Erasure in Early Modern Visual Representations of Intersectionality
Lorenz Hindrichsen
Abstract: Early modern racialized and intersectional images often bear markings from haptic readers touching or poking non-White figures, stigmatizing them in the process. Such iconoclasm overlaps with damage resulting from tactile worship whereby readers engaged with ethnicized figures spiritually, consummating their material representations. This article close-reads these rivaling haptic codes by documenting their dissemination in early modern Europe, and considers how visual narratives elicited specific haptic responses through mise-en-scène, iconography, and affect. Exclusionary forms of erasure are theorized as iconoclasms that demonize difference through collective performative acts which signify sous rature (Heidegger). Inclusive consummations of color are read as iconoclashes (Latour) that may be destructive or constitutive in nature. Understanding the mechanics governing such haptic erasure is valuable for the study of intersectionality and race, as it sheds light on how readers absorbed and promoted dominant social codes of inclusion and exclusion through their act of reading. The article also shows how some texts encouraged haptic reader participation through a strategic use of visual props (such as deictic fingers), and promoted a collaboration between textual production and textual consummation which was arguably central to the spreading of attitudes towards color and intersectionality in the early modern period.
Keywords: intersectionality, early modern period, erasure, iconoclasm, iconoclash.
Introduction: Erasing Difference
In critical race theory, erasure denotes a multilayered form of silencing that stretches across various contexts: political, socio-economic, cultural, and academic (Thomas 509-23). In the writings of Heidegger and Derrida, erasure (sous rature) refers to modes of signification whereby signifiers are crossed out but left in place (“Being”) to acknowledge their inadequacy, or to “diffus[e] (and defus[e]) the singular authority of the author figure” (Nyman 3). Both concepts of erasure – as a racially-motivated silencing, and as a broader undermining of signification – coalesce in physically altered early modern visual representations of intersectional figures on illustrated manuscripts whose features have been smudged or blurred by haptic readers marking them through physical contact with the page. This article shall survey a pan-European sampling of such haptically marked racialized illustrations to see how social practices like the worshiping of Black saints or the dehumanizing of colored individuals in colonial contexts inform these haptic responses. The analysis considers in what ways tactile readings are affected by stylistic properties such as composition or iconography, and evaluates how various forms of iconoclasm and iconoclash (Latour and Weibel 16) can offer insight into the dissemination of attitudes to race and intersectionality in the early modern period.
A striking example of a haptically marked text appears in a History Bible (1467) from Utrecht (Figure 1), where a figure representing the Black bride from the Song of Songs has been literally ‘de-faced’ by readers poking at her head, thereby gradually removing her features and complexion; it is only by studying the bride’s hands and the thin line of skin underneath her turban that the reader can still establish her ethnicity.
Figure 1. Illustration from the History Bible of Utrecht (1467)
The Hague, KB, 78 D 39 fol. 335v (Public domain)
A long durée view of the histories of gender and race in the West strongly suggests that such abrasion forms part of a systemic silencing of intersectionality that stretches across early modern discourse (Orkin and Joubin 201-210, Hall). Readers seem to have taken Solomon’s cue and complemented his non-verbal stigmatizing with a physical poking that manipulates (or manually alters (Harper, “manipulation”)) the main signifier giving the Black Bride a voice: her face. Wearing off parts of the illuminated surface compromises the legibility of the “geno-text”, or original form (Anon, “palimpsest”), as the Bride’s facial expression is no longer knowable. Her facelessness indirectly strengthens Solomon’s voice, as it leaves his accusations unanswered.
That the illustration is preserved in its modified form, as a “pheno-text” (Anon, “palimpsest”), normalizes the violence inflicted on the figure, as does the synchrony between the illustrations’s visual grammar on the one hand and this specific form of erasure on the other. Erasing the Bride’s face complements rather than undermines the show trial she is subjected to. Solomon’s accusatory finger and body language seemingly legitimize the tactile interventions of readers; the violation of the page emerges as a performative act that constitutes an extension of the text itself. That readers stigmatized the Bride collectively – the heavy wear points towards different readers poking at the image – is likewise significant, as such a collective effort would shield an individual reader from accountability, and turn the ostracism rehearsed on the page into an acceptable social norm.
For a historicizing of attitudes towards intersectionality, several aspects of this process of erasure seem relevant: its longevity (being endorsed by several generations of readers); its anonymity (protecting readers from reproach or guilt); its performativity (teaching the stigmatizing of difference through active involvement); and its sensory appeal (allowing readers to experience the power of stigmatization viscerally). The date of the History Bible (1467) seems likewise significant. The fifteenth century marks a shift in attitudes to race, as it ushers in new color-based racial codes, which eventually informed the Northern European racial laws of the 1660s, turning Whiteness and non-Whiteness into legal entities defining an individual's status and civil rights (Loomba and Burton 228–30, Cottrol 80–89). The haptic silencing we encounter in the History Bible seems not only consistent with the systemic silencing of intersectional figures in contemporary travelogs, histories, ecclesiastical texts, dictionaries, literary works and visual artifacts (Loomba and Burton 75–284); it also forms part of a hitherto neglected haptic tradition that reflects the stigmatization of perceived difference across generations. The damage we find in the History Bible echoes tactile wear on representations of the Black Magus (Anon “Book of Hours” (Rouen, 1525) 58v) and of female ethnicized figures (Anon, “Aurora consurgens” f. 14v-30) in early modern sources. Similar traces resurface in late eighteenth-century texts such as extant copies of Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1798), where readers strategically pointed at the faces of distinctly sexualized, and sometimes physically tortured, female slaves (Blake), as if to establish mastery over the objectified figure on the page.
Figure 2. Initial with a Black Madonna from the Hours of the Virgin (Bavaria, 1478)
Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 64, f.1r (Creative Commons license)
Figure 3. Detail
What complicates a reading of such haptic traces on intersectional figures are similar patterns of wear that do not constitute a form of Othering but an act of worshiping Black saints. In a 15th-century Hours of the Virgin from Bavaria, now preserved in the Benedictine convent of Sarnen (Switzerland) (Figs. 2-3), the illuminated initial on the opening page features a heavily worn Black Madonna inside the letter h (for the word “[H]err” (‘Lord’)) marking the beginning of the first prayer. As with the Utrecht Bible, generations of readers deliberately touched the manuscript, thereby eroding parts of the gilded background and blurring the Black Madonna’s facial features, save her ruby lips. The heavy wear on her face (as opposed to her gloves and gown) suggests that readers tried to engage with her physicality, and accidentally eroded some of the paint without intending to damage the geno-text’s signifiers.
To what extent the Black Madonna’s intersectionality would have shaped such a haptic response is difficult to determine. Black Madonnas were quite common in the early modern period, not just in manuscript form but also as effigies; indeed, one finds many statues of the Black Virgin in Bavaria, where the Hours were produced, and around Sarnen, where they were kept and read (Anon “Liste Schwarzer Madonnen”, Scheer 1414–15). Given the normalcy of worshiping Black saints at the time — both locally, nationally and regionally (Rowe) — there seems little doubt that the wear on these Hours testifies to a spiritual engagement with this Black Madonna. The large size of the wear left on the document also resembles devotional marks on other late medieval manuscripts where worshippers touched, rubbed or kissed a text when celebrating Mass or to consecrate important social rituals (like taking an oath) (Hardiman, Rudy).
The devotional “consummation” (Rudy) we find in these Hours (1478) indirectly undercuts the iconoclastic silencing we find in the contemporary Utrecht History Bible (1467) by destabilizing the significance of what it means to erase color. Confusingly, haptic traces of iconoclasm and worship often appear side by side in fifteenth-century documents. In the Utrecht History Bible, readers did not only poke at figures they antagonized (like the Black Bride), but also touched those they idolized (like King David) (Anon, History Bible 207r). In some instances the two codes intersect on a single frame. In an illustration from Exodus, readers marked both Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea and Egyptian soldiers drowning in the waters; readers touched Moses praying to God on Mount Sinai yet also the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf; we find markings on a demon tormenting Job, and on a woman pitying Job; readers touched heroic Esther, but also a plotter turning Esther’s husband against the Israelites (Anon, History Bible 95r, 119r, 300v, 308r.).
This clash of haptic codes raises the question of how one should read erasure in the texts excerpted above, and how early modern readers would have been able to distinguish between the two. Would worshippers venerating Blackness have viewed their consummation of color as echoing the stigmatizing of color in texts like the History Bible and vice versa? Might there have been particular properties of texts — a visual grammar of sorts — which would have guided and clarified the meaning of a particular haptic trace in a give context?
The following discussion shall address these questions by first of all contextualizing erasure in the History Bible and the Book of Hours against the backdrop of comparable forms of erasure as we find them distinctly xenophobic texts and visualizations of Black saints. Secondly, the article considers how stylistic choices like composition, iconography, or the representation of affect shaped haptic such responses. Thirdly, the article theorizes these examples of erasure with reference to Heidegger’s writings on sous rature and Bruno Latour’s concept of iconoclash, and considers how haptic patterns can further our understanding of racialized intersectionality in the early modern period and beyond.
Ostracizing Color
The stigmatizing of the Black Bride in the History Bible builds on a centuries-long tradition of censoring gender and race in the Song of Songs, both verbally and visually. The iconic line “Nigra sum, sed formosa” (1:4), which follows the illustration above (Fig. 1), already exemplifies such censorship, since the wording misrepresents the ambiguity of the Masoretic text, which may either signify ‘I am black but beautiful’ (as in Jerome’s Vulgate) or ‘I am black and beautiful’ (as in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and the Septuagint) (Scott 65–83, Whitaker 176). Jerome’s rendering, which becomes the standard reading in the West, feeds directly into early modern vernacular versions which enshrine a “formulaic antagonism between [B]lackness and positive qualities” that normalizes exclusion while “raising the stakes for any [B]lack African seeking acceptance or integration” (Lowe 551–52).
Early modern exegesis regularly treats the Black Bride’s beauty as a conceit that proves exclusionary racial codes to be irrefutable and universal (Loomba and Burton 121, 190). Glosses in early modern Bibles by-pass a serious engagement with the Black Bride’s beauty by emphasizing her allegorical function as representing the Church in union with Christ (Anon. [Geneva Bible] 281v.), and harness a medieval exegetical tradition that disembodies the Black Bride’s sensuality (Courtès 15) for the sake of racial and gender politics (Flinker 31-65). Interpretive scenarios whereby the Black Bride can be both Black and beautiful are practically nonexistent in medieval and early modern discourse. The only brief window when Western sources entertain such a scenario appears in the fifteenth century, where several illustrated manuscripts show Solomon together with a Black temptress: an alter ego of the Queen of Sheba adopting the voice of the Song of Songs (Suckale-Redlefsen and Suckale 25).
The Utrecht History Bible’s (1468) illustration falls into this brief window when Black femininity - coded as Solomon’s nemesis - becomes representable. A very similar version appears in the Bible of Evert van Zoudenbalch (c.1465), also from Utrecht (Figure 4), which likewise dramatizes this encounter between Solomon and the Black Bride, and captures a suspenseful moment full of romantic possibilities, with three outraged servants visibly protesting the intimate embrace between Solomon and the Bride. The History Bible (Figure 1) fast-forwards this love plot to a falling-out between Solomon and the Black Bride, in which the patriarch blames his lover for seducing him. The Bride’s proximity to the red canopy bed, a fixture in romantic scenes in the History Bible (207r, 364r.), together with her calm indifference, invokes a femme fatale whose seductive powers demonstrate the dangers inherent in what the text calls “Minnesang”.
Figure 4. Opening of the Song of Songs from the Bible of Evert van Zoudenbalch, Utrecht (c. 1465)
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2771, f. 81v (with permission)
There is little doubt, then, that the wear on the History Bible’s Black Bride constitutes an ostracizing of Black femininity, a hypothesis supported by later texts where Black figures are similarly stigmatized. In a copy of Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (1534), the woodcut illustrating the proverbial ‘impossibility of washing an Ethiopian white’ has not only sustained considerable water damage, as indicated by the stain stretching diagonally across the page; there are also traces of readers touching and rubbing the Black figure’s head and upper body, as if to assist the hunched White figures in their endeavor (Figure 6). By turning what Geoffrey Whitney’s English translation (1586) calls a “scour[ing]” of the “Ethiopian” (Loomba and Burton 120) into a tactile experience, complicit readers seem to have engaged in multisensory readings that blur the boundaries between reader and text. By collapsing these boundaries and ‘entering’ the narrative viscerally, they become performers who rehearse the erasing of color through their act of reading.
Figure 5. Alciato, Emblematum Libellus (Paris 1534)
University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, SM Add 53, p. 89 (with permission)
Figure 6. Detail
Such haptic othering also appears in overtly colonial texts like Willem Piso’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648), where an instruction on how to operate a sugar mill (Figs. 7–8) becomes a script for haptic readers’ enactment of the role of a colonizer. As several light blotches reveal, readers repeatedly touched technical appliances such as the pans used for heating sugar cane juice, and the heads of the Black laborers. In relation, the lack of haptic traces pertaining to the colonial master, suggests an effort to preserve his unmarked status. By poking exclusively at personifications of Otherness surrounding him, readers appropriate his voice, and endorse a narrative that normalizes the monetizing of Black fungibility for the sake of “operating the sugar mills continually day and night throughout the summer months”, as the accompanying text states.[1]
Figure 7. Illustration from Willem Piso’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648)
Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library, QH117.P57 1648 [#884], IV, i. 51 (Public domain)
Figure 8. Detail
As these excerpts demonstrate, unmarked White interlocutors often form a conduit directing the reader’s haptic response towards marked, colonial bodies. The texts’ diachronic (1467, 1534, 1648) and geographical spread (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Paris), and variety of text type (illustrated bible, emblem book, natural history), reveals exclusionary haptic readings as a widely practiced phenomenon. As a performative act that promotes complicity, haptic othering might have substantially contributed to the silencing of racialized and intersectional demographics in the early modern period.
Venerating Colour
While such iconoclastic responses seem fairly uniform in that they expand an already-extant visual narrative, haptic worship of Black and intersectional bodies is more diverse. Some texts show traces of readers engaging with the physicality of skin color; others show a concern with peripheral elements such as symbolic props, reflecting the different forms worship of Blackness assumes in a given cultural setting.
Figure 9. Drawing of the Virgin of Le Puy carried in procession (1578)
Notebook of Jean Burel, Le Puy, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 59 (8081), f. 102r.
(Photo: Le Puy, Bibliothèque municipale, with permission)
A close analogue to the ‘consummating’ of the Black Madonna in the Book of Hours (Figure 2) appears in the notebook of Jean Burel, a sixteenth-century chronicler of Le Puy-en-Velay, whose account of a local procession of the city’s Black Virgin includes a sketch of the effigy framed between candles adorned with the city’s coat of arms. Blurred marks on candle flames, the coats of arms, the Virgin’s cape, and Christ suggest that readers (perhaps Burel himself) used the sketch to share impressions of such a procession with an audience. Significantly, readers did not touch the faces of the Virgin or of Christ, perhaps to protect the delicately drawn features, or because the sketching merely referenced - rather than constituted - a sacred object.
The Virgin’s face shows light shading, which could represent an attempt to color or to whitewash the effigy: an indeterminacy possibly linked to the challenge of drawing distinct features while working with monochrome ink. The unequivocal ethnicizing of Le Puy’s Black Madonna in other contemporary sources (Foster “Out of Egypt” 11, 20; Foster, “Moveable Feasts”, 59) leaves little doubt that readers would have perceived the effigy as a Black saint, though this is not borne out on Burel’s manuscript as such.
Figure 10. Illustration from Christoph Silberysen’s Chronicon Helveticae (1576)
Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, MsWettF 16: 1, p. 39 (Creative Commons license)
Figure 11. Lacuna in the Brennwald-Stumpf chronicle (1535)
Zurich, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Ms A 1, f. 34v (Public domain)
Color is, however, central to tactile responses in the Chronicon Helveticae (1576) by Christoph Silberysen, abbot of Wettingen (Switzerland), which intersplices the founding histories of Swiss cantons with the vitas of patron saints, most of which belong to the Theban legion (Zangger). The founding history of Zurich is interrupted by the passion of Maurice, who is depicted as a Black knight, prompting readers to probe his chin, nose and cheekbones as if to know him viscerally.
These traces become significant in a socio-political context. Swiss mercenaries — a mainstay of pre-modern economies in Catholic cantons — regularly invoked Maurice, whose cult united denominationally isolated territories like Lucerne or Solothurn with Catholic Milan and Savoy (Näf 196). Emulating Savoyan, Spanish and Italian representational practice, Swiss artists invariably Europeanize Maurice, in contrast to German, Scandinavian, Baltic, and Eastern European artworks, where Maurice appears as the Black Saint of the Holy Roman Empire (Näf 164-74, 192-99). Despite openly acknowledging Maurice’s African origin – an influential Jesuit from Fribourg even traces his genealogy to Noah’s son Ham (Carnisius 37) – Swiss discourse consistently venerates Maurice as a White saint.[2]
The Chronicon Helveticae breaks with that tradition by Africanizing Maurice, an unusual choice which prompted readers – perhaps Silberysen himself – to engage with the coloring added by Silberysen’s illustrator Jacob Hoffman. That ethnicizing Maurice represented a conscious act emerges from the template the illustrator relied on. In the Brennwald-Stumpf chronicle (1535), which is copied verbatim by Silberysen, the space left for the portrait of Maurice is left blank (Fig. 11), as that chronicle was never completed. By filling this conspicuous lacuna with an Africanized Maurice, Silberysen’s illustrator takes an exceptional stand and challenges normative artistic codes by adopting a form of representation which is inclusive, political (mimicking a foreign tradition), and anachronistic (since the cult of Black Maurice dies out in the 1530s) (Suckale-Redlefsen and Suckale 108–11). While little is known about how these tactile traces entered the manuscript, curiosity about Maurice’s ethnicity seems very much in keeping with the nonconformist outlook of the chronicle’s compiler Abbot Christoph Silberysen, a keen historiographer and patron of the arts, who commissioned several stained windows featuring multiple Black figures at Wettingen Abbey (Kottmann).
Two further examples that illustrate the pan-European spread of haptic worship, and the variety of forms this can take, appear at Karlstejn Castle (Prague), and on an ornamental doorstone for a merchant guild house at Riga. Maurice’s portrait in the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Karlstejn Castle (Figure 12) bears a massive stain from worshippers touching the saint’s hand, sword hilt and shield, testifying to his importance as the patron saint of armed forces. By way of contrast, Maurice’s face is unmarked, showing the ways in which his warrior qualities took precedence over other characteristics.
The pattern on the doorside stone of the House of the Blackheads in Riga (Figure 13, discussed in Mänd) reveals an inverse pattern, as guild members touched the saint’s head and flag, yet showed little interest in his weaponry, underscoring their interest in overseas trade rather than armed conflict. In an curious reversal to erasure on manuscript surfaces, the repeated touching of the ornamental sandstone did not lighten or erode the patron saint’s complexion but added a darker patina, turning the guildsmen venerating Maurice into promoters and protectors of Blackness at their own doorstep.
Figure 12. Saint Maurice by Theodoric of Prague (c. 1367)
Karlštejn Castle, Chapel of the Holy Cross, Prague
(Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Figure 13. Doorside Stone from the House of Blackheads, Riga, showing Virgin Mary and Saint Maurice (1522)
© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/ Richard Hamann-Mac Lean (with permission)
Haptic engagement that worships Blackness, then, is far from uniform, and contingent on genre, contexts, and materiality. Devotional texts like the Hours of the Virgin (Figure 2) or the icon at Karlštejn Castle (Figure 12) elicited very pronounced haptic responses, in contrast to the careful probing in Jean Burel’s notebook (Figure 9) or Silberysen’s chronicle (Figure 10). Readers interacted with Maurice’s face (House of the Blackheads) and weaponry (Karlštejn Castle), or with processional props (Jean Burel’s notebook), depending on how Black saint worship articulated itself in various local contexts.
Directing Erasure: Iconography, Mise-en-Scène, Affect
While tactile responses are mainly shaped by cultural contexts, textual properties like composition, iconography and the representation of affect often define how readers interact with a text on a microlevel, what parts of a text they touch, and with what purpose in mind. Tactile Othering seems often prompted by deictic gestures: by fingers that point (Figures. 1, 7), and by hands that scrub (Figure. 5). The lack of resistance by pliable Others, whose slumped bodies and blank expression signal acquiescence (Figures. 5–8), portray them as fungible matter that readers may mark with impunity.
Props that connote religious or cultural difference are likewise significant. The silenced Black Bride in the History Bible is one of only two characters that wears a turban, the other one being Judith’s orientalized maidservant, who assists Judith in putting Holofernes’s head in a sack (Figure 14).[3] Repeated poking at the turbaned maidservant’s face has reduced her face to a gaping white hole, reflecting the intensity with which readers aimed to stigmatize her. The severity of the damage opens up the distinct possibility that the Black Bride in the History Bible may not just be erased on account of her color and gender, but also because of the religious difference she embodies.
Figure 14. Judith and maidservant with the head of Holofernes
The Hague, KB, 78 D 39 fol. 289v (Public domain)
Mise-en-scène further streamlines haptic Othering by providing readers with a prism through which they read iconographic and affective cues. The encircling of the Ethiopian by three White figures (Figure. 5), for example, directs attention to the Black figure, and predestines him for being haptically marked by readers. In the History Bible and the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, the central positioning of the Solomon and the White planter lends them protagonism, and normalizes their stigmatizing of marginalized figures.
Non-verbal cues denoting affect are likewise significant. Iconoclastic erasure often accompanies a dominant White gaze monitoring Black faces: of Solomon staring down the Black Bride (Figure. 1); of White servants observing the Ethiopian’s slumping head (Figure. 5); of the Brazilian planter studying his slaves’s demeanour (7). That haptic othering often targets heads and faces also has distinctly racialized overtones: in the Western tradition ethnicity is often defined through distinctions in complexion (Orkin and Joubin 32), a legacy encapsulated in the term Ethiopian (Greek Aithiops), which etymologically signifies ‘burnt face’ (Anon. “Ethiope.”).
Inclusive tactile responses often occur with iconic texts such as portraits or full shots of a single figure. The decontextualising of these figures arguably empowers readers as it enables one to construct multiple narratives in relation to a figure. The Black Madonna of the Hours of the Virgin (Figure. 2), cast against a monochrome gilded backdrop, may evoke Biblical stories, memories of Marian worship, prayers and hymns, or devotional practice associated with her keeling posture. The Madonna in Jean Burel’s notebook (Figure. 9), floating freely in a borderless panel, inhabits a similarly undefined space, much like the portraits of Saint Maurice (Figures. 10–13), which evoke various narratives related to Maurice’s vita, cult status, and veneration.
Such decontextualization also broadens the ways in which readers may respond to such images, as worshippers may touch a significant prop (Maurice’s flag (Figure. 13)), a figure’s skin (Figure. 10), a hand (Figure. 12), or indeed image and text, as with the Hours (Figure. 3), where readers were equally attracted to the Black Madonna, the dome-shaped letter h sheltering her, and the gilded backdrop of the illuminated initial. Unrestrained by prescriptive compositions that promote viewing non-White bodies through a particular lens, readers explored and haptically marked these texts in diverse, and sometimes idiosyncratic ways.
Conclusion
The haptic patterns surveyed here raise important questions about how physical erasure relates to race and intersectionality: What does it mean to damage a racialized signifier or an intersectional text? Do haptic markings in a racialized text necessarily cancel out meanings, or do they amplify them? Can haptic markings on a textual surface somehow ‘enter’ the visual grammar of the text, and if so, to what effect?
In many cases the deliberate erasure we find in texts like the History Bible (Figure. 1), the Emblematum libellus (Figure. 5) and Willem Piso’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Figure. 7) resembles a form of Heideggeran erasure whereby readers collaborate with a xenophobic narrative and construct a new pheno-text that amplifies dominant meanings inherent in the original geno-text. The stigma characters like Solomon (Figure. 1) inflict on marginalized figures is mimicked and viscerally experienced by complicit readers who embrace the ostracism dramatized in the image. This close collaboration between text and reader, geno-text and pheno-text turns readers into promoters of an exclusionary code that is internalized through tactile engagement with the text.
In contrast, haptic markings on inclusive texts resemble what Bruno Latour calls iconoclash: damage that does not necessarily aim to destroy but arises from an action “for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (Latour and Weibel 16). Paradoxically, worshippers absorb a text’s materiality in order to strengthen the very substance of the text they consummate. Tactile experience here consolidates the rapport between readers and texts, and facilitates individualized narratives that unite rather than divide. In some exceptional cases, haptic markings even become constitutive of the text at hand, as with doorstone outside the Blackhead’s House at Riga (Figure. 13), where the patina from visitors touching the statue’s face makes Maurice’s ethnicity visible.
So how did early modern audiences distinguish between haptic codes of exclusion and inclusion? While the overlap of markings in texts like the History Bible does seem perplexing, structural differences between these codes would have made major misunderstandings quite unlikely. The de-facing of the Black Bride (Figure 1) would have hardly been mistaken as a form of worship, nor would the devotional marks on Maurice’s sword at Karlštejn Castle have been perceived as a form of desecration. Black devotional statues could certainly fall prey to iconoclastic attacks, as with the celebrated statue of Maurice outside Magdeburg cathedral (1240), whose nose was smashed in a manner reminiscent of the ‘de-nosing’ of classical statues (Bowersox “St. Maurice in Magdeburg”). However, while these haptic traces may appear ambiguous to a modern reader, the examples discussed suggests that contextual, iconographic and stylistic clues would have kept haptic codes of veneration and ostracism sufficiently distinct so as to avoid possible misunderstandings when the two converged.
Haptic traces, then, can be fruitfully leveraged for the study of race and intersectionality, particularly for the medieval and early modern period, which are rich in material that lends itself to such an analysis. Given the scarcity of information on how early modern audiences responded to various representations of perceived difference, studying haptic codes can help fill an important gap in extant research. The findings above also point towards a close relationship between notions of sameness and difference on the one hand and tactile experience on the other, opening up new avenues for expanding on research that combines the study of race and intersectionality with the study of materiality and tactile experience (McDermott 26-74).
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Notes
[1] “[Q]uippe toto semestri aestivo, noctes atque dies perpetuo molendina agitantur” (Piso IV, i. 51, translation mine).
[2] Note that in Carnisius’s monograph, Maurice also appears as a White soldier on page 8.
[3] On the convention of orientalizing Judith’s maidservant in early modern art, see Kaplan et al.
Lorenz A. Hindrichsen is a cultural critic working on intersectionality from the Middle Ages to the Romantic period, pandemic literature, trauma theory, ecocriticism, and the graphic novel. Lorenz studied at Zurich and Aberdeen University, writing his MA thesis on social codes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and his PhD on representations of ethnicity and race in Shakespeare and Renaissance art. He teaches English and Theory of Knowledge at Copenhagen International School.