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Darrera modificació: 2018-01-09
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Hartnell, Jack, "Tools of the puncture: skin, knife, bone, hand", dins: Tracy, Larissa (ed.), Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation, Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2017, pp. 20-50.
- Resum
- This essay takes as its subject the knives used in various types of late medieval flaying, considering how the nuances of their form and materiality contribute to a broader understanding of the culture of removing skin in the Middle Ages. The piece begins by addressing the link between knives and bodies across various cutting contexts in the medieval period, considering in particular two different but quite comparable moments of flaying: the deliberately torturous vivisectional removal of a living person's skin and the more staid anatomical stripping-back of a cadaver's skin on the medieval operating table. By thinking about these moments of quite different emotional, intellectual, and temporal type in the same space, the piece will begin to tease out distinctions and similarities between the two realms. Evolving a broad taxonomy of skin ‘puncture' tools, the worlds of torture and surgery are placed alongside other sharpened-knife systems of knowledge and fashion. Building on this context, the essay then focuses on the design and form of the knives used for these different types of flaying, in particular a sixteenth-century knife from the collections of the Science Museum, London. Examining the intricate interplay of bodily materials and authoritative touch at work in this object, the essay considers the potential contradictions its form presented in the action of removing skin and flesh. In formulating a four-way relationship between the metal of the knife, the bone of its handle, the skin of its patient/victim, and the hand of its wielder, this essay sets out the combinations and contrasts inherent in the materiality of flaying a body. Likewise, it begins to couple these material concerns with the contextual demands of different types of comparable flaying, prompting reflexive questions: Who flays, who is flayed, and how?
- Matèries
- Història de la medicina
Medicina - Cirurgia i anatomia
Història de l'art
- URL
- https://www.academia.edu/34021059/_Tools_of_the_Pun ...
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