ABSTRACT
A hanged or decapitated man, a disemboweled and dismembered body, or a burned heretic are all evocative images associated with medieval capital punishment. Modern sensibilities tend toward a notion that such executions were brutal and brutalizing. Spectators reveled in suffering, thus demonstrating an “otherness” in the premodern mentality that placed little value on human life. Richard van Dülmen entitled his book on early modern punishment Theatre of Horror, a phrase that invoked Michel Foucault’s view on pre-Enlightenment punishment.1 However, this impression of retributive cruelty as a spectacle not only conflates the chronology of punishment rituals, but also neglects fundamental notions of morality, religion, justice, and authority that underpinned medieval attitudes toward the death penalty. Most importantly, there was a strong ritualistic aspect to the event that highlighted common messages about the body, the soul, and purgatory. The visceral sufferings of the condemned were not just about a public exertion of legitimate violence by the crown, or an exercise in retributive justice, but were also embedded in strongly felt conceptions regarding spiritual salvation. Much of the historical scholarship on medieval capital punishment has focused
on Continental examples, with notable works for France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.2 Comparatively, less has been written about the English experience
1 Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans. Elisabeth Neu (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 32-4; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300-1348 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 269.
