4 - Taking the Words Out of Her Mouth: Glossing Glossectomy in Tales of Philomela

Summary

Every February, Padua celebrates a saint's day nicknamed the Feast of the Tongue, honouring the sublimely eloquent St Anthony of Padua by genuflecting to the part of him still residing in the city: his miraculously preserved tongue, just as it was found by St Bonaventure upon the first translation of the saint's remains in 1263. Gorgeously housed in a reliquary, the tongue still stands in for the saint, now 750 years young and reputedly incorrupt, conjuring the power of Anthony's oration. It recalls, too, stories of saints who could not be silenced, where the removal of the tongue is no guarantee that the victim will cease to speak and, indeed, generally fails parlously in this objective. The substitution of an individual's tongue for their speech is by no means limited to stories of medieval saints, however, nor to those whose speech is beyond reproach: as the locus and instrument of speech, the tongue of a medieval subject whose speech proved corrupt was also liable to be punished or removed. Law codes and penitentials advocated speech be conditioned or curtailed; unruly speech – a sin of the tongue – was tameable but in some cases the only guarantor of governance is removal of the tongue, cutting off speech permanently. This chapter considers how tongue tearing might be contextualised and gendered in medieval culture, before examining the narrative of another tongueless orator – the late medieval reflexes of the Philomela legend. The story of the raped and maimed princess tells of speech that is torn away and then restored, but the proxies and prosthetics woven into Philomela's unexpected performance challenge the relation between silencing and silence. Does the one really lead to the other? The final metamorphosis into a nightingale, rather than causing Philomela's exclusion from (physical) speech, brings with it the return of her tongue – a songbird's tongue. By the end of her story, though, this has already become a superfluous reattachment, a relic of a conventional variety of speech that is no longer required when the secret of the unspeakable crime has been ‘spoken’ and exposed and the voice of the victim has returned through extraordinary and unforeseen means.