"OH, AMBIVALENT ORGAN": "FERTILE TONGUES" AND "CIRCUMCISED LIPS" IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN

In recent years, the depiction of physical bodies and the literary corpora which they occupy has been the focus of fruitful investigation. The role of the body as an index of cultural commentary - its normative values and, even more often, its anxieties - is dramatically illustrated in the realm of the five bodily senses. Within this context, the tongue, the facilitator of taste as well as language, occupies a unique status: it being, paradoxically, the most powerful and the most vulnerable of organs. This essay explores the centrality and versatility of the tongue in several late Medieval Spanish texts. Beginning with the paradigm of the "circumcised lips" offered by Augustine's Confessions, this essay illustrates how representations of the tongue chronicle changes in relationships between the somatic and the social in the evolution toward the emergence of the Early Modern subject.