Flesh Side: Reading Bodies and Boethius in the Yale Girdle Book

Abstract

How does the parchment codex inform a text’s meditations on what it is to be bound by and to one’s body? The Yale Girdle Book (New Haven, Beinecke MS 84) contains Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; it is bound with a soft leather wrapper that, shroud-like, envelops the codex and reveals that it was meant to be worn. Enabled by the material and affective turns and the field of skin studies, I argue that the binding and parchment alter the text in a synergistic, reciprocal relationship that speaks back to the Consolation’s explicit derision of the body. As a girdle book, the manuscript had the first and last word in the reader’s experience of its text. Every step with which it swung and pulled, every slap against its wearer’s thigh, every turn of the page between the reader’s fingers encouraged a process of cooperative unbinding of both the manuscript and the reader’s self, revealing the Consolation’s debt to embodied sensation. The marks left by MS 84’s medieval readers confirm that it exerted interpretive control over its text and that the affective power of the meeting and merging bodies of manuscript and reader is not a figment of modern theory’s imagination.

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