ABSTRACT

Modern viewers often find medieval images of bloody and horrific martyrdoms extremely unsettling. Laurence is roasted alive, Sebastian is shot full of arrows, Bartholomew’s skin is flayed, Agatha’s breasts are severed, Anastasia is burned at the stake and countless other martyrs are stabbed, boiled, stoned and beheaded. Such imagery is used throughout the Middle Ages; in fact, the use of violence and death as signifiers of sainthood is an established artistic tradition whose roots can be traced back to early Christian and Byzantine iconography. Such images leave little to the imagination; blood flows freely and severed body parts abound. With the creation of the Legenda aurea, or Golden Legend, in the second half of the thirteenth century, popular interest in and devotion to these martyrs and their tortures reached an unprecedented level, and the text itself swiftly became one of the most widely read and reproduced texts of the later Middle Ages.