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Jeffery J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures 35 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). xxix + 336 pp. ISBN 0-8166-4003-3. $22.95.
In this provocative and illuminating study, Jeffery Jerome Cohen brings to bear the somatic identity theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on both the textual and literal corpus of medieval culture. The 'Identity Machines' of Cohen's title are the meaning-creating corporeal assemblages that inhabit the texts which he examines. Citing Donna Haraway, Cohen argues that 'the body does not end at the culturally imposed limits of skin, but has seeped already into a diffuse material world' (p. xiii) While theorists have labelled this understanding of the limits of corporeal coherence 'post-human', Cohen suggests that medievalists, and medieval writers, have long known better. Marvellous and monstrous composite bodies abound in medieval texts, expanding the notion of the body outwards to encompass the monstrous, the animal, and the inanimate.
Cohen's first and most compelling composite identity machine is that of the...