Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation [Book Review]

Abstract

Flaying has a different sort of purpose: to understand the relationship in the premodern West between the actual practice of skinning people and the ways that images of flaying were deployed in literature and art. Here too, human skin is a medium for marking, othering, and sending messages about identity, through its visible injury and removal but also through its display and repurposing; as the editor Larissa Tracy notes in her introduction, “[s]kin is the parchment upon which identity is written” (1). The volume shares with Geltner’s the impulse to push back against the trope of premodernity as barbaric. Flaying, we read repeatedly, was in actual practice scarce, and when it was used, it was primarily associated with treason. It was much more an idea, a phenomenon that had a variety of meanings in a variety of contexts and could therefore be deployed rhetorically and artistically in pursuit of a wide range of social, political, religious or literary and artistic goals—precisely because it was so uncommon in practice and only used in the most extreme circumstances.