Flesh Side: Reading Bodies and Boethius in the Yale Girdle Book

ABSTRACT

How does the parchment codex inform a text’s meditations on what it is to be bound by and to one’s body? The Yale Girdle Book (New Haven, Beinecke MS 84) contains Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; it is bound with a soft leather wrapper that, shroud-like, envelops the codex and reveals that it was meant to be worn. Enabled by the material and affective turns and the field of skin studies, I argue that the binding and parchment alter the text in a synergistic, reciprocal relationship that speaks back to the Consolation’s explicit derision of the body. As a girdle book, the manuscript had the first and last word in the reader’s experience of its text. Every step with which it swung and pulled, every slap against its wearer’s thigh, every turn of the page between the reader’s fingers encouraged a process of cooperative unbinding of both the manuscript and the reader’s self, revealing the Consolation’s debt to embodied sensation. The marks left by MS 84’s medieval readers confirm that it exerted interpretive control over its text and that the affective power of the meeting and merging bodies of manuscript and reader is not a figment of modern theory’s imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• material
• parchment
• affect
• body
• Boethius
• Consolation of Philosophy
• girdle book

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. On provocative prayer rolls, see Gayk (2017).

^2. My description of MS 84 is drawn from the record and images of the Beinecke library online, which can be viewed at https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3531430, and Barbara Shailor’s Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 84.

^3. For images of these clasps and full descriptions of the books, Gøteborg Röhsska Museet RKM 519-15 and München Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 8950, see Smith (2017, 275–82 and 232–46, respectively).

^4. A facsimile may be handled at the Beinecke Library, which reveals that despite the small size of the codex, when hanging from its knot the manuscript grows significantly in length (and thus in presence); the thick little book also has surprising heft. Smith’s (2014) careful measurements of the book are as follows: the boards are 110mm × 75mm × 4.2mm; fully extended the pouch is 285mm × 87mm × 43mm; the manuscript weighs 250g (17).

^5. For references to Boethius’s Consolation throughout, I provide the book, prose or verse chapter, and line. All directly quoted English translations are drawn from Victor Watts’s translation (1999). Latin, where provided, is drawn from Ludovicus Bieler’s edition (1957), which also provides the standardized line numbers given for reference.

^6. I am indebted to Johnson’s (2013, 2018) work for this reading of Lady Philosophy’s “gentler medicines.”

^7. The established works to gesture to for the New/Material Philology are Nichols (1990) or Cerquiglini (1999). For cogent criticisms of its textual focus, see Snijders (2015), Alexander (1997) and Camille (1996) as examples.

^8. New Materialism is an umbrella term for several closely related but distinct theories. See Olsen (2003) and Bolt (2013) for helpful introductions. Related theories include feminist new materialism (see Hekman and Alaimo, 2008); Actor Network Theory (see Gell 1998); Object Oriented Ontology (see Harman 2011); and Thing Theory (see Brown 2001). Fine distinctions aside, new materialisms all have in common the key premise that objects have agency.

^9. The same text is discussed in Gramling (2017, 253). The Latin and the English translation are drawn from Wenzel 1989, 98–9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kayla Lunt

Kayla Lunt recently received her PhD from the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation examines the devotional provocation of marginal illumination through a study of signs of use in the Breviary of Saint-Sépulcre.