Owing to its relatedness to parchment as the primary writing matter of the Middle Ages human
skin was not only a topic to write about in medieval texts it was also conceived of as an
inscribable surface both in the material and in the figurative sense. This volume explores the
textuality of human skin as discussed by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers (medical religious
philosophical and literary) of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. It presents four main
aspects of the complex relations between text parchment and human skin as they have been
discussed in recent scholarship. These four aspects are first the (mostly figurative)
resonances between parchment-making and transformations of human skin second parchment as a
space of contact between animal and human spheres third human skin and parchment as sites
where (gender) identities are negotiated and fourth the place of medieval skin studies within
cultural studies and its relationship to the major concerns of cultural studies: the difficult
demarcation of skin from body the instability of any inscription and the skin's precarious
state as an entity of its own.
