most frequently evokes the erotic and seductive, and early modern depictions of the Five Senses sometimes portray Touch through lascivious or pornographic scenes. Yet tactility is also associated with authoritative scientific, medical, and even religious knowledge, and it often expresses in synecdochic form creative powers (the artist’s touch). Tactile contact is central to religious representation; it is evident in depictions that range from the Noli me tangere topos to doubting Thomas’s touching of Christ’s wounds to the figuration of religious healing, all of which signify the dialectic between materiality and resurrection, between physical and spiritual contamination or cure. In the scientific or medical register, touch is closely tied to pain, to contagion, and to the curative hand of the physician. It is crucial to the history of medicine, anatomy, and science, especially as the instruments of knowing shift from a humoral theory that reads the body through all its senses to an epistemology that grants increasing primacy to the ocular.² Although touch is usually associated with the surface of the body, it becomes a metaphor for conveyance into the interior of the subject, particularly the capacity to arouse emotion (registered in the figurative sense of touching as kindling affect). Touch evokes at once agency and receptivity, authority and reciprocity, pleasure and pain, sensual indulgence and epistemological certainty. It is precisely the rich ambivalence of tactility’s representation that this collection explores.

The impulse of the volume is both analytic and recuperative in that the essays attempt to understand the important history of this sense at a pivotal juncture in its construction and to examine how tactility has organized knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The early modern period is especially significant as a historical moment for this investigation of touch because we can witness then the nascent stages of a consolidation of beliefs about the body’s relation to knowledge, sexuality and reproduction, artistic creativity, and contact with other worlds, both divine and newly discovered geographical realms. The subsequent relative eclipse of touch as an important sense or topic of interest may be correlated with the increasing predominance of the visual, which, beginning with Plato and then consolidated into a regime of the visual with the advent of modern science, has been privileged as the highest and purest of the senses.³ While the intricate reciprocity between visuality and tactility that characterizes the representation of the senses from Plato onwards endures,⁴ touch as figured within a discursive and iconographical tradition tends to be subsumed into a dominant culture of ocularity. These essays implicitly and explicitly interrogate the preeminence of sight (or hearing, which has its own history), focusing on touch as a more diffuse sense, a world of sensation that incorporates the body, particularly the feminine body, into its operations. Where hearing, sight, and smell extend the body beyond its own boundaries, touch insists on the corporeal because it relies upon contiguity or proximity for its operations. To engage touch as a category of investigation, as phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, psychoanalytic theorists such as Didier Anzieu, psychoanalytic and feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva, and post-structuralist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze or Jean-François Lyotard in his engagement of St. Augustine’s sensory world have done,⁵ is to reactivate the body’s material, and often gendered, relation to the world. The exploration of tactility’s representation in this volume has an allegiance on the one hand to these theoretical projects in its wish to question the history of the hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it. At the same time, the essays participate in the materialist impulse in early modern studies, exemplified in such recent works as Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass’s collection, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt’s Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, and Lena Cowen Orlin’s Material London, ca. 1600, which in their different ways seek to recover the tactilityof culture, the tangibilityof diurnal life, whether figured in clothing, images, material texts, maps, textiles, money, or mirrors.⁶ This propensity to focus on material objects is, of course, already well established in early modern work on the body, whether exemplified, to cite only a few of the many examples, in Gail Kern Paster’s analysis of the social meanings of bodily fluids in The Body Embarrassed, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s volume on gender and eroticism, Premodern Sexualities, or Jonathan Sawday’s treatment of anatomical discourse in The Body Emblazoned.⁷ What both these theoretical and materialist tendencies share is a recuperative propensity, a wish not just to reconstruct history’s lostobjects, but also to examine what dominant discourses have willfully elided in their reconstruction of the past, whether it is slavery or lesbian sexuality or peasant rituals. Touch has a simultaneously exuberant and deprecated link to materiality, to the body, to eroticism in the early modern period, where it is still central to a set of representational systems that include philosophy, religion, medicine, and art, as the essays gathered here demonstrate in their engagement of numerous discourses and topics (science, eroticism, medicine, disease, temptation, religion, philosophy, first contact between European and non-European peoples, visual arts, material artifacts, skin, rhetoric, emotion, pleasure, contagion, and pain). The early modern period might thus be designated as the pre-history of our post-Enlightenment construction of touch, a period when it is possible to witness an intensive articulation of the power and danger associated with tactility.

Michael Drayton’s sonnet XXIX To the Senses in Idea captures the privileged positioning of touch in the early modern hierarchy of the senses.⁸ The speaker’s heart is besieged by conqu’ering Love, and he thus summons the five senses to his aid, but one by one, each of them is overcome by Love’s blandishments. Sight is corrupted by beauty, Hearing is bribed with sweet harmony, Taste is delighted by the sweetness of the beloved’s lips, Smell is vanquished by the Spicerieof her breath, and finally Touch remains as the solitary guardian of the heart’s citadel. Figured as The King of Senses, greater than the rest, Touch not only yields to Love, handing over the heart’s keys, but he also persuasively addresses the other senses, endorsing Love’s conquest and telling his companion senses that they should be blest. The traditional catalogue of the senses that Drayton’s sonnet evokes is a topos that has a long tradition extending, at least in its allegorical configuration, from Alain de Lille’s late twelfth-century Anticlaudianis into an iconographical tradition and into such early modern literary depictions as Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Andrew Marvell’s Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure.⁹ The judgment about where touch belongs in the sensory echelon has much to do, of course, with definitions of love and lust, the value of eroticism, and the place of the material or the fleshly. The debate also overlaps with and extends into the realms of philosophy, figuring in discussions of perception and epistemology and in debates about the relation between the body and the soul. Aristotle in De Sensu, for instance, wavers about whether to give primacy to the visual or the auditory sense, yet he also finds touch essential to life, calling it the indispensable sense.¹⁰ In De Anima, he asserts that all animals whatsoever are observed to have the sense of touch,and therefore it must be the primary form of sense (413b). For Lucretius, a materialist who believed that all knowledge is derived from sensation, touch forms the basis for the other four senses and, although not explicitly distinguished from them, is implicated in the body’s ability to sense pleasure and pain: it is touch that is the bodily sense, whether when a thing penetrates from without, or when hurt comes from something within the body, or when it gives pleasure in issuing forth by the creative acts of Venus.¹¹

Just as there is controversy about the placement of touch in the hierarchy of the senses, so, too is there disagreement about its nature as a sense. Touch is, after all, different from the other senses in that it is not housed in a specific, identifiable organ. Where vision, hearing, taste, and smell are faculties located in and thereafter associated with the eye, the ear, the tongue, and the nose, touch is, as classical and early modern writers were quick to recognize, both everywhere and nowhere. Aristotle distinguished touch from the other senses, both for this reason and because he questioned whether it is multiple, a group of senses rather than a single sense. He considered whether the flesh itself is the organ of touch or whether flesh is the medium, with the real organ being situated further inward (De Anima, 422b-423a). Phineas Fletcher sums up the paradoxical nature of tactility in this formulation: " Tactus… [h]ath his abode in none, yet every place."¹² Touch is ubiquitous, dispersed throughout the body; there is no single place where it is said to be concentrated. Even skin, which as a cutaneous boundary would seem to extend touch’s distribution throughout the body, cannot be its somatic harbor, since as Aristotle argues, touch is deeper than skin; the tactile feeling seems, indeed, to be a property of the flesh itself.¹³ The inability to locate touch in a specific place in the body seems closely related to the ambivalence about its importance. Fletcher classifies Tactus as the youngest but also the oldest of the sensory brothers, and declares that his function is both the least important and the most necessary (5:55).¹⁴ In John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum, the essential nature of touch, which Aristotle sees as fundamental to animal life, is caught in the descriptive epithet life’s root, a phrase that signals both the primacy of the tactile and its spatial ability to spread and communicate throughout the body.¹⁵

Recurrent in the history of Western culture is this sometimes submerged but nevertheless enduring idea that tactility is the root of the other senses and, further, that touch is somehow synonymous with life itself. This belief animates the epigraph from Aeschylus; only a corpse cannot feel pain, and conversely, to feel pain is to be alive (or, as Aristotle says, the loss of this one sense alone must bring about the death of an animal(De Anima, 435b).¹⁶ Given this tradition, how and why should touch have importance as a subject of investigation in what philosophers and theorists have called a resolutely ocularcentric culture? In his sweeping study of ocularity in Western thought, Martin Jay enumerates the sources for this visual hegemony, which include the powerful inheritance of the Hellenic privileging of the visual, what he calls (following Max Weber’s use of the term) the elective affinity between the emergence of capitalism and the invention of linear perspective (52–62), the complex coupling of the baroque ocular regime and the growth of a dominant scientific method (itself based on a linkage of rationality and the visual) (45), and the enormous influence of Descartes, the founding father of the modern visualist paradigm (70). The very predominance of the visual has, not surprisingly, attracted a range of critics who have not only challenged the primacy of the ocular, but also instigated a reconsideration of Western metaphysics and culture. If the narratives that subtend our understanding of our relation to the world, to our bodies, to other human beings, and to knowledge in all its forms are based on an unexamined acceptance of visuality, what would it mean to interrogate these truths in terms of the sensory privileging on which they rely?

This is the question that shapes Didier Anzieu’s writing on tactility in The Skin Ego and related works.¹⁷ He asserts that human subjectivity is generated through touch; early embryonic and infantile tactile experience lays the foundation of an ego that is rooted in the body and linked to skin as boundary and receptive organ. Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego unsettles the relationship between inside and outside and situates the tactile organ of the skin as the dynamic physiological and psychic interface between subject and world. This question also motivates Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, a text that unrelentingly scrutinizes the persistence of the visual in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her book itself replicates in its structure an instrument of vision, the speculum,¹⁸ providing a temporally reversed reflection of Western thought that begins with Freud (The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry) and ends with a reading of Plato’s Parable of the Cave ("Plato’s Hystera"). At the center of the book there are seven shorter chapters that treat Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, and Hegel, and in the middle of these sections lies Irigaray’s analysis of Cartesian thought, entitled … And If, Taking the Eye of a Man Recently Dead… In this chapter she examines the Cartesian cogito, interrogating the linkage between rationality and vision and the body’s place in it and concluding with a reference to Descartes’s notion of the body as a res extensa (an extended thing as opposed to a thinking thing, res cogitans), an idea that is complicated by her introduction of touch (190).¹⁹ While Irigaray’s resistance to the tyranny of the scopic regime defines Speculum, her elaboration of an opposing theory, what we might call a metaphysics of touch, nevertheless undergirds it and achieves a fuller expression a decade later in An Ethics of Sexual Difference and in a lecture printed in Sexes and Genealogies:²⁰

If we look seriously at this composite and provisional incarnation of man and woman we are brought back to the sense that underlies all the other four senses, that exists or insists in them all, our first sense and the one that constitutes all our living space, all our environment: the sense of touch. This is the sense that travels with us from the time of our material conception to the height of our celestial grace, lightness, or glory. We have to return to touch if we are to comprehend where touch became frozen in its passage from the most elemental to the most sophisticated part of its evolution. This will mean that we need to stay both firm and mobile in our cathexes, always faithful, that is, to the dimension of touch. (Sexes and Genalogies, 59)

Irigaray’s impulse to return to or revisit what has been repudiated in philosophy relies on a psychoanalytic model of temporality that she extends into a historical register; just as the child abjures the mother in order to enter the symbolic realm, so does Western culture erase the memory of maternal origin. As Irigaray says in an aphoristic gloss on Speculum: Surely man favors the visual because it marks his exit from the life in the womb?(Sexes and Genealogies, 59).²¹ She contends that Western philosophy’s occultation of the maternal contributes to a metaphysics of visibility (which in turn nourishes the hierarchical ordering of sexual difference), and her reconception of philosophy, which has political, epistemological, psychoanalytic, and ethical implications, involves reincorporating the feminine-maternal body and its languageof tactility.²²

Irigaray expands on the topic of touch in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, where she engages with Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished last work, The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty claims that both vision and touch are chiasmic or reversible, that is, that each entails a mutual participation of subject and object in the act of perception. The image that he furnishes to illustrate this reversibility is that of two hands touching, a movement that encodes mutuality: each hand feels itself touched even as it touches.²³ But where Merleau-Ponty asserts that seeing and touching are chiasmically interchangeable—the visible is apparent in the tangible, the tangible is apparent in the visible—Irigaray makes manifest the sensory hierarchy upon which this pronouncement depends. As she says, The visible and the tactile do not obey the same laws or rhythms of the flesh. And if I can no doubt unite their powers, I cannot reduce the one to the other. I cannot situate the tangible and the visible in a chiasmus [The tangible] remains instead the ground that is available for all the other senses [It] is the matter and memory for all of the sensible (Ethics, 162–64). She also questions whether the two hands touching can be perfectly reciprocal, for as she notes, one will always be more active or passive, more subject than object. She substitutes instead the figure of two hands held together, palm to palm (cf. Shakespeare’s palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5), a configuration that suggests greeting or prayer. The intimacy of the gesture Irigaray uses replaces Merleau-Ponty’s more epistemological touch with a touch that evokes undifferentiated uterine or maternal contact, what she calls the prenatal moment where the subject is palpated without seeing (Ethics, 154). Irigaray’s notion of touch also evokes its properties of contiguity (as Aristotle reminds us, touch alone perceives by immediate contact; De Anima, 435a), which is consonant with her privileging of metonymy, her figure for maternal genealogy.²⁴

Irigaray’s idea of a forgotten maternal substratum in which sensory experience dominates can be compared to Julia Kristeva’s most recent description of the semiotic chora. In Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, Kristeva describes what she calls a sensory cave,a place where sensation is experienced that cannot be expressed in language and that is at once reminiscent of the fusion with the maternal but that continues to be experienced by the adult.²⁵ The overwhelming of the subject by sensation that has no articulation or only a troubled articulation is characteristic of autism or hysteria (235), but the impulse to convert deep sensation into language produces literary style (234), a dialectic between the linguistic realm and the affective, corporeal, sensory world that lies before and beneath it. Both Kristeva and Irigaray argue that sensation, and especially touch, subtend human experience as a primordial memory and as the residue of what must be repressed or molded in the child’s passage into the symbolic. For both, although in very different ways, the recovery of repressed sensation is crucial; for Irigaray it is necessary in the formulation of a new ethics of sexual difference, and for Kristeva the dialectic between the semiotic (or, what she calls in Powers of Horror the abjected maternal) and the symbolic is constitutive of art and literature and of a fully embodied humanity.²⁶ In Powers of Horror, Kristeva’s exploration of abjection offers often startling insights into the para-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings of Paul Céline—the simultaneous attraction for and repulsion of an other that is characteristic of abjection—and she thus demonstrates the political implications of the psycho-analytic and linguistic analyses she performs.

These psychoanalytic, philosophical, and linguistic accounts of the discourses of touch are consonant with (and historicized by) Norbert Elias’s description of the civilizing process.²⁷ Elias argues that the transitions from warrior to courtly societies (the medieval and early modern periods in Europe) entailed a progressive controlling of the animalistic instincts (455), the raw material of the drives (487), a rationalizing and curbing process that was enacted both within the individual (the ego or super-ego controlling libidinal impulses [455]) and also as a social molding. Although Elias does not specifically address the senses in his description, the instilling of this social and bodily decorum, whether it refers to sexual behavior, nose-blowing, or the use of eating utensils, implicitly or explicitly orders the senses. Touch and smell in particular, which imply bodily proximity, become subordinated to the senses that support a greater distance between bodies (vision and hearing). In De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), for instance, Erasmus provides a list of admonitions and recommendations about table manners, many of which have to do with touch: do not put your hands in the dish as soon as you sit down (Wolves do that); Do not be the first to touch the dish that has been brought in; To dip the fingers in the sauce is rustic; To lick greasy fingers or wipe them on your coat is impolite(quoted in Elias, 73). Elias traces the progressive integration of eating utensils—especially the fork and spoon, which replace and/or extend the hands and thus distance touch—into civilized society. The codes that govern the use of utensils and manners distinguish human from animal behavior (this is a constant refrain in early modern books of etiquette), and they also tend to separate people from each other, accentuating individually segregated eating as opposed to the sharing of food from a communal receptacle.

Elias’s analysis of the early modern period as a crucial point of transition for the civilizing process offers a critique and a trenchant explanation of psychoanalysis, for, as he claims, the distinctions between what Freud called the conscious and unconscious or the ego and the id are the result of a historical operation; the rift between the conscious mind, what he calls rationalization and the drive impulses and affective fantasies becomes wider until the wall of forgetfulness separating the two becomes increasingly impermeable (487–88). If the mechanisms of restraint and control that we tend to think of as natural are historically instantiated, as Elias argues, then to investigate the historical and material construction of touch is to recover as well what for Kristeva and Irigaray is not only the prehistory of the subject but also the ways in which touch is occluded, repressed, and rendered subordinate as part of the social and individual civilizing process. Rather than setting historicism against psychoanalysis as contradictory and mutually exclusive discourses, then, we might then consider them, as Elias does, as complementary. This is especially important for an investigation of touch, since it could be hypothesized that as the physical properties of tactility—which evoke in the early modern period eroticism, pain, and the appetitive in general—are subordinated during the process of instilling social restraint, they migrate into an affective realm. Elias argues that the civilizing process is one that interiorizes emotion. He cites La Bruyère’s description of a man of the court, for instance, as someone who is a master of his gestures, of his eyes and his expression; he is deep, impenetrable (476). Emotion does not vanish, of course, but is directed internally, producing a split in the subject between drive and affect impulses and their expression; the result is that the subject conceals his passion, disavows his heart, and acts against his feeling (477). We might speculate that one of touch’s discursive transpositions mimics this civilizing trend: in the same way that physical impulses are curbed and directed inward, so does tactility become, in addition to the more obvious physiological responses, feeling—the emotional desires and urges that are presented in explicitly physical terms in the early modern iconography of touch. Perhaps the most powerful of these physical desires that is transposed inward and made progressively emotional and secret is the erotic or libidinal, the arena recurrently associated with touch for early modern culture and the urge arguably most obsessively charted by psychoanalysis. The discourse most suited to analyzing the affective, feeling, is of course, psychoanalysis, and it is not accidental, then, that touch and the senses should play pivotal roles in the work of Kristeva and Irigaray. Tactility is, like Kristeva’s semiotic, linked to a forgotten world—of childhood, of a less completely civilized time, of a more completely realized embodiment. As Lynn Enterline astutely notes, however, the construction of a maternal abject or a semiotic chora is always a retroactive, recursive cultural fantasy that is necessary to establishing a symbolic order.²⁸ Thus, bodies and sensory feelingsare always mediated by a symbolic system; we have access to them only through the elaborate patterns of the symbolic—language, cultural habits, and material practices.

Merleau-Ponty makes tactility a property of the flesh or the body as a whole, but he also uses the synecdoche of the hand to represent touch. While the identifying feature of tactility in the early modern period is precisely its resistance to being identified with a single organ, the hand nevertheless appears with some regularity as a signifier of touch. George Chapman’s apostrophe to Feeling’s organ, the King of the king of senses in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, where tactility is synechodized by the fortunate hand that touches Corinna’s breast, sums up this strand of tactility’s history.²⁹ When the five senses are portrayed through the sensory organs, touch sometimes appears as hands held over a flame (a conjunction of pain and tactility), as a clenched fist, or as hands clasped or being rubbed together.³⁰ Yet the identification between the hand and touch is neither perfect nor symmetrical: the hand is an instrument of mastery, control, creativity, and gesture as well as tactility, and the sense of touch is not confined to the hand but is distributed throughout the body.³¹ The relatively unstable identification between the hand and tactility is accentuated in the divergence of allegorical and anatomical representations. That is, whereas touch in the allegorical tradition is linked to specific animals (parrot, falcon, tortoise, spider) or to scenes of seduction or erotic exchange, the figuration of touch as a property of physiology (often depicted in conjunction with the corresponding ventricles of the brain), which takes the hand as chief signifier, tends to pass into anatomical illustrations. Chapman’s memorable phrase describing the hand’s royal power to touch is an erotic apostrophe, but in Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia., touch, the onely Sense of all Senses, is localized in the hand as the Judge and discerner of touch.³² The hand in the medical and anatomical context does not just serve as an emblem of touch, then, but also controls its dangerous, seductive, and potentially delusive aspects.

For the physician and the anatomist, the hand signals agency rather than receptivity, the power of sensation harnessed to the service of medical epistemology. The images that most haunt early modern anatomical practice are the Vesalian muscle men, bodies divested of the skin in order better to display the structures of muscles, organs, and veins beneath. Paradoxically, perhaps, given that anatomy involves peeling away this vast sensory covering organ, the figure of the anatomist is synecdochized by the hand, as if the power of tactility lost by the corpse were displaced and concentrated in the touching, probing, dissecting hand. Galen, of course, begins with the hand in De usu partium, and early modern anatomies frequently follow his model. As Katherine Rowe puts it, the hand becomes the prominent vehicle for integrating sacred mystery with corporeal mechanism…. The dissection of the hand in particular, from Galen to the seventeenth century, persists as one of the central topoi of anatomy demonstrations: celebrated for its difficulty and beauty, it reveals God’s intentions as no other part can.³³ In the portrait of himself in De humani corporis fabrica (1543), Andreas Vesalius clasps the hand of the corpse, whose arm and hand are flayed to expose its underlying structures of bone and muscle. This touch, unlike the reciprocity of Merleau-Ponty’s touching hands, unites the living, mastering instrument of anatomical knowledge (the Vesalian hand) with the dissected hand that is the object of investigation.³⁴ The anatomical gaze thus converts the material and implicitly sexual hand of Tactus in the tradition of the Five Senses to an instrument that in medical and scientific contexts becomes progressively the handmaiden of the eye.

In contradistinction to this anatomical heritage, the depiction of Touch in the literary and pictorial catalogues of the Five Senses emphasizes the erotic and animalistic. Aristotle asserted that without touch it is impossible for an animal to be(De Anima, 434b), thus firmly coupling the human and the bestial in their sharing of this fundamental, appetitive, and life-sustaining sense. With respect to touch, he said, we far excel other species in exactness of discrimination(De Anima, 421a). Pliny echoed this judgment, inaugurating a tradition of using animals to exemplify the senses: he wrote in the Naturalis Historia that, whereas eagles surpassed humans in sight, vultures has a more developed sense of smell, and moles had better hearing, touch was most highly developed in humans.³⁵ Although tactility is supremely achieved in human beings, it nevertheless also accrues animal exemplars. This animal symbolism evolves in the second-century A.D. Physiologus, medieval bestiaries, and treatises on nature, and it joins with a specifically erotic tradition in Richard de Fournival’s thirteenth-century Bestiare d’amour.³⁶ The tortoise appears with some frequency in these images and texts, registering touch in the paradoxical sensitivity of its shell, but the parrot or falcon and the spider furnish the most resonant animal representations of tactility. As Sander Gilman notes, the biting bird connects touch with the simultaneously pleasurable and painful penetration of the flesh associated with the loss of virginity (the breaking of the hymen) and/or the sexual penetration of the body.³⁷ In Crispyn van de Passe the Elder’s late sixteenth-century engraving The Seasons and the Senses, for instance, the personification of Touch, a woman with bare breasts, holds a falcon, which is poised to bite her. Her other hand rests on a turtle shell, and a scorpion (the zodiacal sign that rules the genitalia) lies at her feet.³⁸

In the fourteenth-century wall painting of the Wheel of the Five Senses in Longthorpe Tower, each of the senses is represented by an animal, with touch located in a privileged position on the wheel and depicted through the figure of the spider.³⁹ Gino Casagrande and Christopher Kleinhenz point to a crucial passage in De Anima where Aristotle makes touch the paradigm and structure of the intellect. If thought and perception are analogous, as Aristotle claims, then "We know the world around us because the mind is able to through touch to grasp the form of things."⁴⁰ It is tempting to read the image of the spider and its web in conjunction with epistemological gathering. Just as the spider’s web extends its tactility, allowing it to sense the world around it, so does touch spread itself throughout the body in a system of web-like nerves. John Davies sums up this arachnoid faculty in Nosce Teipsum: Much like a subtill spider, which doth sit / In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; / If ought doe touch the vtmost thred of it, / Shee feeles it instantly on euery side (1:70).⁴¹ This image of touch as a communicative network may be at work in his phrase describing touch as life’s root, and it is certainly imaged in various physiological depictions (including Descartes’s) that demonstrate the link between the hand and the brain.

The figuration of tactility in the spider has other, less exalted connotations as well. Edmund Spenser depicts the spider as one of the odious creatures that besiege the bulwarke of Touch in the assault on the Castle of Alma in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene:

But the fift troupe most horrible of hew,

And fierce of force, was dreadfull to report:

For some like Snailes, some did like spyders shew,

And some like vgly Vrchins thicke and short:

Cruelly they assayled that fift Fort,

Armed with darts of sensuall delight,

With strings of carnall lust, and strong effort,

Of feeling pleasures, with which day and night

Against that same fift bulwarke they continued fight. (2.11.13)

The associations of touch with sensuality and carnality are intensified by the references to the spider, the hedgehog, and the snail (which secretes a sticky substance that leaves a palpable trail, a kind of visual trace of its touch). While the spider exemplifies tactile sensitivity, it is also entangled through touch with eroticism. The locus classicus for this association may be the weaving contest between Athena and Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for Arachne’s tapestries portray the sexual crimes of the gods, and it is these scenes of seductive transgression that incite Athena’s anger and her punitive transformation of Arachne into a spider.⁴² In Spenser’s Muiopotmos, the web that the cursed creature Aragnoll weaves in order to trap Clarion is likened to the net that Vulcan fashioned to capture the adulterous Mars and Venus.⁴³ Spenser’s simile evokes and reverses Ovid’s description of the marvelous net made of fine links of bronze that Vulcan devised to ensnare the lovers: non illud opus tenuissima vincant / stamina, non summo quae pendet aranea tigno; / utque levis tactus momentaque parva sequantur, / efficit et lecto circumdata collocat arte (4:178–81) (Not the finest threads of wool would surpass that work; no, not the web which the spider lets down from the ceiling beam. He made the web in such a way that it would yield to the slightest touch, the least movement, and then he spread it deftly over the couch.) The spider’s web for Ovid and Spenser is thus at once the instrument of capture, the net of rational (or jealous) control, and a figure of the tactile sensitivity that fuels sexual trespass in the first place.

The ambiguity of the web is well exemplified in Bartolomeo Delbene’s Civitas veri, sive morum (1609), a dream poem that Frances Yates describes as an allegory of the Nichomachean Ethics.⁴⁴ In the poem, the soul is represented as a city, which can be entered by five portals or gateways. The illustration of the Portal of Touch is an elaborately architectural gateway covered with ivy (a plant that touches or clings to a support); on the lintel Mars and Venus lie bound in Vulcan’s spidery net, captured in their moment of sexual union by the image that comes to signify tactility (the web).⁴⁵ It is hard not to read the allegorical implications of the image as a warning: indulgence in tactility leads to capture, and in order to elude ensnarement (and the derisive laughter of the gods as well as the ensuing humiliation for the lovers that follows in Ovid’s narrative), touch needs to be monitored and controlled. Vulcan, the weaver of the net, is in this narrative both the spy who succeeds by means of tethering tactility to the desire for knowledge and also a figure of agency. Similar associations subtend the allusions in Guyon’s binding of Verdant and Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss: the veil of silver and silk that covers (or rather discovers) Acrasia’s lower body is, as Spenser tells us, a web more subtle than even Arachne can weave (2:12:77). The veil, which hid no whit her alabaster skin seems almost to be synonymous with the skin itself, a description of the organ, which, like the spider’s web, is a network of sensation that spreads feeling through the body. Verdant, asleep with his head in Acrasia’s lap, is the very image of tactility’s erotic conquering, for he has hung up his warlike armes (2:12:80), succumbing completely to concupiscence. As with the illustration to Delbene’s poem, the web is associated both with the ensnarements of desire and also with the reassertion of continence and rational control, for Guyon and the Palmer throw over the lovers a subtile net (2:12:81), which was frame[d] by the Palmer (reason). The confluence of these images and meanings may help to explain the association of touch and weaving in a German Renaissance engraving that depicts the personification of Touch at a loom.⁴⁶ The frequently cited etymological derivation of text from the Latin tex-ere (weaving) evokes not only the sense of the literary work’s tactility, its woven, web-like, or indeed, cutaneous properties, but also the incessant dialectic at work in writing between the tactility of language, its sensuous, captivating elements, and the rational, ordering properties of the symbolic. This is the dynamic that Kristeva describes as the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic in poetry, or that Irigaray sees as the passionate foundation of philosophical discourse, the constant interplay of tactility’s capture within the net of language.

It is with this background in mind that this book seeks to examine touch in early modern culture. If touch is a sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, the chapters that follow make apparent the frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism, knowledge, and art. The early modern period is rich territory for investigations of touch and the body partly because the boundaries between discourses now considered separate were not then firmly established. Literature, art, philosophy, religion, science, and medicine overlapped discursively and practically, and the body and its sensorium are thus diversely represented in the cultural imaginary. Developments in human anatomy, particularly the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica in 1543 with its groundbreaking anatomical illustrations and descriptions helped to disseminate a radically changing conception and practice of anatomy that was intimately linked to the history of touch. Illustrations of dissected bodies, anatomical demonstrations, controversies about the nature and function of body parts, and new theories of disease reshaped not only knowledge but also the way early modern subjects inhabited their bodies. Where pre-Vesalian anatomies involved both demonstrator (the assistant who dissects) and ostensor (the

Reviews for Sensible Flesh

[deliriumslibrarian · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Surprisingly sexy for Renaissance literary theory.