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Spanking, Signing, Reading: On the Medieval Use of Hands ‹ Literary Hub

Tags
#history #art
Date added
March 28, 2022, 11:17 p.m.
Description
Hands are conspicuous in this piece. They touch, slap, pat, hitch, point, grope, caress, spank. The more we look, the more of them we see. The woman whose skirt the man is under rests her left hand on his head, her right at the same time pointing with a strangely elongated finger upward to the assembled crowd. The pair of spankers hitch up their skirts with grabbing motions. The bearded figure in the lower left, who presumably is up—or should that be under—next seems to be using his hands to part the crowd, edging his way between the women with flattened palms.