Medieval torture imagery elevated the flesh rather than rejecting it

Evidence

Medieval images of the body have [their] role in medieval piety… . Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than with fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the physical rejection of physicality as the elevation of it—a horrible but delicious elevation—into a means of access to the divine. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 267

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the analytical distinction between rejecting physicality and elevating it — central to interpreting why the Christian imagination produced such violent images of the Muslim body.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that torture scenes signified a delicious elevation of the flesh into access to the divine rather than its rejection — overturns the obvious reading and reframes the whole function of Martyrdom imagery.
• XREF: connects to: Extreme bodily abasement is imitative of Christ’s redemptive humiliation of the flesh — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1913