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To "brush history against the grain" means to pay as much heed to the material of the manuscript itself as to the writing; to see the remnants of follicles on a parchment's hair side as an alternate punctus, a palimpsestic reminder of what the letters of human reason obscure.
-Karl Steel
Introduction: Parchment and "The Animal Turn"
Medieval manuscripts are undergoing a reappraisal by medievalists who investigate texts about animals and the animal body.1 These texts, it has been argued, engage uniquely with the materiality of the skins of animals upon which they were written.2 By foregrounding non-human species, academics are challenging traditional humanist discourses of the past by declaring a pivot to a new era of post-humanism (Wolfe; Stanbury). Identified as "the animal turn," the persistent anthropocentric gaze of western humanism is being re-envisioned by scholars of literature, philosophy, cultural history, and other disciplines. Calling for an engagement with the materiality of parchment, Bruce Holsinger writes: "Medieval literature is, in the most rigorously literal sense, nothing but millions of stains on animal parts. . . . For us as scholars of medieval writing, the survival of our primary object of study depends on the myriad animals whose hides have given medieval literature the morbid life it continues to share with those who consume it" ("Of Pigs and Parchment" 619).
Arising within a larger trend investigating materiality, preoccupation with the animal death required to create parchment derives from a focus by literary scholars on the proliferation of texts about animals and their skins from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, coinciding with the rise of manuscript production in Western Europe (Kay, "Legible Skins" 16). Medievalists working within this discourse perform "surface readings" of text about animals as well as the parchment support on which they are written (Kay, Animal Skins 17). This interpretive approach attends to the material life of an object that goes beyond "symptomatic reading" and aims to reveal a text's full meaning hidden within unrecognized conjunctions with its material form (Best and Marcus 6, 9-13). Such a project requires scholars to recognize medieval literature's material dependency upon the slaughter and sacrifice of animals, and humanity's brute animal cruelty. Human dominion and sovereignty over animals give Homo sapiens "the right to take not...