Medieval art and text inscribed living bodies as signs of monstrosity

Evidence

In the Middle Ages, there was an identification between the page (or canvas) and the body, inscribing human bodies with meaning. As one fellow scholar puts it, “[l] iterary production takes place on bodies.” This made human subjects the “conveyors of words or, more generally, signs.” During the medieval period, Jewish, Muslim, and African bodies functioned as signs of Satan, demons, monsters, sin, and monstrosity within a system of meaning that continued to be in force in the Renaissance and later centuries. We see these signs in medieval texts and drawings, dramas such as Othello, great works of art, and later in the fiction of Romanticism and Gothic horror, the travel journals of explorers, board games, dime-store novels, and the movies. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 748

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘body as conveyor of signs’ framework is the mechanism bridging the theological monster of earlier chapters and the torture of real Muslim bodies at Abu Ghraib. — connects to: Deformed bodies can stand as synecdoche for a whole poisoned community — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 152
• DEFINE: Defines the core mechanism: human bodies literally function as signifiers—‘conveyors of signs’—within the medieval and later system of meaning, not merely depictions of monsters.