Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Chloe Porter, Katie L. Walter, Margaret Healy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351602037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'Prosthesis' denotes a rhetorical 'addition' to a pre-existing 'beginning', a 'replacement' for that which is 'defective or absent', a technological mode of 'correction' that reveals a history of corporeal and psychic discontent. Recent scholarship has given weight to these multiple meanings of 'prosthesis' as tools of analysis for literary and cultural criticism. The study of pre-modern prosthesis, however, often registers as an absence in contemporary critical discourse.

This collection seeks to redress this omission, reconsidering the history of prosthesis and its implications for contemporary critical responses to, and uses of, it. The book demonstrates the significance of notions of prosthesis in medieval and early modern theological debate, Reformation controversy, and medical discourse and practice. It also tracks its importance for imaginings of community and of the relationship of self and other, as performed on the stage, expressed in poetry, charms, exemplary and devotional literature, and as fought over in the documents of religious and cultural change. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book engages with contemporary critical and cultural theory and philosophy, genre theory, literary history, disability studies, and medical humanities, establishing prosthesis as a richly productive analytical tool in the pre-modern, as well as the modern, context. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Textual Practice journal.

Fragments for a medieval theory of prosthesis

Katie L. Walter

Medieval surgery adumbrates a theory of the body in which flesh, because it is sanguine, is radically different from the other simple members that make up the body, such as skin, which are understood instead to be spermatic. In contrast with spermatic members, sanguine flesh is renewable, and so is held to be able to stand in the place of lost, diseased or injured spermatic parts. Surgical theory and practice utilises and artificially enhances this natural capacity of flesh to supplement and substitute in its remedies to repair the body, in what is broadly termed ‘incarnatyf’ medicine in Middle English. This essay suggests that this ‘incarnatyf’ tradition is part of a missing history of prosthesis, which in turn grounds forms of medieval prosthetic thought in two Middle English examples: the miracle of Cosmas and Damian, in which a living man’s rotten leg is replaced with the healthy leg of a dead man; and a series of connected revelations in Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis, in which incorporation into the body of Christ is effected through Christ’s own practice of surgical prosthesis. Raising questions about the relationship between self and other, life and death, and the human and divine, the medieval ‘incarnatyf’ imaginary also asks questions about the possibilities and limits of prosthesis as a metaphor for community and for the body of Christ itself.

In Surgery Prosthesis is taken for that which fills up what is wanting, as is to be seen in fistulous and hollow Ulcers, filled up with Flesh by that Art: Also the making of artificial Legs and Arms, when the natural ones are lost. (Phillips’s New World of Words, 1706)¹

In between its sixteenth-century appearance in English as a grammatical term and its later use to mean ‘the making of artificial Legs and Arms’ lies another meaning of prosthesis. As Phillips’s New World of Words describes, in surgery prosthesis is ‘that which fills up what is wanting […] with Flesh’. Phillips’s 1706 dictionary definition is offered by the OED as early evidence of the use of prosthesis to mean ‘the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes’, but in Philips’s definition this sense (at least syntactically) is itself an apposition, arising out of or adding to its primary sense as an art of making flesh. The prosthesis of the flesh is persistently absent from contemporary critical and philosophical engagements, and yet it is one with a long history reaching back (at least) to Galen and extending up through Paré.

In the medieval period, the surgical art of making flesh is termed, not prosthesis, but ‘incarnatyf’ medicine.² In this tradition flesh emerges as a natural prosthesis in the body, filling in gaps as well as substituting for other parts of the body, especially skin. As a fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Lanfrank’s surgical treatise (‘Science of Cirurgie’) records, the kinds of flesh in the body are threefold: further to the ‘glandelose [glandular]’ flesh (in the breasts or testicles, for example) and the ‘brawny [muscular]’ flesh, is ‘symple fleisch’ whose ‘helpinge is to fulfille þe voide placis of smale lymes to brynge hem [them] to a good schap’.³ It is this capacity to fill up hollow, empty spaces in the body that particularises the role of flesh. Albertus Magnus’s De animalibus thus similarly records how flesh ‘fills up the gaps between the uniform and instrumental members and flows in and out of them and heals their injuries’ (‘quae su[p]plet vacua membrorum similium et instrumentalium, et haec influit et effluit et abrasa recrescit [lit. ‘regrows what has been scraped away (or, destroyed)’]’).⁴ The Latin verb used by Albertus to describe the function of flesh in the body is suppleo, ‘to fill up, make full or whole’ or ‘to complete’, which forms the root of the noun supplementum, or in Modern English supplement (OED, s. v. ‘to make good a deficiency; an addition or continuation’). It is this natural capacity for flesh to supplement that surgical theory utilises and artificially enhances in its treatment of the wounds or diseases that disrupt the continuity of the body.

Understanding flesh, or making flesh, as a form of prosthesis suggests the originally ‘supplemental or technical character of the body’ as modern philosophies of prosthesis also do, but it reframes its terms – away from language and rhetoric, and away from technical and technological prosthetics⁵ – to questions of the matter of the body itself.⁶ This essay is thus a kind of prolegomena for a missing history of flesh as prosthesis, a history which the medieval period in part supplies. It begins by establishing medieval understandings – inherited from classical and Arabic traditions and mediated in part by the medieval scholastics – of flesh and of ‘incarnatyf’ medicine in Middle English surgical treatises, in which flesh emerges as radically different from the body and thus as capable of supplementing, or substituting for, its parts. Two examples show the currency of ‘incarnatyf’ medicine outside of the surgical tradition. The first is a miracle of Cosmas and Damian. The miracle the saints perform takes up surgical theory, but extends its prosthetic logic beyond generating new flesh to substitute for missing parts within the body to exchanging flesh and parts between bodies. The second is a series of visions in the Liber Celestis, a Middle English translation of Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations (prepared partly as evidence for her canonisation), where Christ himself is a practitioner of ‘incarnatyf’ medicine, fashioning those who are his friends into his own prosthetic arm. These fragments for a history of flesh as prosthesis raise questions about what belongs to the body, to the individual, to the human; about the relationship of self and other, of life and death, and of the living and the dead, but also, in a highly medieval way, of the human and the divine. So too do they ask questions about both the possibilities and the limits of prosthesis – as supplement, or substitute, or as implant – particularly as a metaphor for community and for the body of Christ himself. Together these fragments suggest that flesh – archetypally – functions in the way the supplement does for Jacques Derrida:

the supplement supplements. It only adds to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents […] it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place.⁷

Derrida’s characterisation of the supplement offers a productive way of thinking about prosthesis in the three fragments I consider here: flesh as prosthesis not only vicariously fills the void, but it also performs the work of that which it replaces.

Flesh as prosthesis

In medieval taxonomies of the body, flesh and fat are radically different from the rest of the simple members (bones, nerves, skin, etc.) that make up the body. In the Galenic tradition, mediated by Arabic surgeons and followed by surgeons in the medieval west, flesh is categorised as sanguine in contradistinction with other simple members that are, instead, spermatic.⁸ This difference is crucial for medieval beliefs about both the continuity and survival of the body. As a Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Cyrurgie records: ‘some membres beþ [are] spermatik, for þei haue her [their] springynge of þe sparme [sperm], to þe whiche is noþer [neither] generacioun [regeneration] ne verray [nor true] consolacioun’.⁹ Lanfrank’s treatise similarly elaborates that spermatic members such as ‘boonis [bones], pelliculis [membranes], gristlis [cartilage], ligamentis & skyn’, because they are derived from ‘þe sperme of þe fadir [father] & of þe modir [mother]’, cannot be restored once cut into or cut off (at least, not in their original form). In contrast, flesh can be newly made in the body from blood: ‘fleisch mai be restorid bi cause þat þe blood is engendrid al day in us’.¹⁰ It is the natural properties of flesh that enable the body once injured or wasted through sickness to be repaired or healed.¹¹ It is thus flesh’s very (subaltern) difference from spermatic members that enables it to act as a substitute for them.

This prosthetic role of flesh in the body is central to the medieval craft of surgery and its teaching on how ‘to ioyne þat is departed’¹² through a process that might broadly be termed ‘incarnacioun’ or ‘incarnatyf’ medicine in Middle English, and ‘prosthesis’ in Phillips’s 1706 English dictionary.¹³ This process of making new flesh – also variously referred to as ‘fleshynge’ and ‘gendrynge’ – is one both natural to and artificially produced in the body through the use of bindings (‘byndynge incarnatyf (i. to make flesche)’), stitches (‘sewyng incarnatyf (i. makynge flesche)’), and ‘incarnatyf’ medicines.¹⁴ Recalling Avicenna’s teaching on the irreplaceable nature of spermatic members, Lanfrank instructs that in cases of a hollow ulcer where ‘schal neuere [shall never] be no skyn engendrid þeron’, medicines should be used ‘to engendre hard fleisch aboue [vt nascatur caro calosa dura], & schal be in þe place of skyn [que est loc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Fragments for a medieval theory of prosthesis
• 2. Prosthetic ecologies: vulnerable bodies and the dismodern subject in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• 3. Literary genre, medieval studies, and the prosthesis of disability
• 4. Prosthesis and reformation: the Black Rubric and the reinvention of kneeling
• 5. Wearing powerful words and objects: healing prosthetics
• 6. Prosthesis and the performance of beginnings in The Woman in the Moon
• 7. ‘Happy, and without a name’: prosthetic identities on the early modern stage
• 8. Prosthetic encounter and queer intersubjectivity in The Merchant of Venice
• Afterword: any (old) date
• Afterword
• Index