UNCORRECTED PROOF Short Essay The multipliable body Karmen MacKendrick Le Moyne College, New York. Q1 Abstract In the modern understanding of the living body, bodily division is both fatal and distinctive; in the contemporary, the body is biologically and technologically multiple. Four premodern religious phenomena suggest yet another, much more fluid and multiple, conception of the living, spirited body. In relics, the divided body of the saint retains its miraculous vitality across its scattered locations, even restoring wholeness to other bodies. In transubstantiation, the host multiplies, according to the Eucharistic formula, ‘the body of Christ’ in all its specificity. Stigmata multiply the wounds of that body onto those of devout believers, yet retain the identity of these wounds as Christ’s. The development of wound imagery furthers this curious multiplying of the nonetheless carefully numbered wounds; they may appear arrayed behind the body of Christ or even heraldically arranged on their own. The very ontology of the body is different here. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2009) 0, 000–000. doi:10.1057/pmed.2009.2 A few years ago, as part of a panel on ethics at a conference on Foucault and the body, I read a paper on corporeal obedience in which I made use of Foucault’s work on early monasticism. After the panel, a questioner began by remarking that the panelists were all assuming an eighteenth-century conception of singular, integrated bodies, of the human being as a subject constructed on coherent flesh. She then moved into an eager exposition of contemporary explosions of that view. We no longer view the body as an object neatly assembled from its parts, set off distinctly from other life forms; we are, after all, colonies of bacteria and dust mites as much as we are livers and kidneys; we are integrated with machinery and we bear transplanted bits. The old notion of the human r 2009 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 0, 0, 1–7 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/