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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Armor Network: Medieval Prostheses and Degenerative Posthuman Bodies Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ms8388w Author Papica, Raymund Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Armor Network: Medieval Prostheses and Degenerative Posthuman Bodies A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Raymund Papica June 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Andrea Denny-Brown, Chairperson Dr. John M. Ganim Dr. James Tobias Copyright by Raymund Papica 2016 The Dissertation of Raymund Papica is approved: __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the members of my dissertation committee at the University of California, Riverside, for their advice and encouragement: Dr. John M. Ganim, Dr. James Tobias, Dr. Deborah Willis, Dr. Jeanette Kohl, and especially the chair of my committee, Dr. Andrea Denny-Brown, for all of her guidance and willingness to see me through this project. iv To my grandmother, Crescencia S. Papica A quest fulfilled v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Armor Network: Medieval Prostheses and Degenerative Posthuman Bodies by Raymund Papica Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2016 Dr. Andrea Denny-Brown, Chairperson By studying depictions of armor in The Canterbury Tales, Le Morte D’Arthur, and The Faerie Queene, and by seeing how these works help us understand medievalism in contemporary media, this dissertation investigates how armored bodies function as a way to think through the problematics of posthuman transformations. This project repositions the way in which premodern masculine identity was often predicated upon how bodies were constructed with, and connected to, multiple objects, nonhuman figures, and fluctuating interpretations of machinic evolution. Furthermore, this study of armor is concerned with the degeneration of bodies damaged by war and contagion, as well as the instability and inadequacy of the body’s boundaries. Armor can be fragmented, assembled, and remixed with other armorial pieces and materials. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this project performs the task of tracing a longer history concerned with armored bodies, faulty ideologies, and technological anxieties. Studying the fictionalized use of armored bodies across literary history pushes us to question the results of technological augmentation. Each chapter studies the processes in which a body transforms into an armored posthuman. Armor, this project argues, can be thought of as vi part of a posthuman assemblage that collects and develops various narrative strands about prosthetic transformations. vii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Chaucer’s Knight and Squire: 15 Equine Prostheses, Armorial Augmentations, and Masculine Degenerations Chapter 2: Smiting, Cleansing, and Becoming-Sacred: 74 Embracing Bloody Degeneration in Le Morte D’Arthur Chapter 3: Armored Knights and Armored Automatons: 116 The Legend of Justice and the Triple-Bodied Assemblage Chapter 4: Digital Armor and Becoming-Medieval: 162 Simulated Medievalisms and Learning How to Die Bibliography 209 viii Illustrations List Figure 1: Image from Iron Man 2. Palladium poisoning 173 and Stark’s degenerated body. Figure 2: Image from Iron Man’s Mark I Armor. 174 Figure 3: Image of Destiny’s “Iron Companion Vestments.” 185 Figure 4: Comparison of Destiny’s Iron Companion Mask with 187 A sixteenth century closed burgonet. Figure 5: Comparison of thirteenth century armor with simulated 188 armor from Destiny Figure 6: Image of Destiny’s “Crest of the Alpha Lupi.” 190 Figure 7: Image from Destiny. A comparison of Titan and 193 Hive Armor Figure 8: Images from Edge of Tomorrow’s New Jacket Armor 197 ix Introduction If the knight is the man of becoming, then there are all kinds of knights. — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari The armored body is a recurring figure in medieval and early modern European narratives, and its presence helps readers understand the anxieties concerning the boundaries of the human body in both premodern and modern cultures. By studying depictions of armor in The Canterbury Tales, Le Morte D’Arthur, and The Faerie Queene, and by seeing how these works help us understand the use of medievalism in digital media, we can unravel how armored bodies in Western cultural narratives function as a way to think through the problematics of posthuman transformations. Each chapter studies the processes through which human bodies transform into armorial assemblages when introduced to nonhuman forms. Specifically, the armored knight, as a representation of the hyper-masculine chivalric ideal, shows how bodies degenerate and regenerate within a cyclical process of becoming. My study of medieval and medievalizing armor raises concerns about the instability of the body’s liminal spaces, about the inadequacy of the body’s defensive borders, and about the corporeal degeneration of bodies damaged by war and contagion. Studying the fictionalized use of armored bodies across literary history pushes our understanding of individual bodies as multiple bodies, and it makes us question the consequences of technological augmentation in our contemporary world, positioning these developments as part of a much longer cultural fascination with heroic masculinity, knightly armor, and what Katherine Biddick describes as “cyborg history,” a history 1 marked by “temporal disjunctures, its spatial commensurabilities, and the material hybridity of its historical desire.”1 Cyborg history does not necessarily begin in 1960 when the “cyborg” was first coined as a way to think of hybrid bodies that could survive the cold of space.2 Cyborg history, and the concept of the posthuman, I would argue, finds its beginnings in the premodern period, and specifically, in the nexus of knight and armor. Medieval and early modern knights exist in relationship with what I call “rhizomatic” armor. This armor mediates our understanding of how the body is constructed, connected, transformed, and transmitted through various media. I describe this armor as “rhizomatic” because a rhizome, in Deleuzian terms, ceaselessly establishes “connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and the circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”3 Rhizomatic armor is not simply attached to the body; it is an entity that can function separately from the body that “wears” it, and that, perhaps against common perception, makes connections with multiple bodies. Like our bodily relationships with cellular phones or automobiles, rhizomatic armor is not always worn. Yet it is still intrinsic to the body and influential in how the body is shaped, perceived, and understood. Rhizomatic armor, this dissertation demonstrates, can function as either a 1 Katherine Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1998), 167. 2 Nathan S. Clines and Manfred Clynes, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 1960): 26-76. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7. 2 companionate prosthesis or a wearable technology, and as such it suggests a close kinship between two specific kinds of bodies: armored knights and automata. This study does not trace the interrelated historical developments of armored bodies and automata so much as it studies the way writers imagined them to be connected––often through their mechanistic developments, such as their dependence on smaller prosthetic attachments to properly function. Through the concept of rhizomatic armor, we can consider the evolution of armored bodies in connection with the rise of metal automata found in the courts and literature of the late medieval and early modern period. In terms of aesthetics and function, the development of automata parallels the development of armor between the late fourteenth and sixteenth century. E.R.Truitt notes that the production of advanced automata was not common in Europe until the very end of the thirteenth century when small mechanisms like the escapement and the toothed gear emerged.4 Tellingly, like automata, armor became more advanced, both technologically and aesthetically, during the beginnings of the fourteenth century, a transitional moment in which armor evolved from chainmail and surcoats to overlapping plates of steel.5 Like automata, plate armor 4 E.R. Truitt, “‘Trei poete, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance’: Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature,” Configurations 12.2 (2004): 170. 5 Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 5. She demonstrates the ways that European armor became more advanced between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The synchronized development of armor and automata would continue to flourish in the preceding centuries. The evolution of armor I discuss here was part of the overarching developments throughout Europe. Different locations have different armorial histories, shaped by the variables—religious,