ABSTRACT
In presenting the violent loss of extremities as a defining feature of medieval life Monty Python and the Holy Grail follows a pattern deeply embedded in popular notions about the middle ages. King Arthur canters into a forest clearing accompanied by his trusty squire. In the first Star Wars trilogy, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader each lose a hand to the other's light sabre. Journalists regularly use the word medieval to describe the excision of vital members in the name of justice fingers in Iran. As Caroline Walker Bynum, Madeline Caviness and others have richly considered, the fragmentation of the body was a conspicuous theme in medieval Christian eschatology, hagiography and the cult of relics. Indeed, the reasons for the medieval-dismemberment equation are to be found elsewhere, first and most obviously in the historiographic cliché of a barbaric Dark Age followed by a Rebirth' of civility and culture.
