Liturgical comb
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Consider use—ritual, domestic, repeated use; usefulness, purpose, intention; the encounter between gesture and material, touch and form. We are in a more speculative turn here, one in which objects guide human movements as much as they are guided by them. And it is here that I invite us to stay to try to understand and draw nearer to an object whose mundane uses hover around the edges of its rarified form. There are few medieval objects more simultaneously aloof and poignant than the liturgical comb. A distant object, born of butchery, and shipped and carved and polished and brought and given far from the animal from which it was taken. Thick narrative bands in the middle avail the comb to iconographic analysis and align it with grand moments in Biblical or hagiographic narrative. Christ sits on Mary’s lap, the Magi come forward, Thomas Becket is murdered. These images require the user to hold the comb still, to be still for a contemplation of the images of ponderous things. But then a shift, a hunching of the shoulders, and the priest bends his head and picks up the comb to run it through his hair as final preparations for mass are made. First, the thicker teeth to quell whatever unruliness of the tonsure might remain; then the thinner ones, to draw slowly through hair blunted and shortened to mark the man as one who can bring Christ’s body into that of his brethren.
This meditation on use calls up my own discomforts with the medieval body as an object that moves among others, my struggle to reconcile the pristine objects I see in my art history images with the sweaty, tired, isolated bodies of their users. Didn’t the combs get dirty, too, in usefully ridding the priest’s hair of unwanted nits that could interfere with the sanctity of the Eucharist? Do I spend time thinking about the nourishment the ivory received from the oils in the priest’s hair? The usefulness is mutual: the priest is just as useful to the ivory comb as the ivory comb is to the priest. The intimacy between the two created by use repels and awes me. A liturgical comb belonged to an officiating priest; it was a deeply personal object within a most communal ritual, and often, at the end of the priest’s own usefulness, was buried with him.
Combs, chalices, patens, diptychs, books of hours, birthing trays, ivory boxes, mirrors, chess pieces – so many medieval objects lie dormant in the absence of touch. Art historians gathered by the Material Collective in a session at this spring’s Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo told their stories of touch in the sequestered spaces of museum storerooms and study cabinets with warmth and joy to remember the feel of ivory or gems or gold beneath their searching fingertips. And I think of the objects enlivening, warming to a human touch that stirs molecular memories of movement and use. I think of all the speculative turns to be made: to the liturgical comb held by the old priest, to the wedding gift comb fingered nervously by the bedazzled fourteen year old bride, to the ivory comb interlaced with Guinevere’s hair held as relic by a trembling Lancelot, to all those moments when objects present themselves to human touch and manifest themselves in mundane uses and complex desires.