© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1041257314Z.00000000046 exemplaria: medieval, early modern, theory , Vol. 26 Nos. 2–3, Summer/Fall 2014, 127–47 Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on Folios 61 v –62 r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20 Sarah Kay New York University, USA This essay explores how a “surface reading” can at the same time be a “symptomatic reading” when the surface in question is skin. Via a close reading of a double page containing the chapters on the weasel and the aspic in a fourteenth-century French copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20), it examines the treatment of bodily orifices in the text and the copy, including uncanny parallels between them and the parchment of these pages. The skins in question — those of the bestiary creatures, their readers, and the facing pages — are not flat but marked with recesses and gaps that function as symptoms of anxiety about excess as animal and that become overlaid with fantasy, which, however, remains informed by this anxiety. The bestiary page both jars bodily origins against cultural aspirations and exposes their collision, processes that the writings of Didier Anzieu can help to illumine. keywords animal studies, bestiary, Guillaume le Clerc, Didier Anzieu, orifice, parchment, skin A library is a vagina. I mean the ideal library that gathers together the best books. Will this vagina receive me? (Didier Anzieu, Contes à rebours 11) In recent work (“Legible Skins”), I have explored some of the implications for medieval readers of the fact that their books were made from animals’ skins. Two approaches seemed to me helpful for theorizing the human encounter with the parch- ment page. The membrane might, following the ideas of French analyst Didier Anzieu in Le moi-peau, be assumed as a kind of envelope by the reader (who would thus find