Books as Bodies

Books as Bodies was a new iteration of a performance-lecture at the Wellcome Library, which explored skin and tissue by way of aprons, birthing girdles, reading as rumination, flap anatomy, folds as metaphors of digestion, and palimpsests. When books were made of hide, it was not just the metaphorical anatomy of the book, evident in the terms spine, footnotes, appendix, and in manuscript, from the Latin manu, meaning hand, but the materiality of bodies through the “boundary-object” of skin (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001) which was the site of a performance between book and beholder. Fingers, palms, arms, breasts, legs, wherever a tome was placed, and the leather and parchment of books, enacted a corporeal connectivity through the haptic. Karin Littau writes in her book, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania, that ‘apart from the human body, the book is the longest serving medium for the storage, retrieval and transmission of knowledge’. Mary Carruthers believes in the human body as a book: a ‘support for cognitive memory-work or recollective work’. In Carruthers’ research on memory in Medieval culture, she explores reading which was viewed very differently than it is today. It was believed that a person had not “read” a book until they had made it a part of themselves, through the practice of memorizing. ‘Memory was a sign of an ethical person, and one of humanity. It was a sign of what one did with information after receiving it’. The performance-lecture was part of the Wellcome Library Insights, a series of events which offer the opportunity to explore a theme or topic, whilst showcasing the Wellcome Library’s collection.