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Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture PDF

250 Pages·2006·5.57 MB·English
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SUSPENDED ANIMATION pain, pleasure & punishment in medieval culture robert mills Suspended Animation Suspended Animation Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture Robert Mills reaktion books For Neil Published by reaktion books ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx,uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2005 Copyright © Robert Mills 2005 All rights reserved No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise,without the prior permission ofthe publishers. Colour printed by Creative Print and Design Group,Harmondsworth,Middlesex Printed and bound in Great Britain by cpi/Bath Press,Bath British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mills,Robert,1973– Suspended animation :pain,pleasure and punishment in medieval culture 1.Violence - Europe - History - To 15002.Violence in literature 3.Violence in popular culture 4.Violence - conditions - To 1492 I.Title 303.3’6 isbn 1 86189 260 8 Contents Introduction:Speculum of the Other Middle Ages 7 1 Betwixt Heaven and Earth 23 2 Skin Show 59 3 Eliminating Sodom 83 4 Invincible Virgins 106 5 Of Martyrs and Men 145 6 Hanging with Christ 177 Afterword:Heaven Bent 201 References 204 Select Bibliography 234 Acknowledgements 239 Photographic Acknowledgements 241 Index 243 Introduction: Speculum of the Other Middle Ages ‘They used to hang you for stealing a loafofbread,didn’t they?’,retorts the civilized western subject in the twenty-first century.1The sense of relief is palpable in the speaker’s tone.We’re comfortably distant from a part ofour history that terrifies us,fascinates us,the statement implies.These days, thankfully,the western world is free ofsuch apparent disjunctions between crime and punishment.Now,when criminals are chastised,at least the severity ofthe penalty matches more closely the perceived magnitude ofthe transgression.How could people have performed such acts ofunwarranted barbarism on each other? What progress there has been in modern times! The ‘didn’t they?’with which the sentence ends, however, signals an element offragility in the speaker’s declaration,the faintest recognition that self-definition is at stake.The expression is edged with the spectres ofdeath and difference,but also with a voyeuristic sense offascination,even shades ofidentification – the allure ofthe other.Psychic and social structures often produce what might be termed an ‘exclusionary matrix’,a dangerous,abject region that circumscribes the identities ofideas,institutions and selves.The word abjection (from the Latin abicere,to throw away,throw down,aban- don,degrade) encapsulates this dynamic offoreclosure:a casting away,the production ofa domain ofdisidentification against which entities and ideas stake out their claims to symbolic legitimacy.2Capital punishment func- tions as a metonym for the brutality ofthe past,establishing an uninhabit- able space fantasized by the speaker as threatening to his or her integrity 1Anonymous and consequently disavowed (even though that fantasy remains precisely Silesian master, within the subject herself as a founding repudiation, the horror within). Crucifix, Alterity performs its constitutive work ... c.1370–80,painted wood carving from Corpus The abject also confronts us in another meditation on the vicissitudes Christi church, ofpenal horror:a late fourteenth-century carved Crucifix(illus.1) from Wrocław the Corpus Christi church,Wrocław (formerly Breslau,Germany;now a (Breslau). Naradowe part of Poland).3It is a supremely provocative and emotive image.More Museum,Warsaw. 7 than any painting by Grünewald,more even than Holbein’s Dead Christ, the carving demands an immediate response.Taking in the composition, first ofall,the image seems to move incessantly downwards.Christ’s veiny arms are stretched tensely, locked in a strained, bony curve. Leaning slightly to one side,the left arm is pulled taut by the weight of the body, its (literal) woodenness conveying the impression that at any moment something might snap.Cadaver,from the Latin cadere,to fall:the etymology ofthe word is reflected in the unnaturally elongated frame ofthe body on the Wrocław carving,drawn down along the length of the cross.Christ’s legs bunch up pathetically,struggling against the weight ofthe upper body as it sinks downwards.The descending movement ofthe eyes’sealed lids – circled with a frame ofbloody lashes – draws attention to the most captivat- ing part ofthe image:the wound in Christ’s side (illus.66). Moving closer now (if we can), we see that the wound emits rich, blobby globules of curdled blood.Unlike the lacerations in conventional crucifixion scenes,which are relatively bloodless in comparison (illus.2), the gash is fashioned from droplets of blood arranged in neat lines,like strings of glossy pearls or eucharistic grapes,echoed in the bloody mass that exudes from the deep cuts that all but obliterate Christ’s hands.The incessant flow is mirrored in the fall ofthe drapery that frames his sides, and the entire body is bespattered with miniature scourge wounds,inter- spersed rhythmically at intervals across his flesh.The rib cage is splayed in neat, concertina fashion, Christ’s flesh sucked rigidly into his sides; the stomach is drawn in tight so that the creased lines of the belly echo the sharp,furrowed lines of the ribs.Even Christ’s hair becomes a bloody, sticky,matted mess,confusingly assimilated with the surplus secretions of his wounded side. How do we approach a culture that put such images at its very centre? How are we to comprehend such visions ofexcess? alterity and the medieval penal imaginary Images of medieval punishment are commonly understood with refer- ence to what Umberto Eco has dubbed ‘shaggy medievalism’,the idea of the Middle Ages as a barbaric epoch.4In a culture ravaged by violence, death,pain and disease,the story goes,it was entirely natural that those involved in the patronage, manufacture and viewing of artefacts like the Wrocław crucifix should exhibit a profound fascination with flowing blood,torn flesh and fragmented body parts.The classic por- trait of the ‘waning’Middle Ages painted by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in 1919envisaged the fifteenth century as an epoch of‘barbaric’ 8 | suspended animation

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When Marsellus in the film Pulp Fiction asserts, "I'm gonna git medieval on your ass," we know that he is about to bring down a fierce and exacting punishment. Yet is the violence of the Middle Ages that far removed from our modern society? Suspended Animation argues that not only is the stereotype
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