Skin, the inner senses, and the readers’ inner life in the Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy and related texts

In this paper I argue that a twelfth-century experiment in the bestiary tradition – Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium or “Book of Birds” and the various bestiary texts with which it was partnered – uses the bodily substance of the medieval book to mirror an emotional, moral or spiritual self.1 Specifically, Hugh deploys the imagination of sight and touch – covering, enclosing, or shielding – in order to conjure in his readers the sense of having an “inner life” that is outlined by “inner vision” and “inner touch,” and filled with love for God and one’s fellow man.2 These developments may be understood as taking place through the internalized sight and touch of another’s skin, variously manifested as a parental (specifically maternal) skin, the social skin of an institution like the cloister, or the skin from which the medieval page was made. They have parallels in other religious works that exploit the book’s potential as a mirror, such as the twelfth-century Speculum virginum (“Mirror for Virgins”) conceived, as Janice Pindar puts it, “as an image against which the religious woman can measure her inner self, a reminder of who she is and what she is supposed to be like.”3 I use this argument to develop an idea first advanced some years ago that reading a parchment book acts as an extension of the reader’s own skin, which may insinuate unintended elements in this inner self.4