Spaced Out

Abstract

We have seen, ambivalently, how the disclosure of sainthood depends upon a set of architectural, bodily, and discursive enclosures. Dependence, in fact, understates what is more precisely a co-inherence of disclosive and enclosive functions, at once withholding and giving the saint to sight. What is more, saintly disclosure and enclosure have been shown to be mutually and equivocally bound up with the risk of sex (understood as both the mere—though obviously never mere—genital “there” and what one does with it). This chapter seeks to intensify, through a reading of radical Italian devotional literature, the erotic cachet that enclosed spaces, and the bodies and texts that touch upon them, contain and disclose for medieval culture.