Skin encloses and enshrines the body’s complex internal workings in a way that makes them both safe and mysterious. But it also faces outwards, projecting issues of identity and race forward from the surface to create a public façade of the person it simultaneously secures. In the Middle Ages both of these ideas – safeguarding a secret inner life and forming an external social character – were prominent conceptions of the body’s outer layers.
A figure stands proudly in a blue box in the middle of a manuscript page. His body is hairless and naked, and a light wash of rosy paint tints his head and thighs a flushed prickly pink. The lazy curve of his posture projects a certain easiness, a sense of calm, and he seems to be looking vacantly outwards, staring into the empty space immediately to his left. But on closer inspection we realise that he cannot be gazing distractedly into the middle distance, for this man has no eyes or eyelids, only a pair of empty sockets. In fact, his body sports no outer layer at all: his skin is folded in two like a piece of stiff fabric, sloughed over a long stick he carries at his shoulder. Among its flaps and folds, the shapes of his arms and legs are still distinguishable by their intact hands and feet, as is the body’s once full head of hair, which spirals out, corona-like, in strange black weaves from his scalp.
22. A man carrying his skin on a pole in a manuscript of Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgia, copied in Paris in 1306.
From what we have seen of the saints – their severed heads and other violent punishments – we might assume that this is a devotional image of a martyr from a religious text. It certainly resembles contemporary depictions of the ill-fated Saint Bartholomew, skinned alive before being crucified as part of his torturous test for sanctity. Yet this is not a holy figure, inventively presenting his pelt to the reader. Neither is this man part of the medieval tradition of playful marginalia, much of which happily punned on such grotesqueness: fantastical images of giant snails battling with knights or miniature rabbits using knives to skin each other alive at the page’s edge. This naked man boldly spans an entire column of text. He is front and centre, no comedic sideline clinging to the border.
He features, instead, as part of a book called the Chirurgia, the ‘Surgery’, written by the French master surgeon Henri de Mondeville in around 1306. Mondeville was a highly respected figure, a teacher in both French and Italian universities, and with his book he was seeking to raise the rather lowly status of his profession. Detailed, expensive, high-quality illustrations were normally the preserve of religious texts and intellectual treatises written for a class of well-healed elites by more socially assured medieval authors. Until books like the Chirurgia, surgeons were not counted among such illustrious company: their craft was not a literate one, and they tended to fall, along with other practical empirics, towards the bottom of medicine’s pecking order. Pushing back against this status quo, Mondeville sought to present an ambitious theoretical underpinning for his vision of a learned surgery, a rigorous intellectual guide to various elements of the craft covering multiple aspects of anatomy and surgical cure, from leg amputations and wound cautery to the lancing of boils and embalming of cadavers. This was complemented by a set of thirteen diagrams that both elevated and elaborated the text, one of which was this flayed man. An accompanying caption in Middle French beneath the figure explains his specific function:
le 4 figure. un home escorchie portant son cuir sus ses espaulles o un baston et la pert le cuir du chief eschevele, le cuir des mains, et des pies et la char lacerueuse et glandeuse qui est par le cors et la blance qui est es mamelles et es emuptoires, et par la fixeure du ventre apert la gresse le sain loint.
The fourth figure, a flayed man carrying his skin over his shoulders on a stick; the skin of his head with hair, the skin of his hands, and his feet; and the lacerated flesh that is on the body, and the white which is the breasts and the emunctories [organs that carry off waste], and by the opening of the stomach the fat and the lard.
Heading a section on the anatomy of the skin, the figure shows the detail described by the text: the red tone of the flesh, the hair of the head and the whitish hue of the subcutaneous fat.
Although simple, a much-reduced diagram like this could suffice when visualisation of the inaccessible bodily interior was needed. As Mondeville’s contemporaries often attested, looking beneath the surface of a painted figure was, after all, far easier than looking beneath the skin of a real medieval body. In the modern era, by the time we reach adulthood we will probably have seen various types of X-rays and scans – either real or cluttering the sets of TV crime dramas – which suggest relatively clearly to us the shape of things beneath our skin and the skin of others. The same was not true for audiences in the Middle Ages. Although skin was thought permeable, absorbing the humoral surrounds of climates and seasons, it was still an opaque barrier whose contents were not entirely clear, visually speaking. Most major medical centres heavily restricted the actual anatomical dissection of bodies. The practice had always rubbed up against a whole host of extremely uncomfortably social questions. Was it right to do such violence to a dead body? And whose body should be chosen to undergo such trauma? The answers from the earlier Middle Ages came loud and clear: ‘no’ and ‘not mine’. Contemporary religious doctrines of all three cardinal faiths spoke at length of things like posthumous judgement, heavenly resurrection and the ultimate unification of body and soul. If your body was cut to blazes by a group of medics before you were interred in the grave, little would be left to rise again for eternal salvation. Maintaining a corporeal coherence, even after death, strongly mattered to many medieval people.
At just the same moment that Mondeville’s Chirurgia was being illustrated, however, an alternative approach was beginning for the first time to gain traction. In 1286 the Italian chronicler Salimbene da Parma recorded that civic authorities in northern Italy had, unusually, allowed an internal examination to go ahead on the body of a man. There were extenuating circumstances: he had died from an unknown disease that was sweeping rapidly across the region, and authorities suspected that the epidemic had somehow spread to the human population through the region’s chickens. A doctor from Cremona was ordered to investigate and opened the bodies of several affected hens looking for clues, where he discovered that many of the animals carried an unusual and distinctive abscess on their heart. The dead man’s thorax was opened too and, sure enough, his heart showed matching marks, confirming in the authorities’ minds a link to the chicken epidemic. One local doctor was so alarmed that he launched a pamphlet advising against eating either the birds or their eggs, citing as evidence this insightful early autopsy.
In the wake of such crude yet seemingly successful investigations a professional interest in the results of dissection seems to have very slowly begun to grow in the region. In the years that followed, judges in a handful of Italian legal cases began to order some of the earliest bodily post-mortems of the Middle Ages. Doctors started testifying in trials based on both external and internal assessments of cadavers, their results slowly becoming considered a new type of important admissible evidence. In 1302 a man named Azzolino degli Onesti was found dead, possibly poisoned. But it was only after his body was publicly opened by a number of physicians and surgeons that serious internal bleeding was discovered near his heart. The examining doctors took this as an indication of a natural death, not murder, and Azzolino’s suspected poisoners were exculpated. Still, investigations like this were extremely morally difficult. Italian funerary tradition had long called for the dressing of the deceased and the exposure of their face in procession to the grave, something that was clearly violated by deconstructing the corpse piece by piece. Few wished for their loved ones to undergo such treatment unless absolutely necessary. Yet increasingly it seemed clear that dead bodies contained within them some sort of empirical truth, a series of clues and causes that lay hidden beneath the skin.
While fourteenth-century courts might have been adjusting to the occasional presence of post-mortem evidence, the academic medical establishment on the contrary remained largely unmoved. Some initial dissections, undertaken for teaching purposes, did appear around the same time as these trials: for instance, the Bolognese anatomies of Mondino dei Liuzzi recorded in his Anothomia of 1316. But these occasions were not anatomies as we might consider them today. More than anything, they were ritualised events in which the body was opened only to affirm the supremacy of the grand classical tradition. Important treatises by important masters were intoned aloud by important physicians, and the disassembled body was simply used to illustrate them. These were performances of medical texts, not actual exploratory anatomies. An image accompanying a later printed copy of Mondino’s own treatise gives a sense of how the medieval dissection scene may have unfolded. A cadaver is set out on a makeshift wooden table, surrounded by an audience of academic students and fellows who debate around the corpse. Sitting behind at a tall cathedra, looking not unlike a priest at a pulpit, is the figure of the lector, a high-ranking academic who was responsible for reading aloud the chosen part of the Latin text about to be verified against the corpse, while below two figures among the group of dissectors lean over the cadaver. One, the sector, holds a long knife in hand. Judging by his lack of academic robes, he is probably a surgeon, poised to make the first incision as specified by Mondino from sternum to pubis. Beside him, directly above the head of the cadaver, stands the figure of the ostensor, the most senior figure on the dissection floor, responsible for translating and elaborating on the lector’s Latin for the comprehension and guidance of those gathered around him. Apart from these two figures, almost everyone else completely ignores the corpse.
Given the social taboos involved, an extremely cautious practicality also governed much of the detail of these dissection events. Anatomies were scheduled to happen once a year, although they often took place far less frequently, and dissecting a body only ever happened in the cooler winter months, meaning professors and students were not forced to share small makeshift anatomy theatres with a quick-rotting cadaver in the summer heat. The bodies to be examined were also mostly restricted to those of recently executed criminals, pledged to the university under strictly defined terms by the city administration. These could be either male or female: in fact, the female body, with its added capacity to bear children, was thought the more physiologically interesting of the two. But they were largely bodies of foreigners or people born at least a significant distance from the city: universities in these small Italian communities tried wherever possible to avoid worrying the local populace by carving up their own. Couching the event in such regulations was intended to reduce anxieties of this sort, but these dissections did not always go smoothly. In 1319 a Bolognese medical maestro named Alberto de’ Zancariis and his students gathered near the city’s university in the small Cappella di San Salvatore to undertake the anatomy of a body that had been illegally disinterred from a nearby graveyard. The event shocked the town, and a trial sent several of Alberto’s tutees to prison for grave-robbing.
23. A dissection scene, presented in the Fasciculo di medicina
Stories like this troubled the medieval imagination deeply, and laws were often tightened or at least reasserted in response to such unorthodox and disrespectful cases. Nonetheless, over the following two centuries academic healers from Montpellier and Florence to Lerida and Vienna became increasingly eager to display their knowledge of the body’s interior. More and more often, doctors were carefully peeling back its skin to look beneath.
Medieval medicine thought of the skin as being made up of two symbiotic layers: an outer layer, called the ‘skin proper’, and an inner, muscular layer, called the ‘panicle’. Together these offered doubled protection for the body’s internal workings, and they had many combined characteristics. Mondeville described the twofold structure as:
nervosum, forte, tenax, mediocre in duritie et mollitie, flexibile, multum sensibile, tenue temperatum in complexione, totum corpus in parte exteriori circumdans
nervous, tough, resistant, medium-hard, flexible, very sensitive, thin and temperate in complexion, encompassing the entire surface of the body.
24. A later illustration of fifteenth-century rhinoplasty technique, where a graft of skin is taken from the forearm and encouraged to grow over the missing nose. This image is from the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s treatise De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem, printed in Venice in 1597.
Such detailed knowledge of the skin’s many vagaries was especially important for surgeons, who were frequently called upon to breach its surface. Amputations necessitated the stripping back of skin to access and saw through bone. Incisions or counter-incisions into the skin could be made to enlarge entry wounds for the removal of foreign bodies or to relax separated body parts. The frequently prescribed practice of phlebotomy called for the partial puncturing of the skin to let blood flow. And of course there were plenty of complaints and treatments that concerned problems with the skin itself. Liniments and oils were used to treat rashes, burns, pimples, scabies and even freckles, while growths or ulcers were cut from the skin’s surface with thin, sharp knives.
From the 1400s onwards surgeons also contributed to a growing market in plastic surgery, a collection of cosmetic operations whose roots lay in Byzantine medicine and techniques imported from the Indian subcontinent a millennium or so earlier. The fourth-century author Oribasius discussed repairing the tip of the nose with an H-shaped flap of skin taken from the cheek, and in the fifteenth century rhinoplasties were still being undertaken along similar lines. These were particularly popular operations for those who had been disfigured in violent accidents or on the battlefield, and they would become especially important for victims of Europe’s first major outbreak of syphilis in the 1490s, a disease which in its advanced stages can cause partial or total collapse of the nose’s bridge. The operation received medieval renown in the hands of the Sicilian surgeon Branca Minuti and his son Antonio, who advocated taking skin for the replacement nose not from the cheek but from the arm. This left the patient with fewer scars on the face, but did mean they had to be bound into a complex series of straps to hold their elbow up to their mouth for several weeks while the graft gradually grew out of their shoulder.
Skin, though, was more than just a site for physical imperfections and surgical manipulations. Signs of a whole host of flaws could be found in its colour, temperature and texture, and, like hair, it was an important interface for uncovering underlying issues lurking below the surface. Examinations of the skin by a doctor might expose flaws in diet or humoral balance, but they could also highlight defects in a patient’s moral or spiritual integrity. Leprosy, for instance, was one of the most discussed diseases in the medical literature of the period. Its sufferers were clearly identifiable from the scarring and cracking of their skin in unpleasant characteristic lesions. Yet the disease was also thought by many authors, medical and otherwise, to penetrate far beneath the panicle into the more subjective recesses of a person’s character. The leper’s corrupted body was seen as the result of a corrupted internal morality, and this led to serious stigmatisation, particularly anxieties over contagion and the unfounded fear that lepers might attempt to tamper with water supplies and infect entire unsuspecting populations with their disease. We know now that the chances of catching leprosy are extremely low, and that the disease is passed only by prolonged, close contact with a contagious individual over many weeks or months. But in the Middle Ages the advice of one ninth-century commentator on the Qur’an would have rung far more true: ‘One should run away from the leper as one runs away from a lion.’ Others, however, took a kinder view. They interpreted leprosy less as divine retribution than as a test of the patience and compassion of others. No doubt influenced by the sympathetic mentions of lepers in Old and New Testament sources, authors such as Gregory of Nazianzos, a Byzantine theologian and the fourth-century patriarch of Constantinople, chastised those who refused to understand the subtleties of this surface disease. ‘The timid are misled by foolish talk’, he wrote. ‘Look at physicians and the example of those who take care of these sick, of whom not one has fallen into danger through visiting them. Do not despise your brother. He is your own member, though this calamity has deformed him.’
25. An eleventh-century wall-painting from the church of San Crisogono, Rome, showing Saint Benedict of Nursia healing a leper. The dark black spots all over the half-naked sick man evoke the lesions which appear on the skin of patients with the disease.
It was not just marks of disease on the skin that so polarised medieval opinion. Discussions of the body’s surface also unveil a range of complex positions on issues of race.
Occasionally in the Middle Ages we hear of miraculous stories in which skins of different hues came together, just the kind of social tolerance advocated by people like Nazianzos. Such a case appears during a fantastical surgical operation recorded in the hagiography of Saints Cosmas and Damian, two third-century brothers whose distinguished physicianship and pious martyrdom to the early Christian cause saw them enshrined as the patron saints of many medical professions. In the accounts of their holy lives we hear of a churchman from Rome whose leg is being ferociously eaten away by an unnamed infection or cancerous disease. Praying to Cosmas and Damian for help, he falls asleep one night and dreams that the brothers appeared to him bearing ointments and iron surgical instruments to remove the disease-ridden limb. The pair amputate the leg and transplant it with that of an Ethiopian man who had been buried on the same day in a nearby churchyard. Awaking the following morning, the man finds himself to have been painlessly healed and his leg replaced, his dream cure become reality. The author of this short tale does not reflect or even comment on how radical this transgressive bi-racial transformation must have appeared to contemporary audiences, focusing instead on an uplifting sense of spiritual triumph.
26. Saints Cosmas and Damian performing the miracle of the transplanted leg in a painting by an anonymous Spanish artist made around 1495.
Medieval race relations, however, were generally far more malicious than this pious narrative suggests. It was not that people were unaware of other ethnicities. At least in large port cities one could come into contact with a wide variety of diverse travellers from across the Mediterranean and beyond. Pilgrimage routes from east and west to the Holy Land as well as busy trade in exotic and quotidian materials both necessitated frequent cross-continental exchange. But the rapid expansion of Islam out from the Arabian Gulf was met with an equally fierce response from powers in the West. What followed was one of the most sustained periods of intercultural conflict before modern times, an aggressive and bloody collection of religious wars. From the end of the eleventh century choreographed campaigns and counter-campaigns of Crusade and Jihad saw peoples systematically pitted against each other, religion against religion, race against race.
Differences in skin colour soon emerged as a key way of identifying, denigrating and demonising one’s enemies. Theories had been circulating for some time in Middle Eastern medicine that the bodies of north-western Europeans held within them several fundamental humoral failings. The geographer and historian Abu al-Hasan al-Masudi (c.896–956) opined that:
As regards the people of the northern quadrant, the power of the sun is weak among them because of their distance from it … the warm humour is lacking among them. Their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy. Their colour is so excessively white that it passes from white to blue. Their skin is thin and their flesh thick.
Later Muslim propagandists happily carried these long-standing medical criticisms into their twelfth- and thirteenth-century conflicts. They presented their enemy’s physical differences as intellectual flaws: the strange whiteness of the Europeans’ clean-shaven skin and the unsettling blueness of their eyes were transformed into evidence of incompetence on the battlefield and an essential cowardice. For their part, Christian propagandists on the other side of the conflict seemed even more consumed with skin colour and constitution as tools for emphasising difference. Illustrations in books of western Crusader history took every opportunity to portray enemies of Muslim or African origin as visually distinct. Their foreign styles of dress were emphasised and their skin darkened to underline what was seen as a basic physiological difference.
Among other things, these European artists were echoing a promin ent Christian association of blackness or darkness with acts of sin. If Christ, according to the Gospel of Matthew, was lux mundi, the light of the world, then those who opposed him – Satan, spirits, demons, heathens – should be presented as his antithesis, shrouded in shadow, both morally and literally. In making his first call to Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II supported his order to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim hands with a long roll of racial invective, suggesting that followers of Islam were cowards and that this was inherent in their breeding, humours and skin. Unintentionally echoing al-Masudi’s words, he railed that: ‘It is a fact well known that every nation born in Eastern climes is dried up by the great heat of the sun. They have less blood in their veins, and that is why they flee from battle at close quarters. They know that they have no blood to spare.’ Part aggressive propagandising, part pseudo-eugenics, this sort of thinking incorporated for the Crusaders a warped yet useful medical logic into a visualisation of their dark-skinned foe as a violent, savage and impure ‘other’. Ironically, both Christian and Muslim agitators alike were using the same theories of human biology to emphasise each other’s skin as dangerously different.
27. Caricatures of Richard I and Saladin jousting in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter, painted around 1320–40 in Lincolnshire.
These caricatures ran deeper than mere wartime advocacy. In the distinctly un-diverse and religiously conservative environment of most medieval societies, a general racial stereotyping could quietly leak into many parts of everyday life. The Luttrell Psalter, a personal religious book made for the wealthy Lincolnshire landowner Geoffrey Luttrell between 1320 and 1340, contains a revealing miniature scene at the base of one of its pages. Jousting across the bottom of the parchment on horses draped in exaggerated finery are two stalwarts of early Crusader history. The figure on the left is identified by the rampant heraldic lions on his shield as Richard I of England (1157–1199), the Cœur de Lion, or Lionheart, master tactician of the Third Crusade in the 1190s. On the right, dressed in far more exotic armour and a helmet of shimmering gold leaf, is Sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (c.1137–1193) – known in the West as Saladin – the founder of the powerful Egyptian-Syrian Ayyubid dynasty. The scene is entirely fictional. The two men never met in person, fighting battles only by proxy through their respective royal armies, and by this stage in the fourteenth century tales of these leaders and their Crusades had become as much a romanticised literary genre as a genuine chronicle of military events. Yet there is little doubt as to who, a century and a half after the fact, is being presented in the margins of Geoffrey’s manuscript as the victor. Richard’s lance slams forward, knocking Saladin off balance and thrusting him back in his saddle. It is as if he is about to topple to the ground and be trampled beneath his horses’ hooves. And in the clash his ornate helmet has been thrown back off his head, allowing the artist to expose the Sultan’s most alarming features. Here, just like Pope Urban’s description, his eastern skin is so dark, so ‘non-white’, that it is coloured a deep shade of blue, making him seem even more alien than the caricatured head of a black Muhammad emblazoned on his shield. For all the strange webbed flourishes of his horse’s caparison and the intense bright-red scales of his chainmail, the most vivid marker of Saladin’s otherness remains his uncanny, discoloured skin.
Skin did not necessarily need to be attached to a body for it to convey equally powerful meaning. When it came to writing a book – be it a chronicle of Crusader history, a treatise on surgical cure or any other topic – medieval authors had a choice of materials. Those working in the Islamic Middle East and north Africa mostly turned to paper, a technology they had borrowed from contact with Chinese cultures as early as the eighth century. But in western and central Europe a far more common carrier of knowledge and imagery was parchment, dried and treated animal skin that had been transformed from a living, breathing surface into a flat, clean page.
In the earlier Middle Ages the making of parchment was largely undertaken in the scriptoria of monasteries or the courts of royal ruling dynasties. These centres sheltered the few authors of the era who were concerned with creating long-lasting books, either intellectual tomes on religious and scientific themes or more practical permanent records of the state, its laws and its finances. But by the thirteenth century preparing the skin had become the job of professional parchment-makers, commercial producers from whom scribes and illustrators might purchase single sheets or bound gatherings to begin turning into a manuscript. The shops of these artisans were clustered at close quarters in the literary districts of larger medieval cities, sometimes stretching the length of several streets. This was, in part, to concentrate their resources and expertise, for making parchment had multiple complex, carefully planned stages, relying on niche skills and expensive ingredients.
28. Brother Fritz the Parchment-Maker, scraping down a stretched skin with his lunellum in the final stages of making parchment. The image comes from the so-called Housebook of the Twelve-Brothers, a tome listing members of a charitable foundation for retired craftsmen in Nuremberg, Germany, made around 1425.
First, the skin of an animal had to be purchased. This was to be as high-quality and unblemished as possible, as well as of an appropriate size, colour and animal for the book under commission. A calf, say, with darker hair or a patterned hide would produce large parchment of a mottled yellowy-brown colour, while a lamb with lighter wool would produce a smaller but brighter piece. The skin would be washed, left under running water for a day or so, before being suspended for longer periods in subtly corrosive alkaline substances: dehairing liquors, quicklime, even urine. These substances caused the cells in the skin to partially rot and degrade, allowing the hide’s hairs to work themselves loose and fall out, leaving a continuous, flat surface. The parchment-maker would then transfer the skin to a stretching frame, making sure it did not dry out, and carefully scrape it down with a curved knife called a lunellum, a crescent or ‘moon-shaped’ blade. An illustration from 1420s Nuremberg shows a parchment-maker, Fritz Pyrmetter, in the midst of this process. Fritz’s patronym is almost certainly a nickname that riffs on the German term for parchment, pergament, itself taken from the Latin pergamina, ‘stuff of Pergamum’, the ancient Hellenistic city supposedly first famed for its bulging libraries of parchment books. Bearded and dressed in a simple tunic, Fritz works in much the same way as his forebears of the same name, running the wide blade back and forth over the stretched parchment, its curved ends making sure that his swift strokes do not nick the taut skin.
However careful a parchment-maker was in this work, natural imperfections in an animal’s skin meant small slits in the parchment could still emerge. To stop them becoming larger circular holes during the stretching process, these tiny ruptures were swiftly sewn up with needle and thread, just like the living work of the surgeon. Such repairs can still be found in many medieval books, small sutures which have kept the page intact for centuries. Some use plain thread to blend into the parchment’s pale surface while others work in deliberately colourful and decorative patterns, emphasising the skilled needlework of their makers. And when the holes were too small to bother stitching, they could also provide amusement for a book’s author, who might doodle around these blemishes to create animals or faces, discreet reminders of the surface’s original life. Either way, the parchment-maker would have constantly tightened the frame’s pegs as he scraped away any final surface blemishes, reducing the sheet to a smooth and shiny layer. Dry parchment has the texture of a thin piece of plastic rather than soft, floppy paper. Whether rolled up in a continuous series of stitched membranes or trimmed into rectangular folios for binding into a codex-form book, its simultaneous flexibility and rigidity meant it was extremely resistant to folds, creases, scratches and stains, an almost indestructible writing surface.
29. Small holes in a parchment page transformed by a twelfth-century scribe, who has taken a moment out from transcribing Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s commentary on the Song of Solomon to doodle them into a face.
Given all of the work necessary to provide just a single spread of pages, it is not hard to see why medieval books were considered such laborious and luxurious items. Large multi-volume codices, some stretching to five hundred folios or more, might contain the skins of several entire herds and require months of labour before a single word or illustration had even graced their pages. One luxury book, made for the Bishop of Westminster in the early 1380s, is recorded in episcopal accounts as costing four pounds, six shillings and eight pence for its parchment alone. To put this in context, the book’s extremely skilled scribe, one Thomas Preston, was paid a total fee of four pounds plus expenses – almost the same amount – for the whole two years he spent writing it. Indeed, parchment’s expense is not only an issue for the distant medieval past. The United Kingdom’s laws were still being recorded on parchment until early 2017, when Members of Parliament voted to cut costs and move to a cheaper system of bound paper. To its critics, parchment was an archaic and outdated remnant of muddy medieval governance, ripe for modernisation: a sarcastic headline in the Daily Mirror blared, ‘MPs just spent two hours discussing whether to keep wasting £80,000 a year printing laws on calf skin.’ Yet Paul Wright, the general manager of William Cowley, the UK’s last surviving parchment-maker, retorted that it is only because of parchment that the libraries of the Palace of Westminster still hold the original text of laws stretching back to 1497 and the reign of Henry VII. As Wright put it: ‘You can roll parchment up and leave it on a shelf or in a cave for 5,000 years. But you won’t find any paper manufacturer who will guarantee longer than 250 years. That takes us back to about 1750, and the rest of history we can kiss goodbye.’
30. The Acts room in the Palace of Westminster, containing thousands of parchment rolls on which British laws have been recorded for over five hundred years. The oldest Act stored there dates from 1497, and pertains to apprentices in the Norfolk wool industry.
If physicians and surgeons treated diseases of the skin and parchment-makers processed it into flat surfaces for writing, a third group of medieval craftsmen used their skills to protect the skin from the elements, clothing the body in virtuoso crafted textiles. Unlike the fixity of one’s colour or complexion, clothing provided medieval wearers with a changeable skin that could be made far more malleable to mark a range of different identities. However, the actual works created by tailors and seamstresses, weavers and embroiderers, are among the rarest of objects to be passed down from the Middle Ages. Tunics, trousers, robes, dresses, gowns, jackets, capes, undergarments, these are all things that were particularly prone to the wear and tear of daily life. Their organic dyes and fabrics began to degrade from their very first moments of use, and the vast majority of medieval textiles have avoided such decay only from having been kept in the most parched, consistent conditions, excavated from dry desert sites, often in Egypt, or uncovered in the untouched, sealed tombs of churchly catacombs.
Those which do survive, especially from the earlier Middle Ages, seem mostly to have been crafted in what were the highly prized styles of Byzantine and Islamic ateliers. Cotton, linen and silk garments were a speciality of the Middle East, with raw textiles imported there to be worked into remarkable clothes from the environs of Spain, Sicily or Syria, all regions rich in both agriculture and sericulture, the cultivation of silkworms. A woollen child’s tunic from the fifth or sixth century, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shows the kind of detailed work such garments could entail. It is a burial shirt, designed to wrap around the body in the tomb, and although now dirty with age, it would have cleanly enshrined the deceased, a final formality for the person now passed. Made from a single piece of uncomplicated, uncoloured cloth, it lent a certain simple smartness in death, folded at the top and sewn down each side with linen thread. Yet subtle embellishments can still be found at its collar and waist. A series of intricate woven patches and bands of repeated motifs decorate the body with circular patterns, spiralling vines and abstract shapes, while tiny heads, flowers, birds and animals come together to add a delicate sense of personality to the fabric and the wearer.
The idea that clothes might reflect their owners was important in life as well as in death. They often declared national, political or religious allegiance. Sometimes this was extravagant and overt. Soldiers on the battlefield indicated which side they were fighting for with badges on their uniforms, plumes in their helmets or the bearing of royal symbols on their armour. Monks and nuns might indicate their particular religious allegiances through certain colours and styles of robe, an identity they could have stripped from them if they transgressed their order’s rules and were defrocked. But at other times indicators of dress were more subtle and coded. In civilian life social hierarchies were frequently enforced by the expense and turnover of high-quality clothing. For the few who could afford them, fashionable details such as short-cropped surcoats, sleeves with oak-leaf frills, close-fitting bodices with variable necklines, caped hoods with long tippets, or double-horned head-dresses marked one out as a participant in the speedy turnover of chic styles. In such a loaded sartorial atmosphere various regional caricatures abounded. Scandinavians were associated with the pricey furs they traded. The Chinese and Persians were praised for the delicacy of their patterned silks. And western travellers to the Middle East tended to roll together criticisms of non-white skin with brightly coloured, ‘exotic’ clothes, disliking in particular the turbans worn in most Islamic cultures and the gaudy dyes of uniforms at the Mongol court.
Yet, for most medieval people, deciding what to wear was often not much of a choice at all. Not only were many bound by the practical smocks and uniforms of more workaday professions, but from the twelfth century onwards in various provinces on all sides of the Mediterranean an extensive framework of legal codes sprang up which governed expenditure and dress. These sumptuary laws, as they were known, were enforced by local government and confined appropriate styles and fashions to particular types of people. This was, in part, a method of safeguarding local makers, imposing penalties on people wearing foreign fabrics and offering protectionist support to markets closer to home. Textiles could be big business in major centres like Lucca or London, and unlike some niche medieval crafts these specialists formed a substantive workforce of both men and women, reliant on the industry’s success. With such help from the state, making clothes could be quite lucrative. Thomas Carleton, one of the most successful textile-workers in England, was appointed embroiderer to the household of King Edward III from 1368, and his surviving account books show him in the process of scaling up his business to include a number of different properties throughout the city, each with a small shopfront decorated with folding shutters that doubled as a flip-down counter for selling wares.
31. A woollen burial tunic for a child, probably made in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century.
But sumptuary laws could also be more controlling, even sinister. On the one hand, they quite reasonably sought to keep the peace, clothing-wise. In 1375 the codes of the town of Aquila in central Italy insisted that nobody wear ‘pandos curtos ut eorum genitalia remaneant discoperta’, ‘trousers so short that the genitals remain uncovered’. Fair enough. But they often also tried to enforce codes of morality through social supervision, fending off what lawmakers saw as an unpalatable sartorial contamination between high and low social ranks. In Nuremberg, peasants wearing pearls or modish slashed shoes would be met with a hefty fine, while in Mamluk Cairo non-Muslims were required to wear particular colours to emphasise their difference: Jews in yellow and Christians in blue. Prostitutes, too, were banned from wearing certain fabrics in nearly all major cities, both East and West, for fear they were mistaken for ordinary folk. Their hoods were restricted to black or yellow-coloured cloth and at times were even trimmed with small bells to warn of their approach.
A concern for the particular dress of sex workers exemplifies just how closely medieval ideas of clothing the skin were bound to concepts of wantonness and sin. Not that prostitutes were always demonised for their profession. Surprisingly perhaps, religious authorities sometimes advocated a tolerance of sex work, at least in heterosexual encounters. Jewish writers turned to scripture to point out that several biblical women, the likes of Rahab or Tamar, had been prostitutes and yet were still held up as model heroines of the faith. Christian Church Fathers also saw sex workers as something of a social necessity: as Saint Augustine wrote in his first book De ordine, ‘On Order’, if society was to do away with prostitutes, ‘the world would be convulsed with surplus lust’. Muslim writers even equated a sex worker’s fee to a justly earned dowry. Yet the real social danger of a medieval prostitute was not her finances: it was her all too easy ability to shed her clothes and expose her skin beneath. In spite of their seeming tolerance, these same religious thinkers often expressed the predictable view that the easy nakedness of prostitution implied easy morals. The idea that nudity was tantamount to an insatiable lust had been posited from the very beginning, quite literally. Adam and Eve, enjoying prelapsarian bliss and bounty in the Garden of Eden, thought nothing of having their skin on show. It was only after eating from the Tree of Knowledge that, to quote Genesis, ‘the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths’, the first clothes. Such freighted, problematic nudity recurs at various moments in holy texts, always framed as acts of invasion and shame: Noah was discovered naked and drunk by his sons, the heathen Babylonians were humiliated for their free nudity, and saintly bodies were often forced to suffer the ultimate indignity of undress as they went to meet their heavenly demise. Clothes carried with them an inherent morality, and for civic regulators, policing dress was part of policing the ethics of the faithful.
Keen to set an example in this regard, religious authorities thought extremely carefully about what they themselves should wear in front of their flock, especially the ways they should dress to encounter the majesty of the Holy Word. Christian clergy, in particular, among the most powerful figures in European society at the time, commissioned extravagant and symbolically potent liturgical vestments that remain some of the best-preserved specimens of medieval embroidery from the period. As with the pages of parchment books, it was often the wont of subsequent generations of users to cut and crop these garments from their original shapes, sometimes lifting entire scenes from pieces of clothing to reformat them into new robes. Yet even in fragments they still retain something of their former power. Take the so-called Marnhull Orphrey, a fourteenth-century band of embroidered religious scenes that would once have decorated the clothes of a priest. In faded yet extremely fine silken thread it depicts the punishment of Christ: in one image he is flagellated by a pair of figures brandishing whips, while another presents his haranguing and taunting when carrying the cross to Golgotha. These images themselves play on the social role of dress. Christ is shown nearly naked, his dignity covered only by a silver loincloth, while his assailants wear exotic and elaborate clothing, boldly coloured, with clashing patterned leggings and ochre coats. The hues of these textiles underline the stark difference in humility between the parties. But Christ’s nudity also serves to highlight the lucid resplendence of his skin itself. Embroidered in pale, gleaming silk thread, it is fetishised as a patch of pure whiteness that contrasts with the deliberately darkened skin tones of his miniaturised assailants.
32. Two scenes from the Marnhull Orphrey, showing Christ carrying the cross and the flagellation, probably made in early fourteenth-century London
Like the blue-faced Saladin being thrown from his horse across the bottom of the Luttrell Psalter, the spiritual blackness of the sins these non-believers perpetrate against Christ is transformed into a literal blackness worn on the skin of their face, hands and feet. An expensive, luxurious piece like this would have amplified the high authority of the cleric who wore it, at once showcasing the Church’s clear opinions on race and dress. And at the same time his body would have also added a final element of animation to the scene. The figures are set not against a simple yellow silk but against a background of metallic, gilded silver thread. As the priest moved through the actions of officiating the Christian ritual, his garments would have caught the light streaming through windows or flickering from candles, making its threads glitter and shimmer. The cross, the whips, the flecks of blood on Christ’s body would have all sparked as the priest embodied the orphrey, its heavy inanimate fabric coming to life as a second liturgical skin.