“It snewed in his hous of mete”: A Nicholas and the butchers capital from Narbonne

by KARL STEEL

[what follows is a light piece, quickly written; for a real post, see below, from Cord Whitaker, whose paper I had the great honor of witnessing at the recent London meeting of the New Chaucer Society. All the papers in that session, which will be appearing sequentially here, were superb, and the crowd, I'm happy to say, was large. Read Whitaker first, I insist.]

In the visual arts, it’s not so easy to portray anthropophagy as anthropophagy. Guts are guts, and flesh is flesh, so much so that the corpus/porcus pun was standard in medieval writing, even far outside works like the Anatomia porci manuals, which used pig bodies to teach human anatomy. The anthropophagy artist has to make sure to include a head, some feet, some hands, some hint of bipedality, some formal echo of the living bodies on the other side of the cleaver: otherwise, how can we be certain that what’s being prepared had at least once been human?

As I’ve written before – in an agonized psychoanalytic manner that befitted my anxious interests of those dissertating days -- few medieval stories are as aware of this slippage between human and other fleshes as the story of Nicholas and the butcher (lighter version here). In the most widespread version of this ur-Sweeney Todd story, three traveling scholars are put up for the night by a butcher, who decides to rob them. When he finds they have nothing of value but their own bodies, he kills them and turns them into sausage. Saint Nicholas, the special object of the scholars’ piety, soon turns up, and, in one version of the South English Legendary, asks the butcher for his best meat, eliciting a confession, and then a miracle, as Nicholas (un)renders the scholars whole.

12th-c. font, Winchester Cathedral, photo by John Cook

The visual depictions I know, like this twelfth-century font, tend to show the butcher looming over the scholars in bed.

 Or they show three young, naked men emerging from a salting barrel, as with this churchfront statue from Porto. 

Igreja Paroquial de São Nicolau (18th c.)

Few show the butcher at work, because care’s needed to ensure that we know the butcher’s cutting up people.

Hence my excitement at coming across this capital (below) at Musée des Augustins in Toulouse a few weeks ago. The capital, dating to the second half of the twelfth century, comes from Narbonne’s Saint Paul basilica, and show the butcher amid a hodgepodge of body parts: a torso perhaps, but mostly extremities -- hands, feet, and a couple heads -- so we know what’s being stuffed into the barrel, so we know something's gone awry, while also reminding us, again, that, professionally speaking, flesh of whatever sort is mostly a matter of joints to a butcher, who can make money from us even when we feel certain we carry none. And that what's needed for us to be more than flesh is the care, the mourning, the outrage, the obligation, of some passing saint -- here, seated, brandishing his crozier at the butcher -- another body of flesh, so holy that they refuse to eat us, even just a little.

Notably, not far from this capital, the Museum displays another twelfth-century carving, from a church in Oô, of a woman being consumed by a snake, or suckled, or straddled by one, which runs from a breast to her genitals, which perhaps as a whole -- as the Museum suggests -- represents luxury. Luxury here is the female flesh, fed on itself, delighting in itself, the form that flesh takes in its mutability, its putrefaction, in its loving itself the wrong way. As if clinging to the flesh could ever be anything but excessive, unjustifiable, an unwarranted vanity in this world of fleshes that have no more right to be here than we do. Some bodies, like hers, are bodies of flesh, made to stand in for all that's wrong; and some, like the three clerks, are given the chance to be a bit more.

(for more on me and anthropophagy, see, most recently, my contribution to the recent anthology Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism (ed Seaman and Joy), just out from Ohio State University Press)

(hi gang - yes, before you get all in my business, I know mete means "food" in the Chaucer, but you'd have gone with that title too if it had thrust itself upon you like it did on me.)

Margery Kempe's Vegetarianism: Part II

by KARL STEEL

Part I is here; Part II is here; and now, finally, in as good a state as I can get it now, Part III.

Last week, one of our medieval colleagues gently expressed some incredulity when I said I was trying to produce something publishable on Kempe after spending only a few days "mastering" (hahah) the secondary criticism. She's right! The only way I'm getting away with this, probably, is that I'm writing for a non-medieval audience. I aim to be as good an ambassador as I can be; I aim to get Kempe still more readers than she already has (though Anthony Bale's already doing quite well on this front); I hope to do her a little justice.

Writing on Kempe and flesh is a decades-long project by now (thanks Karma Lochrie!), and writing on women and/as the "body" is at least as long. What I'm bringing to this conversation, if anything, is an interest in posthumanisms, new materialisms, and critical animal theory. And of course I owe a debt to Lisa Kiser's fantastic article on Kempe and animals. In a longer version of this project (perhaps as part of the introduction my always developing second book?), I can see engaging with, say, Leo Bersani ('is the rectum a grave?') and Mel Y Chen: maybe for this Fall's "Problems in Posthumanism" seminar!

Flourish of horns.

----

Add MS 37049 28r - "rede flesche"

Karma Lochrie argues that the "primary human conflict" for medieval Christianity was not body against soul, but "the life of the flesh against the life of the spirit" (19). The body was neutral and passive. It did nothing on its own. Flesh, not body, was the true enemy of our better self. Flesh was "heaving" "pervious" (4), and "heterogeneous -- neither body nor soul, but carnal and spiritual at the same time" (39), for it was both materiality and materiality's own disturbingly autonomous disorder. It was both desirable in itself and desire incarnated. Flesh tended towards things it should not. It drew us after it. And flesh was a woman: as Augustine explained, "your flesh is like your wife ... it lusts against you like your wife" (caro tanquam coniux est...Concupiscit adversus te, tanquam coniux tua; on Psalm 140,  PL 37: 1825; see Lochrie 19-20; also important for me: Suzannah Biernoff, eg, 34; also, minus the attention to gender, Ben Woodard)

Kempe's Book tends to use "body" to represent whole things: her body as a whole, or her husband's, or Christ’s, either hanging on the cross or in the form of the Eucharist. The body, neatly bordered, coherently designates an individual. "Flesh," the other hand, is material and willful, desirable and disgusting, human or animal, and whether dead or alive, always irrepressibly lively. Flesh is sex (as in "fleschly knowyng" [Chapter 9] or "fleschly comownyng" [Chapter 3]). It is the thing that draws us away from spirit ("fleschly affeccyon" [Chapter 28 and others]). Flesh is sometimes the edible body of Christ, sometimes the aspect of self that operates without our willing it. When Kempe awaits an Archbishop’s interrogation, she "stod stylle, tremelyng and whakyng ful sor in hir flesch wythowtyn ony erdly comfort" [Chapter 13], standing still and trembling at the same time, as if she were commingled with another, unquiet self. Flesh is human and animal flesh both, and also meat, because Middle English vocabulary, like Latin, did not distinguish between "meat" and "flesh" (the Middle English "mete" simply meant "food" in general). Kempe’s flesh therefore recalled the body all in its lustiness, its exposure, its vulnerability, its edibility, its irrational motivations, and its sublime Eucharistic incarnation, recreated every time Catholic priests performed a Mass.

She is a woman, a mother, separated from her husband, and an older person (in her 50s) and widow by the time she has the book last last written down (for discussion, especially on the Book's ambiguous dating of Kempe's widowhood, Tara Williams): her culture would have made her into a figure of flesh in its its danger, its filth, its concupiscence, its edibility, all that a masculinized order sought to render governable by abjecting it from itself (so that "your flesh...lusts against you, like your wife"). Widows were considered to be sexually knowing; older women were commonly portrayed as repulsive (SGGK; Wife of Bath's Tale; Niebrzydowski's work for nuance). Her contemporaries prefer that she either hew to these roles or be silent. Failing that, they prefer her to be a hypocrite, so she confirms the truth of what they really know her to be. They accuse her of pushing aside a red herring at one meal in favor of a tastier, more expensive pike [Chapter 9]; by calling her both a Lollard heretic [Chapters 13, 46, 52, 53 etc] and a Jew [Chapter 52], they accuse her of not sharing correctly in their enjoyment, particularly of Christ's Eucharistic flesh (still useful); they want to believe her chastity a fraud, that she and her husband regularly sneak off to "woodys, grovys, er [or] valeys usyn the lust of her bodiis" [Chapter 76]. They insist that she eat meat, stop weeping, and keep her conversation about holiness to herself [Chapter 27]. She carries on, inhabiting and inhabited by flesh in all its characteristics simultaneously, on terms that both enact prejudicial certainties and deny them, because she is living as woman, as wife, as animal, as food, as desire, as a particularly sublated desire at that, and as the body of Christ.

Additional 37049 33r

A short poem included in a fifteenth-century Middle English Carthusian devotional anthology helps illustrate the operations of this densely tangled node of signification. It imagines a falconer that entices a restless bird to return by showing it a hunk of "rede flesche" (Additional 37049 28r): so too, explains the poem, does Christ draw us back, so that we can join him on the "cros of penaunce" through "discrete poneyschyng of thi body." Jessica Brantley dryly remarks that "the poem sets up a number of complex equivalences" (132): Christ is falconer, but also meat, while the reader is a falcon who becomes both "meat and crucified savior" through penance, which for a Carthusian means the lifelong penance of vegetarianism, which preserves pleasure by penitentially subjugating it. All the Carthusian poem lacks is an explicit reference to gender. Elsewhere, the same Carthusian compilation imagines a once beautiful women beset in the grave by vermin, gradually made to come to terms with her putrefaction and edibility (me; Elizabeth Robertson). The debate's first page features an illustration of a cloaked man kneeling before a crucifix, decorated with nearly naked Christ figure whose white flesh bleeds redly from its every surface (33r). Flesh, especially suffering flesh, runs though this compilation in all its forms: edible, suffering, disdained, repulsive, feminized, and the stuff of redemption.

Similarly dense identifications operate in Kempe’s fasting and identification with suffering. When Christ first orders Kempe to eat no flesh but that of his own body, he promises too that “you shall be eaten and gnawed at by the people of the world as much as any rat gnaws on the stockfish” (“Thow schalt ben etyn and knawyn of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stokfysch” [Chapter 5]). Kempe twice compares herself to being meat chopped up for stew: “If it were your will Lord, I would for your love and for the magnifying of your name be chopped as small as meat for the pot” [Yyf it wer thy wille, Lord, I wolde for thi lofe and for magnyfying of thi name ben hewyn as smal as flesch to the potte" (Chapter 57, line 3358; see also Chapter 84, 4861)]. She goes without (animal) meat; she eats the (divine) meat of the Eucharist; she imagines herself as meat. The most insistently public form her piety takes, her writhing and wailing, even make her animal-like, as it cuts her off from the articulate voice that was among the definitive features of rational humankind: when she first receives her white garment, she emits her strongest wails yet, so that people “said that she howled as if she were a dog” [seyd that sche howlyd as it had ben a dogge” (Chapter 44, 2477).

When she sees animal suffering, she too suffers:

If she saw a man who had a wound or a beast of whatever sort, or if a man beat a child before her or smote a horse or another beast with a whip, if she might see it or hear it, she thought that she saw our Lord be beat or wounded in the same way that she saw the man or beast beat or wounded, whether in the field or in the town, whether alone by herself or among the people.

[yf sche sey a man had a wownde er a best wheþyr it wer, er ʒyf a man bett a childe be-for hir er smet an hors er an-oþer best wyth a whippe, ʒyf sche myth sen it er heryn it, hir thowt sche saw owyr Lord be betyn er wowndyd lyk as sche saw in þe man er in þe best, as wel in the feld as in þe town, & be hir-selfe [a]lone as wel as a-mong þe pepyl. (Chapter 28, line 1586 ff)]

In a superb study, Lisa Kiser enumerates several other comparisons between Christ’s and animal suffering in late medieval English religious writing; she points out how Kempe's comparison differs from the norm by beginning with animals and then moving to Christ. From this, Kiser proposes that in Kempe's weeping, we even witness a rare, even precocious instance of both "emotional fervor and moral disapproval" over the suffering of animals (for a brief treatment, also sympathetic, Katherine Wills Perto's Kinship and Killing). 

Kempe's compassion is not, however, for animals so much as it is for injuries in general, whether animals or human. More importantly, Kempe has no interest in preventing this suffering; rather, she passionately seeks out suffering, joins with it, and renders it,  whatever its form, an occasion for entanglement with the suffering of Christ. A typical scene from the Book has Kempe see Christ’s “precious tender body, rent and torn with scourges all over, more full of holes that "evyr was duffehows of holys" (Chapter 28, line 1618), whereupon she collapses and shouts wyth lowde voys, wondyrfully turnyng and wrestyng hir body on every syde, spredyng hir armys abrode as yyf sche schulde a deyd" (Chapter 28, line 1621), or as if she were herself hung on the cross.

This is empathic identification with suffering, but without any desire to end it. All the affective elements that we might think necessary for the development of animal rights, and even critical animal philosophy, are present, yet all they do is exacerbate the need to have suffering animals. I stress this, again, to argue against the notion that attention to or awareness of or even unease over animal suffering will be enough to activate a resistance to violence against animals. This is not to accuse Kempe of not being "good enough" from a modern animal rights perspective: that would be absurd. It is rather to keep open the chance to observe the real strangeness of Kempe's animal identifications and "carnivorous" vegetarianism. 

However much her religious ecstasies may normalized by contextualizing them with analogues in other late medieval mystics or contemplatives, her Book, at least, wants us always to know how much her identifications disturbed her contemporaries. Kempe performs this identification in and through her flesh, in public. Though she does rationally dispute with professional clergy to defend herself from charges of heresy, she expresses herself most characteristically through ecstatic weeping and howling, like a dog. More accurately, none of this is her performance or expression so much as it is a performance, an expression, generated impersonally or through a mobile melding of persons through and in the flesh in all its qualities as desiring, vulnerable, edible, disdained, and profanely sacred. This performance is not wholly agential, not wholly human, often not linguistic, but through all this indelibly gendered.

If we return to Derrida's praise of the "nonpower at the heart of power," we can see both how she lives out this quality, and how she does Derrida one better. Derrida is a philosopher, and a male philosopher at that, granted through that professional status a certain bodily abstraction. Though his famous essay puts his own body on stage, briefly, to speak of his embarrassment over his embarrassment of stepping out of his shower to find his cat looking at his penis, Derrida is himself largely absent from it, except in the expected form of philosophical language. Though his attention to the "nonpower at the heart of power" aims to break down language's pretensions to autocratic, rational agency to enter into its subrational passivity and helplessness, he still does this through the medium of language, his language in particular. 

Kempe's "physical piety," her insistent fleshiness vividly expresses this "nonpower," without having to preserve any pretensions to autocratic ratonality. To put this bluntly: she lives what Derrida only talks about. She enacts what Derrida only thinks about. And by distinctly living out this "nonpower" through her own body, Kempe renders any generalized statement about suffering or "nonpower" impossible. Kempe is not operating with the homogeneous categories of "human" and "animal" that Derrida's text preserves, despite its efforts. I join with Myra Seaman in stressing that "Kempe's state is supposedly beyond human, yet it remains utterly human as well: embodied, and intensely physical" (258), which is to say, that it is also animal and divine and woman and mother and widow, and that the medium that makes all this possible is the flesh.

Margery Kempe's Vegetarianism: Part I

by KARL STEEL

First, thank you Jeffrey for yesterday's post ("For Friends.") If you haven't yet, I would ask that you read this article by Mariella Mosthof, this one by Justin Torres, this one by Najva Sol, and I join Alison Kinney is asking that you keep reading work by queers of color, particularly Muslim and Latinx queers (one more, so harrowing, by Jesus Valles). If you think it would help you, absorb this data on gun violence, just to know how comparatively easy US gun policies, and its profiteers, make it for men - and it is mostly men - to kill en masse. If you'd like to argue about these points, there are many places on the internet for you to argue, and I encourage you to go there and use them.

So. This is what I've been working on. I don't know if there's ever a good time to post it, so I'm posting it now.

It's a follow up to my post from last week ("No Filter: Suffering, Finitude, and other Supposed Truths about Animals"), and the first of what I hope are two parts on Margery Kempe. I am writing this as the central section of my chapter on "Animals and Violence" for the Routledge Handbook for Human-Animal History, and it's already 13 days late, because I decided to scrap plan a (cobble together a bunch of existing stuff) in favor of plan b (do something new that I actually care about). Good and bad.

This meant following out a hunch that hit me on May 28, and writing about someone I haven't given any thought about since doing my oral exams some 14 years ago. If my Kempe research seems shallow, mea culpa! I've been writing my way towards her, and really only got to her last week (ahem and ahem). If my medieval material seems obvious, it may be! But I'm writing for a non-medieval audience, who may never read any other medieval scholarship, and who may be prejudiced against the period already. Not to throw myself on the mercy of the court, but I'm doing what I can.

British Library, Add MS 61823 78v: "Cap. 66," and, in a red box, "fleyshe"

Thinking about animals and violence and the middle ages tends to follow one of two routes. The first holds that medieval people were more "brutal” -- the animal metaphor is telling -- because they lacked the "humane" delicacy of modern civilization. The other route holds that medieval people were not more animal than us but rather just more "closely connected" to them, because big, working beasts were so much a part of their daily lives, because animals were driven "on the hoof" into the very heart of cities to be butchered, and because virtually no book could be produced without killing animals for their skin. If reducing cruelty to animals requires getting closer to what "really" happens to them when we have them butchered, then animals may well require that we "get medieval" for them.

That may strike you as self-evidently silly as it does me, but in a purely quantitative sense, animals did have it far better in the Middle Ages than they do now. On occasion there were mass killings, to provision military expeditions, or, for example, to make up the parchment for the eighth-century Codex Amiatinus and its two matching volumes. But the 1500 calves this extraordinary project required hardly register in comparison to the figures of annual cattle slaughter in the United States (in this century, generally well above 32,000,000 individuals per year). In the twelfth century, Walter Map furnished what looks like a more typical portrait of premodern animal intimacy: each evening, a rich man entered his barn “and approached each oxen in turn, shook up their fodder, running his hand along the backbone of each, approvingly and fondly, instructing each by name to eat” (515-16). They worked for him; they would end their lives of labor by being slaughtered and eaten; but at least he knew them individually, and, inasmuch as he could, he treated them with kindness; and, as the story concludes, should a deer hide itself from hunters among his herd, the rich man, even in darkness, would immediately identify it, eject it, and have it put to death.  

What follows restores to the Middle Ages some of the cultural complexity often denied it by a modern self-satisfaction that makes the middle ages little more than either a barbaric anticipation of modernity or its less decadent origin, or both, simultaneously. My subject is the fifteenth-century bourgeoise, contemplative, preacher, mother, troublemaker, and pilgrim, the author, through her amanuenses, of the first English-language autobiography, the extraordinary Margery Kempe. To use terms not often used to describe her: Kempe was a vegetarian who wept sorely at the sight of animal suffering. This makes her sound as if she would be a troublesome crank, or worse, for omnivores, and a founding hero for modern vegetarianisms. But most modern vegetarianisms want to end animal suffering: not Kempe. Hers was a carnivorous vegetarianism, whose practice was founded on a sublated preservation of desire for the suffering and death of animals (I am distinguishing my approach sharply from several excellent published articles on food and Kempe, by Cristina Mazzoni, Melissa Raine, and animals and Kempe, by Lisa Kiser; see also this seminar paper by Elizabeth Knight, whose development is certainly worth watching). This at least was perfectly in line with contemporary Christian piety. What distinguished her was less her diet than her gender, age, and life experience as a mother, all of which generated a particularity potent sanctity, established through identification with a suffering, pleasurable flesh that was at once animal, female, and divine.

Around the year 1409, Christ granted Margery Kempe his first long visionary visitation, in which he commands her to "forsake that which you love best in this world, and that is eating of flesh. And instead of that flesh, you shall eat my flesh and my blood, which is the true body of Christ in the sacrament of the altar” [forsake that thou lovyst best in this world, and that is etyng of flesch. And instede of that flesch thow schalt etyn my flesch and my blod, that is the very body of Crist in the sacrament of the awter” (Chapter 5, line 379 ff)]. Despite the exertions of pilgrimage, and despite bullying from her fellow travelers, she keep the vow for years, begrudgingly having some meat when he confessor insists, but for no more than “a lytyl whyle” (Chapter 26, line 1404). It is not until Christ himself intervenes, years later, that she fully “resort[s] ageyn to flesch mete,” and that only because he wants her to build up her strength for another pilgrimage. Obedient on both occasions to her divine lord, she – in Sarah Salih’s words – gets “to have her fast and eat it” too.

In her fifteenth-century England, Kempe’s decision to forgo meat for years on end would have been unusual for a secular woman, but was otherwise perfectly orthodox. Kempe could have gone much further and still remained within the church: the twelfth-century mystic Alpais of Cudot, for example, is said to have subsisted on nothing but Eucharistic hosts. Meat would not necessarily have been rare in the diet; late fourteenth-century harvest workers in eastern and southern England would have received nearly a pound of it daily during the laboring season (28). Baseline Christian dietary practice thus really did require some care: for Kempe's Christianity would have required that she, like any other layperson, abstain from meat for nearly a third of the year, mostly during the fasting season of Lent. Monks tended to do still more, and Carthusian monks, whose practice Kempe's most closely resembled, did the most of all, by requiring that their adherents keep to an entirely meatless diet.

Early medieval monastic rules tended to forbid all but the sick from eating quadrupeds and sometimes even birds; later monks developed loopholes by distinguishing forbidden carnes (fresh-cooked meat recently cut from the joint) from licit carnea (pre-cooked, pre-salted meat) (40), so much so that a monk like the twelfth-century Samson, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, earned high praise for eating neither (40). Carthusians would have none of this. After centuries of debate, even the chancellor of the University of Paris weighed in. Jean Gerson's 1401 De non esu carnium Carthusienses admitted that while abstinence from meat was bad for the health, so too were mercantile voyages and nearly all other human endeavors, so there was nothing inherently wrong with Carthusians damaging their health for God, and therefore no reason for their critics to charge them, as they often did, with homicide (101-103). Carthusian attitudes towards meat-eating found themselves promulgated outside the cloister in works like the enormously popular Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, a meditative guide that explains that Christ ate meat only once, at the Last Supper, where Christ's typological role as the sacrificial, sacramental Paschal lamb made eating symbolically useful (51, 377). Carthusian approval for Kempe's ascetic diet is suggested by the so-called "red ink annotator," an early sixteenth-century monastic reader of the sole extant manuscript of Kempe's Book. Willing at times to delete or even rewrite passages to suit his doctrinal preferences, he leaves the margin blank when Kempe first stops eating meat (9r), but when she takes it up again, he writes "fleysche" near the passage, and draws a box around it: it may be too much to suggest that he was disturbed by this change in Kempe’s religious practices, but he certainly found her new difference from his own vowed commitments remarkable.

In Kempe’s England, the common heresy was not one of not eating meat, but of eating it at the wrong times, and without due regard for its special importance. Peter of Bruys provides a spectacular twelfth-century continental example: he dined on meat that he had roasted in front of a church, on Good Friday, on a pyre of disarticulated crucifixes (PL 189:771C-D). According to records produced in the last decade of Kempe's life, the heretics of Norwich – a town some 40 miles from Kempe’s own King’s Lynn, one which she visited frequently – broke with the church with far less fanfare, by saving leftover meat to eat on fast days (Margery Baxter, 46), or by declaring that anyone on whatever day “can eat fish or flesh indifferently, according to the desire of their appetite” (potest indifferenter edere pisses vel carnes secundum sui appetitus desiderium). This studied carelessness was punished with a temporary diet of bread and water, or, in one case, bread and ale, simultaneously depriving these heretics of meat and returning them to the cycle of penitential eating that was supposed to be common to all of the faith.

The heretics who had worried the church the most were the s0-called Cathars, who “shun all flesh...but not for the same reason as monks and others living spiritually abstain from it” (PL 195:14C), according to Eckbert of Shönau’s complaint in his 1163 sermon in praise of meat-eating. Eckbert explains that the Cathars believe that since some vast prince of shadows (“quemdam immanem principem tenebrarum”) created the material world, they should not eat meat, the most material of foods. Eckbert then sarcastically regrets that there had been no Cathar present to whisper his doctrine in Noah’s ear after the flood, when God first authorized this new diet of flesh. It is in memory of beliefs like these that one late medieval defender of the Carthusian vegetarianism explains “unlike certain heretics, [we] hold like other Christians that all God's creatures are good,” which is to say, inherently good for food.

While medieval ethnographers were willing to imagine fully vegetarian, entirely peaceful ascetics, and to let them voice disdain for those who “made their bellies a tomb," they deposited these ascetics safely in the far east, or the distant past of the classical “Golden Age,” before humans turned to meat, warfare, and commerce. Good Christians, even Carthusians, were supposed to want to kill and eat animals, and to recognize that God had given them animals for exactly this purpose. They were encouraged to refuse this pleasure, but they were supposed to refuse it as a pleasure, so that the Christian year, even for laypeople, may be understood as a elaborate management, and refinement, of the pleasurable satisfactions of denying oneself the pleasures of eating meat. This is how Kempe fasts: the orthodoxy of her abstinence is marked by what Christ says to her: leave off eating what “thou lovyst best."

Since orthodoxy requires that she never give up this desire, her fasting must therefore be distinguished from her celibacy: the two asceticisms differ. Quite early in the book, after waking up to celestial song, she suddenly loses all sexual desire for her husband (Chapter 3); and she dolefully recollects, as she cares for him in his incontinent dotage, that she had once desired him (Chapter 76): but now, she thinks sex "abhominabyl," a sin, a distraction, certainly fleshy, but only repulsive. Meat, on the other hand, she has given up without giving up desire for it. The preservation of this pleasure preserves the desire for this substance, flesh, that was the material sign of human supremacy over animals, the particularly feminine unruliness and pleasures of the body (in particular see), and the very substance of the incarnated Christ himself. It was all these that she presented, denied, identified with, and performed, troubling nearly all who came in contact with her with the noisy insistence of her fleshy and suffering piety.

(to be continued)

NO FILTER: Suffering, Finitude, and other supposed truths about animals

by KARL STEEL

Three times (!) in the last week, I've had people raise their eyebrows at me when I said I recently missed a deadline. Let me assure you that this isn't my first time at the tardy rodeo. This one (June 1) I missed  because - I'm claiming - I've been so hard at work, and because I found myself writing things I shouldn't. My essay on "Animals and Violence" for the Routledge Handbook for Animal-Human History has transmuted from a rather dull Frankenstein's monster of old blog posts and précis of previously published stuff into an overambitious reconsideration of the problem of the "medieval" in accounts of violence and animality. Of course I want to share a bit with you, but perversely, I'm not giving you part I (on animality, the medieval, and the politics of time), nor the next part of part II (on Margery Kempe's vegetarianism), but rather this not very medieval bit, which ultimately breaks up a little with a bit of Derrida that I've long loved. Boohoo.

Thanks to all the contributors to my Facebook thread asking for bibliography on violence, thanks to John Protevi for some behind-the-scenes discussion, thanks to Steven Bruso for sending me his bibliography on the same, and thanks to Jared Rodríguez for some last-minute, very welcome PDF help. Enormously helpful.

And here's the chapter section:

Sauprellen, anon c. 1720, detail; from the Jagdschloss Grunewald (see also)

It is not uncommonly said that habitats generated by internal combustion engines and electronics lack the crowds of animals common to what are often called “premodern,” “preindustrial,” or “developing” habitats. It is supposed that medieval people were therefore “more in touch with” animals than their modern counterparts. The standard argument continues in this way: because medieval people relied on animal labor, traveled on animals, and because they could not have misunderstood where meat came from, they did not need to compensate for their “unnatural” separation from animals by surrounding themselves, for example, with overbred, useless pets. Their relationship to animal life was truer than ours, where "ours" equals that group of people most likely to be reading this chapter.

The faults of the argument stem first from its implicit narrative of a fall and decadence, as if the real came first, followed by a long slide towards our antiseptic present. This nostalgia for the origin and its attendant belief in the truth of first things can and has been traced from, for example, Plato and his Ideal Forms to present-day postapocalyptic literature (with its survivalist belief in the final return to the “underlying” – a favored spatial metaphor -- reality of nature). The idea that people have a primary connection to animals as a whole (say, as children), that socialization as such is the culprit, that subrational “lived experience” is distinct from and more authentic than cultural practice, that getting before "modern civilization" is somehow going to save us and others, and so on, belongs to the precritical fantasy of origins and the fantasy of the superiority of an imagined unmediated contact.

In an animal rights context, the argument has been that industrialized production of meat somehow separates us from our "real" engagement with its real source in animal life and animal death. Supermarket culture is particularly to blame for shielding meat-eaters from the violence that feeds them. The shock of butchery, of getting past the hypocrisies of industrialized carnivorousness, is key to Sue Coe’s slaughterhouse art, or in the grand reveal, not without sexual violence, of the [I recommend not clicking on the link] industrial, cannibalistic dismemberment of female clones in Cloud Atlas. This argument follows the standard logic of ideology critique, insofar as it claims that only by coming face-to-face with the "reality" of the modes of production can we finally surmount the cruelty of our polyannish relationship to work and consumption. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in a variety of contexts, such claims are overblown: there may be some value in revealing what goes on in industrial farming - the very reluctance of these operations to open their doors to scrutiny is evidence enough of that - but what may be far more difficult to change is the consumer’s certainty that, in the end, their needs are worth it all, regardless.

Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning lambastes the “Messianic approach to art-making,” which holds that being “ambushed” by with the “truth” is an essential or even desirable goal of art. Nelson argues that truth, good action, knowledge, and least of all good art may not require revelation, surprise, horror, or destruction. Revelations of cruelty may be little more than revelings in cruelty. They might produce nothing but sensations of disgust, alienation, self-loathing, and guilt, or the self-aggrandizement of feeling that one feels more intensely or just more honestly than others, or that one has been exiled from bourgeois comforts (or that one has discovered some new way to épate them for their supposed hypocrisy). Revelations of cruelty might lead to still worse, titillation and enjoyment and from there to the desire for more cruelty, not because cruelty treats others as things, but because it recognizes that others can suffer in ways that things cannot.

Dominick LaCapra’s History and its Limits arrives at similar ends through its assault on conjunctions of the sublime, the transcendent, and sacralized violence, and on generalized, antihistorical obsessions with wretchedness, particularly as practiced in the work of Agamben, Bataille, and Žižek. When Lacapra turns his attention to one of Coetzee’s fictional creations, the animal rights activist and writer Elizabeth Costello, he joins Nelson in arguing against the notion that identification necessarily leads to empathy, and empathy necessarily to kindness. Coetzee’s Costello analogizes the death of animals to the Holocaust, accusing those who kill animals of being like the camp guards, whose fault, she insists, was that "the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims." Lacapra observes that while this may be so, Costello's argument that this cruelty can be blamed on a failure of identification can hardly account for sadomasochistic projection: no doubt, some killers and other villains can and do perceive their victims as like themselves, vulnerable and dependent, and therefore, for those very reasons, suitable targets of cruelty.

With all this in mind, we are now in a position to reconsider one of the most philosophically challenging, influential demands for an identification with nonhuman suffering. This is Derrida’s statement on the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. As Derrida observes in his The Animal that therefore I am (L'animal que donc je suis), when Bentham proposes that the important question about nonhuman animals is not whether they can speak or have reason, but whether they can suffer, this "changes everything" [change tout]. To a large degree, Derrida is correct. Where philosophers have traditionally excluded or included nonhumans within the human community of rights on the basis of positive capacities – for example, the capacity to make tools, form family relations, exhibit a theory of mind, or various forms of "lack" in Lacan, Heidegger, and their epigones – Derrida focuses on a shared non-capacity, what he calls a "nonpower at the heart of power," the ineluctable, general exposure of animals and humans alike to discomfort, injury, and death. If thinking about animals and humans begins not with abilities, language in particular, but with a shared vulnerability, certainties about agency and freedom all happily collapse.

Derrida's recentering of the animal question on suffering still has two problems: the first is that it raises the possibility that animals may be killed ethically so long as their suffering is eliminated. This would be "humane killing," which comes as such a surprise that an animal has no time to experience fear or pain: this is the goal of the slaughterhouse design championed by Temple Grandin, developed through her identification with nonhuman sensory worlds. The second issue is that identification with the "nonpower at the heart of power" need not necessarily result in less cruelty or more kindness. An awareness of suffering need not necessarily result in the desire to end it.

These objections are perhaps too practical. Derrida's concern is less with animal welfare than with philosophy. He is led to his logical endpoint by his approach to language, in which having language, this supposed distinguishing capacity of humans, is itself not a capacity, but an entanglement in an always shifting, preexisting, limitless network. At the furthest end of this "nonpower" lies the figure of the animal, preserved in Derrida's analytic, despite his attempts to do otherwise, as a homogeneous figuration of abyssal mystery.

More to the point for my analysis is that Derrida arrives at this problem by aiming at "the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life" [la façon la plus radicale de penser la finitude que nous partageons avec les animaux, la mortalité qui appartient à la finitude même de la vie]. The truth of things may be an aporia, and therefore necessarily, anti/foundationally unreachable, but what it is not is in the middle of things. One has to follow things through to their end to find this truth of absence. Toril Moi's championing of ordinary language philosophy identifies many of the problems in this, not least of all the fact that "Derrida's deconstructive concepts at once enact and deconstruct such ideality," thus requiring that concepts meet the demands of a presumably philosophical purity so that deconstructive analysis has something to disprove. 

The purity in its most intense form, as an absence, Derrida discovers in death, suffering, and inability, all of which lie on the other side, at the before (the radical, from the Latin radix, root) and at the after (the finitude, from the Latin finis, a close or conclusion). The "nonpower at the heart of power" locates truth, even if that truth is a void, in suffering, vulnerability, violence, death, across borders, and at least implicitly across temporal limits. Whatever its dedication to upsetting pretensions to unmediated experience, nostalgia for origin, and all other myths of purity, it also needs these myths in order to preserve the grounds for deconstructive analysis. 

All this is not to demand that human and animal difference should be conceptualized around differences in ability. I welcome a focus on nonpower, among other things, even if, as Dominic Lacapra observes, this focus goes rather "too far in acknowledging human disempowerment" in relation to nonhumans. It is rather to question both the centrality of suffering in Derrida's analysis and the accompanying centrality of finitude, and the presentation of all of this as authenticity: Herbert Marcuse's "Ideology of Death" should make us suspicious about any elevation of "a brute biological fact..into an existential privilege" (for introducing me to this essay, thank you to Aranye Fradenburg's superb Sacrifice Your Love).

Nor am I denying the actual practice of cruelty. Animals can and do suffer, generally not just like people, but nonetheless in their own ways. Recognizing this suffering is no small matter. Furthermore, to say that revelations of cruelty may not necessarily lead to an end to cruelty is not to say that such revelations are valueless: possible results may range from individual kindness to wholesale assaults on an otherwise indifferent or worse social order. Or they may lead to anti-Semitic and Islamophobic assaults on (certain forms) of animal slaughter: good for some animals, bad for some people. I am challenging notions that center right action on the discovery of suffering, especially when this discovery of suffering is elevated into being a central truth – as it can be, strangely enough, for thinkers as antithetical as Bataille and Derrida --- and on those that insist that the route to that truth is through the discovery of cruelty where it was otherwise unsuspected or unfelt.

Man is the Pasture of Being 3: Mandeville in Tibet, at long last

Mandeville, 1481 printing, Augsberg

by KARL STEEL

Hi everyone! I'm trying to trick you into reading this whole thing with this jaunty opening.

My interest in Sky Burial and the European Middle Ages can be traced, exactly, to this July 13th tweet. Since then, I've become, I think, the world's leading expert in the medieval Evilmerodach tradition (it didn't take more than 3 days) and written somewhere close to 11,000 words on the topic (EDIT: I am at the very least tied with one other scholar, Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America, whose La Chronique Anonyme Universelle: Reading and Writing History in Fifteenth-Century France gives Evilmerodach some 10 pages, more, I believe, than he's received anywhere else). I'm also making Sky Burial the center of one of my talks during my week as a visiting medieval scholar at UCLA in early February: trust me, I'll get it down to 5000 words for you, by then.

The posts are as follows:

• Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 1: Evilmerodach
• Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 2: Sky Burial, Mostly Persian
• Man is the Pasture of Being: Interlude on the Old Man Himself

The following post, which should be savored (or avoided?), comprises three parts, which you might read sequentially, or which you might take à la carte: part 1 is a brief review of medieval European burial habits, and more on the knowledge of sky burial in the West; part 2, on Mandeville's texts on sky burial, and their patterns of illustration; part 3, where I finally do some interpretation, some of it speculative, and some of it wrestling with contemporary art also interested in the practice. It's where I get ecocritical. Hip folks might skip to the end.

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

I. Burial Habits and Foreign Customs: Esca Vermibus meets Esca Avibus

St. Gall, Cod. Fab. XVI f. 101v

Medieval aesthetics keep coming back. Gothic lines and gothic semicircles can be found anywhere anyone in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries had too much money and a more than a bit of mania (at Wave Hill, for example); they’re anywhere any university ever hankered for what they believe to be respectable antiquity (or perhaps not so respectable); I’ve watched fireworks, with other medievalists, from a Brooklyn building blessed with a Romanesque façade and lobby. But none of these buildings that I know of includes its own transi tomb; no industrialist, no moneyed aesthete – none I know of, anyway – had themselves, or their prospective tenants, represented in full size (if not “life size”) sculptures in the process of becoming esca vermibus (food for worms).

Here, then, is one of the sharpest cultural differences between the Middle Ages and now: they were fascinated with human putrefaction, and we are not. The villains of our big-budget films often meet their ends, not through a gut-devouring disease, but by tumbling off something tall. To this, we can compare the legendary death of the heretic Arius, whose guts slid out as he sat on a toilet; the sinus cavities of Vespasian, swarming with his namesake wasps; Guinevere’s ghost, crawling inside and out with vermin (105-23); the many corpses of Sir Amadace; the beloved body of The Squire of Low Degree, which, though embalmed, and though the wrong body, is still worn to dust by the kisses of an insatiable princess (929-32).

For all this, for the medievals, the exposure of human corpses to the appetites of larger animals was generally considered a horror: an accident of war, a deliberate humiliation, an erasure of the memory of the deceased. Unless something went wrong, the transformation of body to dust was subterranean work, something done out of sight. Some of you will remember the ninth-century program of establishing funerary chapels to ensure paupers had decent burials; or a forged cartulary from the same period that requires the “humane inhumation” (“humanitatis causa humaverit”) of the indigent, “so that they are not polluted by pigs, nor torn by beasts or dogs” [ut neque a porcis inquinetur nec a bestiis seu canibus laceretur; PL 97: 749b-c]. Thomas of Kent tells of how Alexander the Great, before burying the assassinated Darius, took the extra step of burning Darius’s viscera, to keep pigs from eating them, while Thomas of Cantimpré’s exempla collection (The Book of Bees) recounts why this wasn’t over-cautious: there, invisible, grunting pigs invaded a monastery, broke into the sepulcher of a wicked man, and scattered his guts about the cloister.

Amid this focus on inhumation of still fleshy (if sometimes disemboweled) corpses, other funerary methods were known in Europe and parts immediately adjacent, if only faintly. Classical texts are very well aware that many Central Asians – Zoroastrians, the peoples living around the Caspian Sea (Scythians, Bactrians, Hyrcanians, Massagetae, &c) – exposed corpses, or even the not-quite-dead, to be eaten by dogs and birds. The practice was sufficiently well-known for Diogenes the Cynic to turn it into a joke (It is reported that Diogenes said that if dogs tore apart his body, he would have a Hyrcanian funeral; if Vultures, Iberian; Diogenem dixisse testatur, si canes cadaver suum dilacerarent, Hyrcanam fore sepulturam; si vultures Iberam).

A small group of early Christian works recorded this fact too, though most of this material was just as lost to the Middle Ages as the classical texts themselves. With some help, I’ve turned up a few more texts since I last posted here: Theodoret of Cyrus’ A Cure for Pagan Maladies (9.33), smugly content that Persian converts to Christianity now bury the dead; Procopius’ The Persian Wars (I.xii.3-5), in which a Georgian Christian king switches his allegiance to the Byzantines when commanded by the Persians to follow their funeral customs; the martyrdom of Saint “not the Cornish one” Ia, her corpse left to be eaten by birds, not to scorn it, but because this is what Persians do (Latin here, at 11); and especially Agathius’s sixth-century Histories (Latin translation in footnotes here and here), which, though disapproving, still tells a story of several Byzantines (of course called “Romans”) who come across an exposed corpse in territory newly captured from the Persians. Piously, they bury it, and then at night, they endure a dream vision of an old, dignified man, garbed and bearded like a philosopher, who rebukes them for stuffing a corpse into Mother Earth. In the morning they find the corpse lying atop the grave, evicted by the insulted soil. My hunch, however, is that none of this was known to Latin Christendom, nor would the Latins have cared much about the issue, given their wonted distance from Persia. And with the Muslim conquests that followed not long after Agathius’ writing, burial practices through Mesopotamia would have seen radical changes.

Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the key source (if not the choke point) for most medieval ethnographic and geographic musings, drew its material on Central Asia from Solinus, which records the superb camels of the Bactrians, the anthropophagy of the Scythians, and the fire-worshipping of the Zoroastrians, but nothing about exposing the dead. Jerome’s Against Jovinian was well-known to the Middle Ages (as it is to Chaucer scholars) primarily as a vector of misogynist contagion, while its ethnography would be repurposed much more rarely: in a (pseudo?) Chrysostomic sermon adapted by Paul the Deacon (PL 95:1542D-1543A), and then, much later, copied into the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais, a work of no small popularity. That may be it, however, for Jerome’s material on cultural variation.

The Latin Middle Ages would have to wait until the late thirteenth century, and especially the fourteenth, for the deliberate, funerary exposure of the dead once again to become a cultural thing. This required, first, the emergence of Jacopo de Cessolis’s hugely popular political allegory on chess, which made Evilmerodach a star by featuring him as its exemplary bad king. No longer relegated to being just a bizarre Babylonian footnote, Evilmerodach parlayed his newfound fame into a staff position with the Speculum humanae salvationis¸ few of which could be complete without its own illustration of Evilmerodach dismembering Nebuchadnezzar’s corpse and feeding it to birds. This was not exactly sky burial: Evilmerodach did this not to honor his father but to ensure this former king, who had already come back once before, stayed dead.

Mandeville, 1499 printing, Strasbourg

II. Tibetan Sky Burial Finally Comes to Europe: Franciscan Missionaries, and the Many Mandevilles

Into this fertile soil fell Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his time spent (1320s) in, or near, Tibet, during his return from his missionary trip to China. This friar heard of, or witnessed, a Tibetan funeral method in which, if a man’s father dies, he summons his relations and the clergy and:

carry the body into the country with great rejoicings. And they have a great table in readiness, upon which the priests cut off the head, and then this is presented to the son. And the son and all the company raise a chant and make many prayers for the dead. Then the priests cut the whole of the body to pieces, and when they have done so they go up again to the city with the whole company, praying for him as they go. After this the eagles and vultures come down from the mountains and every one takes his morsel and carries it away. Then all the company shout aloud, saying, 'Behold! the Man is a saint! For the angels of God come and carry him to Paradise.' And in this way the son deems himself to be honoured in no small degree, seeing that his father is borne off in this creditable manner by the angels. And so he takes his father's head, and straightway cooks it and eats it; and of the skull he maketh a goblet, from which he and all the family always drink devoutly to the memory of the deceased father. And they say that by acting in this way they show their great respect for their father. And many other preposterous and abominable customs have they.

Earlier accounts of Tibetan funerary rituals were already available, in the thirteenth-century missionary ethnographies and travel accounts of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini and, later, William of Rubruck. Neither writer includes the birds, however; for them, the anthropophagy is the sole responsibility of the family of the deceased. And, as William of Rubruck observes, the Tibetans have abandoned the practice, “for it made them detestable in the eyes of all men” (143). Both works enjoyed a little popularity: fourteen manuscripts, comprising two versions, survive from John of Plano Carpini, and only five of William’s, all produced in England (58).

By contrast, Odoric’s travels enjoyed an astounding success: more than 117 manuscripts survive, with translations into French, German, Italian, and Latin. And with Odoric travelled the Tibetan funerary birds, and from this success, the birds assumed even more popularity, as his account of “Tibet” or “Ryboth” found itself incorporated, as you might have expected, into the Book of John Mandeville.

The key difference between Mandeville and Odoric is not Mandeville’s omission of the final, negative judgment. That happy deletion had already happened in Odoric’s 1351 French translation, Mandeville’s more immediate source, which ends its account of Ryboth only by speaking of the honor done the father. The difference is, instead, something that appears in every Mandeville I’ve read (including the Latin here or here). To save you the work of checking mine, and because there are no word count limits on the internets, here is my record of (mostly) the English versions, from printed sources:

and the birds of the country, which have long known the custom, come flying above -- such as vultures, eagles, and all other birds that eat flesh -- and the priests throw pieces of the flesh to them, and they carry it not far away and eat it (insular French, 182, trans Higgins; possibly the earliest version)

And briddes of the contré cometh thider, for they knoweth the custome, and they flieth aboute hem as egles and other briddes eteth, and eteth the flesshe. And the prestes casteth the flessh to hem, and they berith hit a little thenne and eteth hit. (Defective Version, 2770-73133, ed. Kohanski and Benson, and the most widespread of the English Mandevilles; Anthony Bale’s translation in modern English here)

And [the] byrdes of the countre come theder. For they know Well the custome. And they flye above theym as they were Egles and other Byrdes: that ete flesshe. And the preestys cast the pecces unto them and they bere hit a lytell from thens and than they ete it (Richard Pynson’s 1496 printing, based on a version of the “Defective” Mandeville; used again in Wynken de Worde, 1499; likewise in a 1568 printing; very small changes—“about” and “then” for “above” and “then” —happen in 1582, repeated in 1612, 1618, 1639, &c, into 1705 and 1722) 

And the foules of raveyne of alle the contree abowten [that] knowen the custom of long tyme before comen fleenge abouen in the eyr, as egles, gledes, rauenes, and othere foules of raveyne that eten flesch. And than the preestes casten the gobettes of the flesch, and than the foules eche of hem taketh that he may and goth a litille thens and eteth it, And so thei don whils ony pece lasteth of the dede body. (Cotton, 224, ed Seymour) 

And the Fowles of raveyne of alle the Contree abouten knowen the custom of long tyme before, and comen fleenge aboven in the Eyr, as Egles, Gledes, Ravenes and othere Foules of raveyne, that eten Flesche. And than the Preestes casten the gobettes of the Flesche; and than the Foules eche of hem takethe that he may, and gothe a litille thens and etethe it: and so thei don whils ony pece lastethe of the dede Body. (1725 printing, proud of being based on the Cotton. This is the first comparative, scholarly edition, and, like a scholar, it snipes at its predecessors: “all other printed Editions are so curtail'd and transpos'd, as to be made thereby other Books”; Google’s version lacks a charming handwritten note in the copy scanned for Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Read its whole introduction: as with Elizabeth Elstob, it’s an essential piece in the development of English medieval studies) 

And fewles of þe cuntree þat knawez þe custom commez þider and houers abouue þam, as vowltures, egles, rauyns, and oþer fewlez of rauyne. and þe prestez castez þis flesch to þam, and þai bere it a lytill þeine and etez it. (Egerton Version, 167, ed. Seymour) 

Than cometh foules fest fleenge / That knoweth the maner of þat doynge / And etenne the flesshe eueri dele, / For thei knowe the custome wele. (Metrical Version, 2826-29, Seymour; the Metrical version is so highly idiosyncratic that it may deserve a post of its own)

One 1705 printing, based on the “defective version,” misses the Tibet bit, as does the 24-page (!) version, printed at least four times from 1710 to the 1780s, and which stands among the last Mandevilles produced without pretentions to scholarly antiquarianism, and also as the Mandeville most ruthlessly winnowed to its zaniest core: all who teach Mandeville should teach it, alongside the introduction to the 1725 scholarly edition. To tempt you, here is its complete title:

 The Foreign Travels and Dangerous Voyages of that renowed English Knight Sir John Mandeville. Wherein he gives an Account of Remote Kingdoms, Countries, Rivers, Castles, and Giants of a prodigious Height and Strength. Together with the People called Pigmies, very small and of a low Stature. 

To which is added, An account of People of odd Deformities, some without Heads, --- Also dark inchanted Wildernesses, where are fiery Dragons, Griffins, and many wonderful Beasts of Prey, in the Country of Prester John. --- All very delightful to the Reader.

In printed editions, illustrations of sky burial portray one of three things:

the father corpse’s, bent on hands and knees, with blood gushing from the stump of its neck; above it is a knight (perhaps a priest in knightly garb) with a sword, handing the father’s head, on a platter, to his son (1481 (also here) and 1482 German printing (in full color), quite similar to this;

two naked men standing over or nearly straddling a table, one holding an arm and a leg, the other a cleaver, with nothing on the table itself but a head, while birds swoop about them, flying off with bits of body (1499, German);

one perhaps naked man, with a cleaver, and two nearly naked companions, wearing what may be medieval speedos, likewise around a table, with birds making off with body parts (1488, German; or this one, 1481).

This latter is similar to this c. 1425-1450 German Mandeville, St. Gallen, Stiftsarchiv (Abtei Pfäfers), Cod. Fab. XVI, 101v, with two fully clothed men, one a priest in a robe, each with cleavers, around a table on which lies a mostly intact, bald corpse, itself in a black speedo, while 2 birds make off with a hand and a foot. A similar image appears in this well-known French manuscript (BNF fr. 2810, 223r), which lacks the speedo, and has the priest only standing by, flanked by two attendants. These latter types must have their origin in illustrations of Evilmerodach.

My current sense is that illustrations were not terribly common, and, furthermore, that English printed books were content just to copy German illustrations, and, furthermore, that they compounded that lazy efficiency by letting this plagiarized program of illustration taper off before the book’s final sections, where the sky burial passage appears: prior to the nineteenth century, no English printed edition that I know of illustrates sky burial. Neither do any of the digitized manuscripts or printed books have marginalia, annotation, or doodling in the sections of sky burial, so, for now, here is a case where modern edited texts may be mostly sufficient for interpretation.

Mandeville, 1488 printing, Strasbourg

III. Your Bodies, Ourselves: On Waste, Wanting, and our Feathered Friends

Mandeville’s account of sky burial chiefly differs from Odoric’s in its awareness of the cultural participation of the hungry birds in this ritual. Birds come because they know the custom. We know this kind of behavior is not atypical for birds, squirrels, goldfish, or the other critters of city parks, which all know well what a sandwich, or a bag of bread and a pensioner, promise. We and other animals habituate ourselves to each other. We like to be their hosts; we find it amusing to watch them eat; we like to feel that we’re helping out somehow.

Admittedly, this all may be pushing too hard at Mandeville. A Tibetan plateau is not a city park. But even the most cautious interpretation must still recognize Mandeville’s careful attention to nonhuman behavior, and, more importantly, to their essential function for this ritual. Here is a case where the edibility of the human corpse is not a battlefield horror, as with most medieval accounts of bodies eaten by birds; nor is it a sign of the transience, and hence contemptibility, of all mortal things, as with most, if not all, medieval accounts of bodies eaten by worms, toads, and other swarming things of the grave. Nor is it hidden away underground, a repulsive sign of the body’s failure, offered up to others as a warning against worldly attachment.

Here edibility is instead part of the public acts of mourning, of familial attachment, especially of material connection of father to son. Managed edibility also recognizes the material stuff of life, and how this material stuff will always come to belong to some other body, and so forth, until this whole sublunary world comes to nothing. This ceremony recognizes, as well, that we are not exempt from this attachment to bodies at once ours and destined for others: not only the birds partake of the corpse. When the human – at least in Odoric and Mandeville – share out tidbits of the father’s head among friends, they join the birds in this simultaneous recognition of body as flesh and as a temporary home.

In brief, Mandeville’s account recognizes that we are bodies, made of the same material stuff as other bodies, while also recognizing that the passing association in which matter becomes, for a time, self, also counts for something. We love these bodies and these selves that are never just our own. Mandeville doesn’t pretend that bare materialism is the one answer, that our whole family is made of meat; but, in this passage, he doesn’t argue that we’re not meat, either. Within this consumable world, not one or the other answer will suit.

Mandeville's accomplishment can be best understood by comparison to a set of modern works concerned with feeding birds. Greta Alfaro’s “In Ictu Oculi” (also) consists of a single camera trained on a banquet table, laden with food, open to the sky. Then vultures arrive, in shocking numbers, to eat and fight over and through the dinner, until they leave nothing behind but shambles. Valerie Hegarty’s crows do similar work: in 2013, they mangled and tore at several historical rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. These birds are reminders of death (the most famous “in ictu oculi,” I’ve just learned, is this painting); they are chaotic eruptions into the bourgeois order of dining and reception protocol, like the famous Last Supper of Buñuel’s Viridiana. In effect, these birds are worms, representing and enacting the fundamental, filthy disorder of this mortal world.

Mandeville likewise diverges from several works, all titled “Sky Burial,” published over the last 16 years in a clump of literary journals (feel free to alert me to others). Representative gobettes: Vida Chu “bodiless soul / set free” (Literary Review 1999); David Citino, “carrion me” returned to “bless the soil” (Southern Review 2000); Wanda S. Praisner, “‘You see?’ I say, / pointing to the birds. / But she doesn’t” (“Earth and Sky Burials,” Paterson Literary Review, 2004); Hoag Holmgren (in prose), “ancient burial ceremony for humans,” “a giving back…nothing wasted” (Gettysburg Review 2005); Peter Pereira, “released to the sky,” “not dust into dust / but flesh into flesh” (Prairie Schooner 2006); Cara Dorris, on a murdered (?) woman, “the vultures have already flown to the / light, yet / something is alive here” (Cicada 2010); Dean Koontikoff, whose stubbornly anti-spiritual poem breaks the convention, “To the side a fire pit / cradles jigsaw pieces of charred / bone in its ashen basket: a skull” (This Magazine, 2010); Joseph Harrison, “summoned, for centuries,” “flying / ever higher, / They disarticulate / In wind and sun” (Parnassus 2013); and Eric Weinstein, “A smudge of dust or mud goes / undissolved, though it grows less // with each digestion by another” (Michigan Quarterly Review 2014). These might be understood as works that, mostly, imagine our world as wormless.

I do like many of these. Some, however, mistakenly believe that Tibetans expose their dead because they lack timber for burning corpses or soft earth for digging, as if Tibetans did not practice other methods of burial (including inhumation), as if all practices but inhumation were deviations from the norm (for this critique, 69), and as if all culture can be traced to a practical origin having to do with one's natural environment (a kind of ecological evo-psych; see also the otherwise excellent Sandman “World’s End,” 121, for an example of this error). Several more of the poems characterize the practice as “ancient,” or use some similar marker of antiquity: but Tibetans seem to have picked up the practice only in the tenth century (65; certainly a long time ago, but not “ancient” so far as concerns medieval scholars). And, at any rate, William of Rubruck marked how Tibetan practices, as he understood them, had changed since the time of John of Plano Carpini’s visit. Neither Mandeville nor the European Franciscan missionaries believed the Tibetans practiced an unchanging, older, and – therefore – purer, form of culture than their own: that mistake, rare in the Middle Ages, would have to await the smugly triste dominion of world colonialism (see for example Khanmohamadi and Phillips).

The poems especially tend to take the practice as a balance or giving back, or as an abandonment of bodily constraints: “nothing is wasted,” writes Hoag Holmgren (a sentiment that also features in the “urban death” movement, with its call for composting our corpses: Slate; NYTimes). Given that our earth is not a closed system, given that we thrive, for now, on heat emanating wastefully from our Sun, and given that we have only 1.2 billion more years left to thrive in, the closed loop of the ecological fantasy is simply a bad idea (“heat is a disordered, useless state of energy that is generically the endpoint of an energy flow process”). Life is good at capturing and using heat that would otherwise go to waste, and our atmosphere at deflecting the light that would kill us: heat capture (and, one hopes soon, more effective heat dispersal) is what keeps us going.

And even if this funeral ceremony is a gift to the birds, a gift is always bound up with competition and especially with a continued grasping that marks the thing given as a gift, as having belonged to the giver and as being transferred to someone else, freely, without theft (we can all well imagine the use of reading this whole ceremony through The Gift of Death). For a taste of this competition:

And he that hath most nombre of foules is most worshiped….And thane alle his frendes maken hire avaunt and hire dalyance how the foules comen thider, here v., here vi., here x., and there xx., and so forth” (Mandeville, Seymour 1967, Cotton, 225)

Our social and emotional practices cannot be cancelled out by the gift, nor can these be reduced to pure sense. Bad feelings, misplaced longing, free-floating delight, and rambunctiousness, coupled with the memory and the pride in a lineage and the hope that the birds will come too to affirm our familial pride: all these are too part of the ceremony as Mandeville tells the story. Where culture and energy are concerned, waste is inevitable. Closed loops are an ontotheological fantasy, nothing more.

The project that most closely matches my particular interest in sky burial is the work of Brooklyn artist Alex Branch (written about so well in Alison Kinney’s “Every Creeping Thing that Creepeth”). Her video “Nothing Left to Take Away” (2011) records her feeding a swarm of seagulls on a snowy hillside until she runs – nearly – out of bread. She collapses herself into a nodule, while the seagulls refuse to leave: she has given them – nearly – all that she decided to bring them, and they remain unsatisfied (bad emotions on the nonhuman side too!). But there’s more: Branch is wearing a helmet made of bread, which the seagulls go for, horribly rending chunks from it, as she continues to lie still, letting them take it until, presumably, they fall to complaining again.

Alex Branch, "Nothing left to Take Away," screenshot

We have generosity, bad feeling, bad feeding, and even grief, all at once; attachment to ourselves, which is also to the bodies that enable us to be, for a time; but also disattachment, an ironic displacement from our self-possession once we realize, too, that the stuff that lets us be can never be fully ours.

Where Branch does Mandeville still better, finally, is by being a woman. Her bread armor gets at this better, at the body given over as food to others, and at the traditional associations of women and kitchens and ovens. If the paradigmatic verminous medieval corpse is a woman, a sign of the grotesque truth of feminine beauty so far as clerical misogyny was concerned, then the bird-eaten corpse of Tibet, with the body honored by being eaten, is a man, with all the public honor and dick-measuring that accompanies that. What Branch offers, however, is her own body, “armored” by food, harassed by gulls, hers and vulnerable and a gift all at once, wrapped in art’s high culture, which never offers itself as just a “natural” gift to a fundamentally sensible world. This is a practice that collapses the distance between vulnerability and (a male fantasy of) permanence; Branch is turning herself into remains, but remaining here too as the artist. I can imagine, finally, that she and Elaine Tin Nyo might have something to say to one another.