Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on Folios 61^v–62^r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20

Abstract

This essay explores how a “surface reading” can at the same time be a “symptomatic reading” when the surface in question is skin. Via a close reading of a double page containing the chapters on the weasel and the aspic in a fourteenth-century French copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20), it examines the treatment of bodily orifices in the text and the copy, including uncanny parallels between them and the parchment of these pages. The skins in question — those of the bestiary creatures, their readers, and the facing pages — are not flat but marked with recesses and gaps that function as symptoms of anxiety about excess as animal and that become overlaid with fantasy, which, however, remains informed by this anxiety. The bestiary page both jars bodily origins against cultural aspirations and exposes their collision, processes that the writings of Didier Anzieu can help to illumine.

Keywords:

• animal studies
• bestiary
• Guillaume le Clerc
• Didier Anzieu
• orifice
• parchment
• skin

Notes

1 If there is a three-dimensional dimension to medieval allegory it is one of height, not depth, and concerns not the verba but the res to which they refer. See Copeland and Struck’s The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, in particular the chapters by Struck and Whitman.

2 See Bowie, especially 13–44, for a review of Freud’s use of the metaphor of depth and its subsequent development.

3 My “Surface Reading” reviews Cheng, Second Skin; Ahmed and Stacey; Connor; and Segal. The pioneering study remains Benthien. See also Walter.

4 I am grateful to Segal (Consensuality 72) for introducing me to this collection.

5 Derrida: “There is only content without edge — without boundary or frame — and there is only edge without content. The inclusion (or occlusion, inocclusive invagination) is interminable: it is an analysis of the account that can only turn in circles in an unarrestable, inenarrable, and insatiably recurring manner — but one terrible for those who, in the name of the law, require that order reign in the account, for those who want to know, with all the required competence, ‘exactly’ how this happens” (70).

6 The copy of Guillaume’s Bestiaire in BnF fr. 14969, which also illustrates the allegories, actually introduces them with rubrics using the word sermon: “le sarmon del leon” (“the sermon of the lion”), “ce est le sarmun de l’aptalops” (“this is the sermon of the antelope”), and so on (see Reinsch 33). Guillaume’s text is generally the most sermon-like of the vernacular bestiaries. It opens with an overview of salvation history (vv. 37–136), contending that the bestiary will provide an alternative means of treating it; and it ends with a number of parables, including that of the talents. Guillaume treats these parables at greater length in his Le besant de Dieu, which can be associated with the sermons of Maurice de Sully (see Reinsch 147–51).

7 A catalogue description of this manuscript can be found at <www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/>.

8 This is the older version also found in Physiologus. Reinsch discusses the sources of Guillaume’s chapter (126–27). For more on the bestiary weasel, see Hassig.